EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

The exhibition opens on November 2nd at 6:30 pm and will be on display from November 3rd, 2023 until april 14th, 2024 at Galeria Millennium bcp, at MNAC, with a different mediation program to be announced soon.
Starting from the reading of “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, the exhibition space operates as a container, a container of different timelines and memories of those who are not remembered as heroes, but of those who collect and bring together (almost secretly) objects as relics of being, of existing. At the same time, we hear the stories narrated by the shells, in the essay “Shells and Time” by Italo Calvino, recorded in their spirals, in lines 1 of the “earth notebook” as multiple centers of the idea of ​​chronology, in a non-linear time, which does not have a measure, it just is. Deriving from tangent chronologies, human and non-human, we address the (non) present times that, in contemporary times, move towards possible futures. 

Based on a multidimensional, and multimodal relationship, which reinterprets anachronism, transtemporality, fiction, temps mort, with the short story (and the book) as the centralizing drive, Só because it was, and it flew, puts on the scene the research carried out by the students of the Master's Course in Curatorial Studies at the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra in a curatorial residency at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, in the context of the partnership with UmbigoLAB and the Millennium bcp Foundation. This project also has support from the National Arts Plan. 

Bringing together a set of works of these important Collections with the production of Portuguese artists represented on the online Platform, the Museum space appears, in this equation, as an essayistic possibility, a place for experimentation and hypothesis. Curatorial practice as an investigative practice (and applied to the academic context) finds in these relationships an active methodology, typical of fluid and communicating thought (because plural). 

In a kind of cosmology in transit, works by artists such as Aurélia de Sousa, Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, José de Almada Negreiros or João Cristino da Silva currently point to new narratives generated in the encounter that the UmbigoLAB network fosters: from Ana's books of hours Frois, the liquids of Andreia Santana and Catarina Domingues, the memories-turned-objects of Carla Cabanas and Eunice Gonçalves Duarte, the vanitas of Inês Brites and Horácio Frutuoso, the sculptures-presences of Carla Rebelo and Carolina Serrano, the sphing bodies of Francisco Trêpa and Fernão Cruz to the suspended images of Henrique Pavão, a basket-tale is fictionalized to be read in different voices.

Artists featured in the exhibition: