UMBIGO invited several artists to reflect on the era we are living in and to think about their artistic production in quarantine times.

Project by the artist Nuno Sousa Vieira.

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Nuno Sousa Vieira, Memorial, 2011/2020

At the end of 2011, I presented, at the Pavilhão Branco – Museu da Cidade de Lisboa [White Pavilion – Museum of Lisbon], the exhibition Somos nós que mudamos quando tomamos efetivamente conhecimento do outro.

The works, developed for three of the four rooms of the building, were not installed there. They remained in my studio in Leiria throughout the exhibition run. For their place, I developed three works, entitled Memorial, representing the others during the whole exhibition, in those three rooms.

These works Memorial #1, Memorial #2, Memorial #3, were each composed by an office chair from my studio, on which the room sheets were placed. They had information about the location of the works represented, as well as all the data about them. Also, for each of the missing works, an ecphrazis described them rhetorically.

For this project Arte em quarentena, I decided to recover and present these works, which, anticipating the current moment, represented in the exhibition the works that remained in quarantine in their original location – the studio. On the other hand, this discomfort and anguish, of not being able to step outside, justifies the will to find a mechanism that represents us. Arte em quarentena, promoted by UMBIGO, is one of these mechanisms and this project is a tautology of our own condition.

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Memorial #1

Memorial #2

Memorial #3