This is an atypical article on an exhibition that is happening “in crescendo” – as it is on display at Brotéria and is echoing in nearby bookshops. It may also be a brief text that is unfair in its visual impact, form, rhythm and semantics, considering the poem-object that forms its starting point.

Accepting the consequences of being a participating narrator in a critical essay (of writing to you, the readers, directly in the first person), I must get this off my chest: this is a text-confession. I was unfamiliar with Samuel Silva’s work and almost had no idea of Daniel Faria’s words – and I probably should not have been, but we are certainly just in time for this dive on a sweltering August afternoon.

At Brotéria, behind the curtain dividing the entrance hall from the gallery, there are ropes, ropes and more ropes weaving their way across the floor, or perhaps sections of the same rope woven together to obstruct walking. Stranded or just loosely tied, we wait for our pupils to expand and grope between two red light beams – the only light in the room. The rope stretches into the next room, there are no shelters on this drifting boat, but there is a visual beacon. It is a leaden object, dangling under a light projecting from below. The shadow cast on the arched ceiling draws the outline. It seems to be an unknown maritime fossil, a foreign mineral, a rare metal, a sluggish snail in the middle of the summer month of “tituetes”, or is it the anatomy of a cochlea (from the Greek kokhlia, that also means snail)… On the way out, the loud sound of a female voice (suddenly) echoing the verse “why do you take the flowers to the north when I know he will come through the south?” made me wonder: what narrative is Samuel Silva telling us?

Rémiges Cansadas is a black curtain. But one that opens up a window of opportunity to read Daniel Silva’s work – for those who, like myself, are unfamiliar with it or for others who, although they know it by heart, can now re-read it. This exhibition stirs unease and curiosity. In three acts^[1], this one being the final, Samuel Silva speaks of the spatial aspect of a poem, its physical body as well as its structure (verses and stanzas) and reveals a profound knowledge of the poet-monk’s intimate landscapes. Silva looks at and interprets the unearthing of a poem-object, O País de Deus, an unpublished poem written in 1991 by Daniel Faria and gifted to his friend João Pedro Brito: ‘(…) a clay pot adorned with colourful geometric motifs capped by a cork stopper. Inside we find a roll of thermal paper receipts about 42 metres long and 6 cm wide, with red paint on the sides. This cryptic roll, sealed with dozens of turns of linen thread, unveils a remarkably long poem written on each turn…’.^[2]

As an object, O País de Deus is a ritualised memento of celebration and reading. It is also an intimate performative act between the reader and the listener (who are one and the same). Opening it, smelling the cork, unravelling it by touching the rough linen thread and the fragile paper, filling the space, reading the handwriting guided by the red margin, then listening aloud to the written words and perhaps the deep sea that slumbers in the shells.

This is all imagined, as the poem is just an aesthetic benchmark, a never-ending departure for reflection in which Silva simulates the tired, staggering flight of a seabird.

Samuel Silva states that his first contact with Daniel Silva’s poetry was through sound (“I heard it before I read it”). Maybe this is also the drive behind Rémiges Cansadas: the sound design of the word or a disciplinary crossover between the plasticity of literature and the artistic object.

Samuel Silva’s Rémiges Cansadas, based on Daniel Faria’s work and curated by Álvaro Moreira, is on show at Brotéria until September 7.

^[1] “Rémiges Cansadas is the third and final section of a multidimensional circumspection by Daniel Faria – Escuto o calcanhar do pássaro (Galeria Kubik, 2021) and Levitação (Casa da Arquitectura de Matosinhos, 2021).” In the exhibition room text by curator Álvaro Moreira.
^[2] in “A poesia multidimensional de Daniel Faria”, text by Samuel Silva, 2022.