The largest group of Alexandra Ferreira’s pieces in the show Um Labirinto de Passos Intermináveis is in the exhibition room of the Solar dos Zagallos building.

The rest are found punctuating the palace’s gardens. Some appear in the bucolic, small greenhouse, recently restored. Others are next to the fountain, in the Chapel of Senhor dos Passos, embellished with tiles from the eighteenth century in vibrant shades of blue and white, alluding to St. Anthony’s miracles.

After returning from Germany, Alexandra Ferreira has turned a quarry in Vila Viçosa into her studio. This is a place where marble is plentiful and where she has found a fertile and broad range of stimuli for her artistic work.

We often ascribe a heaviness and physicality to marble that seems to contradict the artist’s installation in the Chapel of Senhor dos Passos. Thin slabs weave together next to the altar and, one on top of the other, form a pile that challenges the laws of gravity. Far from the heavy stones mentioned by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, the thin slabs, by the way they are arranged, provide a staccato view of the angular dances they unleash in space.

The lightness of their composition and the various layouts of their elements point to a somewhat apocalyptic landscape, built on vulnerability. Are we dealing with an imminent catastrophe, or with an event that has already happened, its remnants?

The artist has rehearsed a miniature shelter in this landscape, with a fragile complexion, supported on its roof by a simple column.

Perhaps admirers of Caspar David Friedrich have found consolation in this docile installation, or the opportunity to witness a simulacrum of the worries of our age. A romantic transformation, one that the artist labours over meticulously, in an experiential and intensely procedural manner. It may be a testimony of ‘timeless connection’, as Benjamin would say, or of ‘survival’, as Warburg would put it.

In his art history, Didi-Huberman mentioned the similarity of images[1], and how they could reappear at different times. In an exercise of unceasing reverberation, and in a sense of resurrecting the old.

This is why, without any guilt, as a spectator, I feel like I am perceiving a repetition of a birth, the sprouting of a new life. I look at Alexandra Ferreira’s installation and simultaneously drift through my imagination to Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice. I cannot help but glimpse them without connecting them, without drawing a comparison. Some kind of comparison.

And this complicity is sometimes forged between artists and spectators, based on the idea of the similarity of images. This is far from the linear nature of art history, as Didi-Huberman said of Benjamin: an interpretation of the present is anchored in the past[2], a dialectic of images: ‘’When Benjamin posited his theory of resemblance in 1932-1933, the image once again became the intersection of survivals of the mimetic gesture, survivals of magical affinities and of that mimicry of time that is exemplified by the belief in astrology‘’[3].

Astrology, geography, geology, anthropology, material and psychic archaeology. In Alexandra Ferreira’s work on display, all this expertise seems to coalesce. The pieces hanging in the Solar dos Zagallos reverberate the notion of vestige, of memory, but a memory that, although intuited as the past, flows into the present and draws closer to us. The hint of a small animal skull, or its shadows, carved into the stone, as well as the imprint of a small staircase that can be felt etched into the rock surface, remind us of a wandering through time and memory.

I can imagine the artist in her studio, observing, sorting the small stones, their traces. A studio with its own beat, where chance is nurtured, the inexact is preserved, and it follows its own rules. Giacometti also collected the everyday dust on the windows of his studio. The work that came out of his hands was a tender elaboration of impressions, vagueness and shadows.

Transience, chance and anachronism are terms that strike and insist on being raised throughout the exhibition. A journey built on tiny details, coincidences and juxtapositions. A real trove of traces and memories: a stone on an iron structure, which resembles a bed, and which the artist called Esta felicidade não durou para sempre; a rock resting on a traditional bench; a stone that bears the resemblance to an animal skull, resting on a workbench, scarred by time; overlapping marble shapes of different colours and textures; an old iron chair, topped by a small rock; a pot with a plant, on a wicker stool.

Alexandra Ferreira’s Um Labirinto de Passos Intermináveis is on show at Solar dos Zagallos until September 7.

[1] DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. (2017). Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of the Anachronism. Orfeu Negro.[2] Ibidem.
[3] Ibidem.