According to the Chinese Calendar, 2025 is the Year of the Snake, the sixth animal in the zodiac cycle, which repeats every 12 years. 2025 also brings part of the Bienal de Fotografia de Vila Franca de Xira 24 (BF24) curatorial program, titled INFINITE SERPENT. Built around a speculative reading of Aby Warburg’s A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, the Biennial seems to summon the serpent’s age-old symbolism and, at the same time, to revive magical-explanatory narratives that have traversed distant eras and civilizations, offering – however provisionally – a sense of meaning to human existence.

In A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, Aby Warburg presents a series of reflections based on his observation of the ritual practices of the Hopi people in New Mexico. This text announced the survival of a primitive pagan culture in a country where technology had already become a weapon at the service of the intellect. But what does it imply to carry this text into the realm of photography? This exercise in (re)reading inevitably returns us to Aby Warburg’s thinking. Interested in shaping a history of culture grounded in the interplay of diverse fields of knowledge, Warburg used photography as a methodological tool in the development of this new discipline. The prime example of this is his Atlas Mnemosyne, created between 1925 and 1929: an extensive archive arranged in panels, where connections emerge between images from distinct historical, aesthetic, and cultural origins. In this sense, the logic of the Atlas Mnemosyne seems to permeate BF24’s curatorial framework, spread across different venues in the city, forming a constellation of photographic images woven into an intricate and ever-evolving web of meaning.

We encounter both still and moving images from different artists, contexts, and visual universes. They are, above all, images that do not produce meaning on their own, but together they form a mosaic that turns into a synthesis due to an endless interplay of associations – sometimes close, sometimes almost dizzying. As Delfim Sardo writes in O Exercício Experimental da Liberdade, these different photographic planes are not simply amassed in a heterogeneous collection. Their significance lies in the possibility of constructing a sense of unity, which, in this case, may be embodied by the snake, a figure that inevitably weaves through all the Biennial’s exhibition spaces.

Paulo Arraiano’s intervention on the façade of the Museu do Neo-Realismo presents a snake whose skin shifts over its motionless body. Shown in a loop, this video reveals movement in what appears still, a transformative process that is both cyclical and infinite. Carla Cabanas’ pieces, presented in her solo exhibition at Galeria Paulo Nunes, are serpentine bodies peering out of the sky, luminous, suspended and contorted in on themselves. Similarly, Inv. 903, by Daniela Ângelo, reveals a snake illuminated only by a yellow spotlight. Like an artifact newly discovered and displayed in a dark room, this piece – which marks the beginning of our journey through the group exhibition at Fábrica das Palavras – seems to encapsulate the curatorial program’s purpose: to unarchive and catalog narratives constructed around this mythological figure. However, it should be noted that the representation of the serpent takes on different forms. At times, we find only traces of an absent body. We see its vertebrae in Halo and the skins shed through ecdysis in Snake Skin, Ritual and Cabeça de Klimt. In other instances, its portrayal acquires a performative dimension, such as in Bárbara Fontes’s A mais inábil candura, a video installation presented at the exhibition in Celeiro da Patriarcal, depicting a woman trapped in the body of a snake. This leaves us wondering: to what extent are we also creatures of change? What are these skins we wear and shed, like a snake?

The Biennial weaves potential answers that are never definitive nor entirely conclusive. The skins we wear, suggested by successive plays of presence and absence, revelation and concealment, appear in Elisa Azevedo’s Turva series, where wet clothes clinging to the body become translucent. A testimony to intimacy shrouded in a murky, almost dreamlike atmosphere, these photographs depict skins that, when worn, allow us to conceal our vulnerabilities. This symbolic aspect of skin also stands out in Flesh to White to Black to Flesh, a film by Bruce Naumam, in which a man covers his face with black and white paint. This sequence – almost ritualistic – resembles how we prepare for social life. After all, every day we paint a mask: white, black, always different. And when we return home, we remove the mask that covered our face: we are back to flesh. It is a cycle that repeats itself endlessly, for socialization entails a measure of pretense and detachment – hence, skin changes.

But more than just a change of skin, the serpent seems to herald a movement “of times, of the cosmos, of pathos, of rainwaters, of harvests, of ecdysis and of images that fold into one another”[1]. Among these meandering bodies, we find movement traced in the lines of a hand in Serpentina by Adriana Molder, in the luminous celestial bodies orbiting within Time Machine by Igor Jesus, and in the wandering paths outlined by Inês Moura in Somos terra, chão e caminho. Something here belongs to the realm of the unspeakable, existing in a field of tension between the visible and the invisible, between document and fiction. Perhaps because these photographic images hold no concrete truth to be uncovered. Because it is precisely in the “interval, in what is not there, in the leap and in the lack that the narrative discourse around the images can be constructed”.[2]

Take, for instance, Retracing & Spooling, by Tris Vonna Michel. Made up of 65 photographic slides, this work presents scattered, enigmatic fragments: books with forgotten papers tucked inside, a rotting pumpkin, recesses overtaken by vegetation that insists on growing. The images we see are traces of a ghostly presence that we know is there, yet we cannot unveil. The works Míope and Máscara, by Igor Jesus, belong to this same space of non-representation. Photographed through a sculpted lens, they reveal objects that become strange, distorted bodies, corrupted by myopia and the mask that conceals them, blurring our vision.

As suggested in the text accompanying the curatorial program, these photographs correspond to parts of an infinite serpent to whom “every time a vertebra was removed, nothing was needed. […] Anyone who wanted to take a piece of it home could put it on the wall and contemplate a fragment of the infinite serpent.”[3] There is no way of knowing where the head of this serpent lies. And so, we only see fragments of something we can never fully perceive. To visit BF24 is therefore like a return to the Cave, walking through darkness in the presence of fleeting apparitions. Luminous photographs that guide us through the shadows, forming a body of images that allow us to open the way through an imagery of the collective unconscious: the one of the serpent, but above all, the one of ritual, which serves precisely to heal this innate wound of ours – man’s confinement to the fragment, to the vertebra, to the shed skin.

In the drawings of the Hopi, as recovered by Aby Warburg in A Lecture on Serpent Ritual, lightning is depicted as serpents, messengers sent to return in the form of a storm. The serpents would have been an explanation for the coercive forces of nature that the indigenous people could not yet understand. Alienated between pixels and rational explanations that overlay the earth, as seen in Meanwhile, At Home, de Paulo Arraiano, technological civilization distances itself from this magical-fantastical causality, blindly entrusting its future to narratives of progress which, as we know, do not always translate into true advancement. Myth, symbol, and ritual are thus relegated to a state of primitivism, understood as distant from the West. It is true that the technological age no longer requires the serpent to explain and control light, but has humanity truly lost its primitive fears? Isn’t the most primitive fear the impossibility of knowing? The emancipation from mythological explanations has yet to offer – if it ever will – an answer to the problem of existence. And so, it becomes pertinent to (re)evoke the serpent, a flash of lightning. To sustain these magical narratives and, above all, to use photography as a tool for speculation in the hope of finding a possible answer.

Curated by Ana Rito, the exhibitions featured in the Vila Franca de Xira Photography Biennial can be visited until March 23 at Fábrica das Palavras, Celeiro da Patriarcal, Galeria Paulo Nunes, and Núcleo Museológico do Mártir Santo. Interventions were also made on the façades of the Museu Municipal and the Museu do Neo-Realismo.

You can find more information about BF24’s curatorial program on the Biennial’s website and in the article A Bienal de Fotografia de Vila Franca de Xira 24, written by Maria Inês Augusto for Umbigo in 2024.

[1] From the introductory text of the BF24 Curatorial Program, written by Ana Rito.

[2] Traduction from Exercício Experimental da Liberdade, by Delfim Sardo

[3] From 351 Tisanas, by Ana Hatherly (Lisbon: Quimera, 1997), pp. 44–45.