Within the framework of Coimbra’s application to the Portuguese Contemporary Art Network, and aligned with a national strategy of artistic decentralisation, the Municipality unveils, at Centro de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra and Sala da Cidade, the inaugural phase of the curatorial and exhibition project Um Silabário por Reconstruir, conceived by José Maçãs de Carvalho.

In partnership with the Municipalities of Óbidos and Elvas, as well as Culturgest, the project enables the circulation of one hundred and twenty works by eighty Portuguese and international artists drawn from the State Contemporary Art Collection, the Caixa Geral de Depósitos Collection and the António Cachola Collection. This roving exhibition foregrounds sustained research across the three collections and fosters a coherent networked collaboration.

Bringing together works that summon a narrative impulse, Um Silabário por Reconstruir unfolds across four sites and moments: in Coimbra, at CACC and Sala da Cidade (February to May 2025); at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas (July to October 2025); Galeria NovaOgiva in Óbidos (December 2025 to February 2026); and Culturgest, Porto (March to May 2026). The architectural diversity of each venue, which shapes the very exhibition design, is complemented by invitations to emerging curators who research and select the works for each stop: Joana Oliveira Borges in Coimbra, Tiago Candeias in Elvas, Inês Faria in Óbidos and Filipa Valente at Culturgest Porto.

Under a specific thematic umbrella, José Maçãs de Carvalho adopts as the exhibition’s guiding thread an analogy between the visual artwork and the organic, architectural qualities of literary text, positing that every piece harbours narrative potential. The CACC presentation spans painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation, each suggesting a story. The opening, sombre and theatrical, extends writing beyond its support, letting it spill into the gallery through works whose narrativity resides in form. We sense this in Jorge Molder’s photograph from the series Inox (1995), where the artist’s own presence, with face, gesture and body language, takes centre stage, intensified by black‑and‑white tonality. Nostalgic and mystical, the image speaks more of presence than representation, sparking a charged dialogue with Ana Rito’s video piece Le Mot et le Fantôme (2015). Like a spectre haunting the realm of images, Molder’s seated figure, cigarette poised, seems to spy on the film’s inhabitants, whose scale and intensity hold our gaze. In a space drenched in the same velvety black as the photograph, attention converges on the actress’s face as she murmurs into the ear of a petrified bust. Throughout this secret narrative, silence lets words echo in the dark, the work probing the sculptural possibility of quiet actions through body and gestural‑visual vocabulary.

The thread extends to Álvaro Lapa’s painting, where two silhouetted figures, shadow‑like and ink‑black, appear locked in dialogue: one speaks, the other listens. Nearby, Rosa Carvalho offers a nostalgic reverie: a female figure, poised between the religious, mythic and oneiric, holds an arrow amid haze, an atmosphere of melancholy mirrored by Miguel Branco’s works, whose skulls summon thoughts of death and hush.

On the exhibition’s second floor, the palpable word in the absence of script emerges in Dalila Gonçalves’s installation Amontoar em Carga e Descarga (2015). Through a process of dissection and rediscovery of everyday materials, the artist reveals their uniqueness, the stories and primary functions they conceal. Reflecting on memory and the passing of time, we see an array of used Bic pens fixed to the wall, their arcs shaped by the ink they retain, resembling a drawn landscape. In O tempo dos outros às vezes é o meu (2019), a sinuous cylinder snakes across the floor, revealed to be a vast collection of shop tickets; grouped on a new support, they assume a morphology far removed from their original use. In the same room, paintings invite fresh readings through paratextual elements: Jorge Martins’s Um bilhete p/ubiquidade (2003), Julião Sarmento’s Dois amigos (1982) and João Louro’s Blind Image #177 (2010), whose caption, lifted from a film, fires the viewer’s imagination while the acrylic, reflective surface mirrors and enfolds the onlooker.

The spectator’s image‑world is courted again on the third floor. Gonçalo Barreiros’s Untitled 2016 presents seven iron lines of varying length, painted and inscribed on the wall, exploring transformative capacity and hinting at literary terrain by evoking spray‑obliterated text, a sculptural trompe‑l’œil. Text and its visual essence surface in Catarina Dias’s visual poem, which reasserts the word as both form and language. Inviting the viewer to occupy the empty spaces of the cut‑out letters, the piece projects itself onto the wall, revealing a double—a drawing sited elsewhere. Verbal expression converses intriguingly with gesture in Andreia Santana’s sculpture Study for Paranomia (2018), a spatial drawing that seems to materialise as a visual echo in Rui Sanches’s drawing series, where the letter as sign is unmistakable. Closing the CACC exhibition, humour and irony greet us in Ana Jotta and Pedro Casqueiro’s readymade‑inspired piece Solitaire Universel (1994); its manipulated cassette boxes stage the word as fertile ground for multiple narratives, each sprung from the sequence of terms composing the work.

Extending its narrative, expanded reading of language and body, Um Silabário por Reconstruir continues in the Sala da Cidade with two works by Rui Chafes (Debaixo da pele XIV, 1992, and Estrada do sonho, 1997) alongside the material residue of Vera Mota’s performance Queda, Evento, Composição, Figura II, enacted on opening day. The traces serve as score and composition, conjuring language itself as a site of resistance.

The exhibition is on view until May 18.