The exhibition Metaphoria is a European project born out of a dialogue between Silvia Guerra and the late Portuguese poet Rui Costa (1972–2012) on the possible meaning(s) of metaphor today.

“An exhibition can be born out a single word. Or from a desire to think of how poetry, one of the literary forms most entrenched in the history of a country such as Portugal, enables a nation to preserve its unconscious and to preserve its dreams when they are slipping away. Poems can sometimes live in our memory, but how might they open an area for thought in a museum..” (Silvia Guerra)

Metaphoria will bring together a site-specific piece by Jason Dodge that are experienced with a simple movement on the part of the viewer, like a poem without words; several installations by Katie Paterson that transform the artist’s horizon into a metaphor and project the visitor to the realm of moonlight and gamma rays; poems by Ellen LeBlond-Schrader that submerge the visitor in the precise moment when one thing becomes another; poems by Joana Serrado that present the world as a mineralization process and waste ofsaudades; ” … pour ainsi dire …”; and the world premiere of a concert by the composers and musicians Jean-François Pauvros and Hélène Breschand on the electric guitar and the harp respectively; The duration of this exhibition is extended through a book in which these same artists and authors figure, and the reader can thumb through its pages as though moving between the different terms of a poetic reconciliation. In addition to this, readers will find a meditation by François Prodromidès, on what’s Europe the metaphor nowadays. Prodromidès’ reflection invites the reader to return tosee what is written and to bump up against the very surface of the word from which the exhibition grew.

Download Catalogue (PDF – 5Mo)