É tempo que a pedra se decida a florir is a fictitious and compulsive herbarium compiled by Luís Silveirinha. It’s a collection of specimens still to be discovered, still to happen, in that extensive and perpetual transformation of the evolution of Nature and imagination. It’s a speculative exercise, centred on forms that are gradually generated in the dream or reverie of a park yet to be sown or planted.

The floral and vegetal motifs acquire almost a poetic scientificity: entries in some botanical catalogue yet to be made, among metamorphoses, hybridizations, grafts, transplantations, which have autonomy on paper and develop themselves in thought in an almost hallucinatory way.

According to the curator João Pinharanda, “it is important to understand if these imaginary artistic images by Luís Silveirinha also transform those who see them; and, if our state of consciousness is indeed altered, they force us to follow them. If that happens, we will be able to enter the magic garden, the underwater or aerial world, the artificial paradises where they so powerfully are”.

É tempo que a pedra se decida a florir opens on 24 April, at 11 am, at Galeria do Parque, Vila Nova da Barquinha, until 24 September. This exhibition supported by the EDP Foundation.