'Scheherazade' e 'Gall Ball' at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

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DATE

18 Dec 2025

AUTHOR

Maria Brás Ferreira

'Scheherazade' e 'Gall Ball' at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

AUTHOR

Maria Brás Ferreira

At Espaço Engawa, Francisco Trêpa presents his Gall Ball, committed to looking outward and revealing metamorphosis, making it explicit as an artistic platform and a political act of thinking about the familiar and the foreign. The idea is to take advantage of the metaphorical potential that nature offers us, as a plane of various crossings, of metamorphoses responsible for the indistinction, more or less prolonged, more or less provisional, of inside and outside, of the one and the diverse, of similarity and diversity. As described in the exhibition's presentation sheet, this dance is the result of "observing galls in the CAM Garden, where the artist had his first contact with these biological reactions resulting from the interaction between plants (such as oaks) and external agents (such as wasps). The effect manifests as a swelling on the outside of the plant, which provides nutrition and shelter to the insects that induce it." Thus, the parasitic body provokes a reaction in the host body, so that the former is accommodated by the latter, which, in effect, accepts and understands—an example of “biological empathy”—the presence of the foreign body. In the exhibition room, separated by glass from the Gulbenkian garden, it is impossible not to continue the analogy and think about the thousands of refugees who move from country to country, promoting the reconfiguration of their own identity and that of those who inhabit the place of arrival. It is equally impossible not to reconsider the relationship that humans have with non-humans, including the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. The notion of displacement, travel, and transience thus becomes more appropriate for establishing a notion of identity, which, necessarily, if we look at the world we inhabit, will have to involve the exposure of borders as provisional, fictitious constructions and, like all fiction that becomes normative, vulnerable to the vices of power held by a minority leading the majority. This would be to incur a mythification of Natural, with dangerous consequences, namely the protective strategy of totalitarian ideologies that legitimize some and exclude others. However, it is interesting to observe the nature that precedes us to understand the tensions that arise and that can be resolved based on the assumption of the notion of incompleteness as an existential condition of every living being, contextualized in an ecosystem on which it depends. Metaphorically, through analogies, of the nature that surrounds us. From discreet corners, figures emerge, like surveillance cameras, as if reminding us that there is always another gaze, while we ourselves become—we are permanently—the object targeted, watched, sometimes a parasite, sometimes a host.

***

The Modern Art Center, in Scheherazade, curated by Leonor Nazaré, exhibits the museum's collection, in a proposal for the permanent updating of works, revealing the concept of a collection as a whole driven by a desire for continuity. Perhaps this appeal for continuity is launched, and becomes manifest, as compensation for a lack of clarity in the curatorial principle of the exhibition. This is a doubt that the various moments of the exhibition do not clarify.

While this may be a continuation, the same cannot be said of continuity, since the artistic conception and exhibition criteria underlying Scheherazade are presented as combining diversity, playing with a gesture of estrangement to be elaborated—and continued—by the viewer. The exhibition is divided into 14 thematic sections or, better said, 14 ways of telling stories, while simultaneously suggesting the defense of various narrative rules or various compositional elements of the act of narration, which also involves attentive listening and observation of what surrounds us. Nothing is guaranteed, however. No grammar is dictated. It must be said, moreover, that the organization of each expository moment seems somewhat forced, with everything appearing subsumed under a rather wild reading of this and that topic, designating the various parts of the exhibition, namely: Muito me Contas, Um Livro (em) Aberto, Suspense, Memória Prodigiosa, O Combate, O Brilho do Mundo, Labor Intenso, Mil e Uma Coisas, A Vida de Cada Um, Mil e uma Madrugadas, O Sono dos Injustos, Astúcia e Sedução, Fontes de Inspiração, Estar Viva Amanhã. The connection between one section and another is a task delegated to the visitor, who must be predisposed not exactly to narratively link one piece to another, but to witness tensions, whether positive or negative. Indeed, and guided by the title alluding to the mythical Persian storyteller, from One Thousand and One Nights, this exposition, divided into 14 moments, 14 paragraphs or 14 intervals — 14 dreams or 14 wakes — rests on the terrain of suspension between one night and another.

The immensity of the Arabian Nights, during which a story containing others is narrated, is mimicked by the endless game of exhibition, promoting a constellation of thoughts, emotions, and ideas of necessarily incalculable extent. Also, to rhyme with this incalculable nature that a narration inscribes as a time apart, detached from the rules of the world and any individual agenda reducible to this or that encounter, the ages and origins of the artists vary, without imposing simplistic criteria such as age or artistic lineage. Thus, we have painting, photography, drawing, illustration, sculpture, video, and sound recording. To the fortunate gesture of circumventing empty categories indicative of a traditional mode of exhibition, is unfortunately added the impression of a certain arbitrariness, as if the concept of hybridity ultimately underpinned the choice to generate a dynamic exhibition, more as an excuse than as a reason.

There is no possible prescription for the act of counting, just as a collection that aims to be true to itself can only be motivated by the collector's taste. The reasons for the existence of a collection—and it is important to distinguish between a public and a private collection—can be of various kinds. However, the mystery of bringing together will invariably underlie a specific combination, just as the result of placing two works side by side produces effects in the viewer that are neither predictable nor entirely comprehensible to the one who witnesses them.

We therefore yearn for the just mystery of this storyteller, narrator of open dwellings. We await Scheherazade future combinations.

Gall Ball, by Francisco Trêpa, can be visited until January 12, 2026. The Scheherazade exhibition will be on display until September 20, 2027.

BIOGRAPHY

Master's degree in Portuguese Studies from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with a thesis on Nuno Bragança. She is currently writing a doctoral thesis on Agustina Bessa-Luís and Manoel de Oliveira and melancholy. FCT scholarship holder, she has contributed to anthologies and has published poetry and essays in national and international magazines. She has published two books of poetry: “E o Coração de Soslaio a Todo o Custo” (2025) and “Penhasco” (2025). She is co-editor of Lote magazine. She writes literary criticism for the Observador newspaper.

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