collective exhibition

collaborating with fellow artists bárbara assis pacheco and joana linda, we each extended invitations to additional artists to participate in the exhibition: sofia de eça, soraya vasconcelos, and pedro vaz.

after being deeply moved by aldous huxley’s novel ‘island’, i initiated a project where i invited a group of artists to read the book and use it as inspiration for a collective exhibition. at that time, my primary concern was grappling with the prevailing sense of disconnected individualism and witnessing a persistent alienation within society. there seemed to be a growing tendency towards contempt for our own country, often leading to sweeping generalizations. ‘island’ served as an initial step towards combating this sense of isolation.
transitioning from the anxiety of creating collectives, which often seemed to have an expiration date, and the pursuit of a union of dissidents to materialize utopia, my focus shifted towards an enduring obsession with the body—its limits and meanings. with this in mind, i proposed georges bataille’s ‘story of the eye’ as the foundation for our artistic exploration.
as our perception of the body expanded, so did our understanding of its confinement within didacticisms, rules, and norms. while the body serves as a vessel for knowledge acquisition, bataille’s transgressive fiction, tinged with autobiographical elements, confronts societal rejection of the rejected, feared, and despised. through our exploration, we realized an confirmed that societal norms and expectations confine us, and attempts to break free often lead to rejection—a free individual in an unfree society is deemed a monster.
therefore, ‘story of the eye’ provided us with an opportunity to embrace our inner monsters, to become terrorists of the imagination in a realm of ‘organized transgression’.

– miguel bonneville

this exhibition was designed to occupy various spaces of the campo grande 111 bookstore in lisbon.