Fósseis vivos
[Living fossils]

2025

The programmatic proposal — TheSpaceInYourHead — (...) explores the physical and spatial characteristics of DÍNAMO which, at this moment, benefits from the circumstance of maintaining an area still in the construction phase and, therefore, open to multiple and untimely possibilities of artistic intervention that will be aimed at in situ practice — fostering the dialogue of the works with a singular space but also with the history of that place, the architecture, the landscape, the people. (+info: https://esap.pt/en/galeria_dinamo/thespaceinyourhead-programacao-outubro-2024-novembro-2025/)

Starting from the interior garden at ESAP, and in dialogue with the expanded space of the DÍNAMO gallery, I reflected on the perception of ferns as decorative elements: from the tree ferns (‘living fossils,’ reminiscent of an ancient geological time), to the spontaneous ferns that grow in the gallery space. 
I start from a reference to pteridomania, an obsession with ferns that resulted in their collection in herbariums, their cultivation in small gardens/greenhouses (or ‘ferneries’), and even their use as decorative motifs. Originating in the United Kingdom, where it almost led to the extinction of some species, this obsession also spread to Porto (e.g. through the publication ‘O jardim na sala’ (1876), by Duarte de Oliveira Júnior, which teaches how to grow ferns indoors, in greenhouses, artificial rocks or pots) and in the planting of tree ferns in various parts of the country, such as the Vale do Fetos in the Bussaco Forest.
Images captured in Bussaco, alongside images of fern fossils from the Carboniferous period, appear here in dialogue with these tree ferns.
Encapsulated in the interior garden, the frontal view seems to create an image in itself. The negative images create a kind of reverse frame of what we see in the garden, images from another time and space, a pteridomania without liveliness. Just as the myths surrounding ferns (associated with the idea of invisibility), here the images and texts are also on the threshold of invisibility, silently revealing some of their contradictions.