331 Amoreiras em Metamorfose

The exhibition project “331 Amoreiras em Metamorfose” (331 Mulberry Trees in Metamorphosis) opens at the Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva Museum on 20 November, celebrating both the thirtieth anniversary of the museum’s opening and the start of Nuno Faria’s programme as the institution’s new director.

Conceived as a large constellation of Portuguese and foreign artists, contemporaries and non-contemporaries of Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes, the exhibition is in constant transformation, featuring a set of five partial installations. Under the sign of metamorphosis, the program seeks inspiration or reflects what might be called textile thinking, so fundamentally characteristic of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s work throughout the decades of her long artistic production.

Inspired by the origin of the place where Vieira da Silva wanted the Foundation to be born – the former Silk Fabric Factory and its surroundings – and its specific function in the factory’s economy (this factory was a place to learn the trade of weaver or weavers), the program will take as its starting point the idea of metamorphosis, solidarity and interdependence between species. It offers new readings of the artistic universes of Vieira and Arpad, and invites other artists, poets, musicians, art historians and philosophers, among others, to weave dialogues with the works and the site.

331 Amoreiras em Metamorfose was the number of mulberry trees planted by Marquês de Pombal to feed the transformation and production process of the silk factories built in the area between the 1760s and 1770s, as part of the city’s urban renewal plan after the earthquake.
In this process of interdependence between entities – plant (the mulberry tree), animal (the silkworm) and human (the weavers) – the memory of the building, the place, learning the gestures of warping and weaving, the stories told and sung over time, will lead us to build a program based on themes or concepts such as history, memory, orality, writing, learning, the body, movement, transformation, transience, non-binary nature, among others.

Exhibited artists : Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Álvaro Lapa, Ana Hatherly, Ana Jotta, Angelo de Sousa, Belén Uriel, Bruno Pacheco, Dominguez Alvarez, Elisa Strinna, Fernanda Fragateiro, Fernando Marques Penteado, Frida Baranek, Gaëtan, Hans Hartung, Hein Semke, Helena Valsecchi, Ilda David’, Jorge Feijão, José Escada, Joseph Albers, Lourdes Castro, Maria Capelo, Mário Cesariny, Mumtazz, Pedro A.H. Paixão, Robert Rauschenberg, Rui Moreira, Sol Lewitt, Sonia Delaunay, Tomba.

Opening Wednesday 20.11, 6pm
Tuesdays to Sundays, 10am > 6pm
until Wednesday 31.12.25

Location
Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva
Praça das Amoreiras, 56
1250-020 Lisboa

Read more about Fernanda Fragateiro and Pedro A.H. Paixão.