That\u2019s exactly what Isabelle Ferreira has done in Notre Feu<\/em>, her first solo exhibition in Portugal, the country her father left in the 1960s, fleeing the dictatorship and the colonial war. He, like many others, embarked on an arduous clandestine journey (known as \u201cthe leap\u201d) through Spain, the Basque Country, and the Pyrenees to France. During these crossings, a torn photograph served as a lifeline: families kept one half of a portrait of the one who was taking the leap over the Pyrenees, receiving the other half only upon their loved one\u2019s safe arrival in France.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
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$\"Isabelle$
Isabelle Ferreira<\/strong>
Par la nuit (depuis le vallon de Castets)<\/em>, 2025.
\u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa, 2025.
Photo: Guillaume Vieira, courtesy of the artist & Fundaci\u00f3n EDP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The leap(also the name of one of the series), the Pyrenees, the photographs\u200a\u2014\u200athey\u2019re all present in her exhibition at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, although she doesn\u2019t address \u201cthe leap\u201d in a conceptual or historical manner. Instead, she handles her post-memorial sense of severance in a series of visceral material and plastic exercises. As she dwells between sculpture and painting, she creates the pictorial by removal, displacement, and reconfiguration\u200a\u2014\u200ashe builds as she takes, or as she separates. In Portuguese, partir<\/em>, \u201cto depart,\u201d also means \u201cto part,\u201d \u201cto break,\u201d or even \u201cto fragment.\u201d This exercise in translation allows us to understand that Ferreira\u2019s artistic techniques have always been affected, or informed, by her father\u2019s exile. Even before her work on the torn photographs, her impulse has consistently hovered around tearing, shredding, and fragmenting\u200a\u2014\u200aattending to the same gesture as her father\u2019s, departing. Far from a melancholic take, phantomatic and lasting dislocation, this continuous departing ultimately shifts into returning\u200a\u2014\u200aassuming that leaving is not only coming from somewhere but also going somewhere. Here, \u201csomewhere\u201d is related not necessarily to a geographic location but, mainly, to a place where people can remain permanently deterritorialized, in knowledge and discourse, to use Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s terms. That is, departing<\/em> and returning<\/em> as regenerative gestures\u200a\u2014\u200ashredding, attaching, and rearranging, materially.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Isabelle$
Isabelle Ferreira<\/strong>
Tor oro<\/em>, 2022, from the series L\u2019invention du courage (O salto)<\/em>, 2021-2025.
\u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa, 2025.
Photo: Guillaume Vieira, courtesy of the artist & Fundaci\u00f3n EDP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Isabelle$
Isabelle Ferreira<\/strong>
ajf<\/em>, 2021, from the series L\u2019invention du courage (O salto)<\/em>,
2021-2025.
\u00a9 ADAGP, Paris \/ CARCC, Ottawa, 2025.
Photo: Guillaume Vieira, courtesy of the artist & Fundaci\u00f3n EDP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This regenerative process also has the power to reframe the understanding of why Portuguese workers fled their country during the 1960s, calling to attention that they did so not only to pursue economic dignity, as is still maintained, but also, and mostly, social emancipation. This argument is supported by the cinematographer Jos\u00e9 Vieira, whose documentary informed Ferreira\u2019s work on the torn photographs. However, as mentioned above, Ferreira\u2019s practice is neither utterly conceptual nor historical, so her regenerative gestures are much more psychosomatic\u200a\u2014\u200awhich in itself already consists of a restorative operation\u200a\u2014\u200athan objective. Between meta-material interdependencies, from wood to paper and to printed photographs, she puts identity, roots, and radical moves on display and reimagines memory, landscapes, and mountains as collectively moved and shaped by people\u2019s personal and relational histories. Still, as she departs, as she takes like Prometheus took the fire from the gods to give it to humans, she also returns, with a vasculum and some staples as the tools for a radical and vital arson\u200a\u2014\u200aprecisely the one that will sustain our deterritorialization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Museum of Art, Architecture <\/br>and Technology,<\/strong> Lisbon
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