The outline, the will and the limits, 2023

This series includes fourteen drawings I made on the island of Faial for the exhibition at the Capelinhos Volcano Interpretation Center, which opened on September 27, the 66th anniversary of the 1957 eruption. 

 

The title of the exhibition is taken from the poem "Na ilha por vezes habitada" by José Saramago, in whose life - as his wife Pilar del Río said during the author's centenary celebrations - "there was always the intuition of the island", as well as the "poetic impulse and also a possibility of the future". As if he had guessed that, many years later, he would live, write and die on an island.

 

When I visited the Capelinhos for the first time, I retained the brutal images of that incredible scenery. These images became so persistent within me that I later proposed to make an exhibition in this place, where we seem to be witnessing a confrontation between the old lighthouse, left in ruins, and the modern building of the Interpretation Center, buried in the "recent" volcanic landscape, where we have the inevitable perception of how much the sea has already claimed, gradually and covertly, from what the volcano then added. As if we were witnessing the birth and death of those rocks. It's an absolutely ephemeral place.

 

I would like to thank the Regional Secretariat for the Environment and Climate Change and the Centro de Artesanato do Capelo for making it possible to do this.