In a shipping container installed in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s garden, you can view “Hereditas” (2006) by Vasco Araújo. This video, with no sound and no spoken or written words, celebrates muteness. The protagonist is a child, filmed at a medical sanatorium for tuberculosis in Caramulo, which is no longer in use. A girl walks through the forest, alone and immaculately dressed in white. She unearths human bones, including a skull, which she carries in a cloth bundle, too large for her tiny body. She deposits them in a room of the sanatorium, trying to reconstruct the spinal column. “Hereditas” is simultaneously a vanitas and a work about childhood, solitude, pain, love, death and the desire for knowledge and understanding of the great enigmas and questions of the human condition.

Curator: Leonor Nazaré

Cycle of films: Is space real? 

The experience and instinctive interpretation of the spaces that each of us develops – spaces we inhabit, pass through or visit – is far less objective than we might first think: it results from a point of view and an inner disposition and purpose. The three moments of this cycle of films from the CAM Collection take us from real spaces in the Foundation, seen with a new and unexpected look, to spaces of assumed reverie and strangeness, through ways of fictionalising and narrating immersion in a natural space.

• Spaces in the Foundation: The first part of this cycle takes us directly to spaces in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, as the films were made there, and have been acquired in recent years. Films: I gave my love a cherry that had no stone (2016) by Emily Wardill and Piso Térreo (2006) by Filipa César.
• Fictional approaches to nature: The second part of this cycle includes two films that relate to fictional approaches to nature. Films: Surrendering after Hamish (2004) by Bruno Pacheco and Golden Dawn (2011) by Salomé Lamas.
• The parallel worlds of the unconscious: The third part of this cycle includes two films that mark the reveries or parallel worlds that exist as we move form the conscious to the unconscious. Films: Hereditas (2006) by Vasco Araújo and Hypnotic Suggestion (1993) by Jane e Louise Wilson.

CAM IN MOTION

CAM in Motion is an ‘outdoor’ programme that brings together a series of site-specific interventions by artists and exhibitions with works from the Collection in different spaces in the city of Lisbon and its surroundings. More info