2025.01.18—2025.03.29
Mimológica
Isabel Carvalho

Mimológica brings together works from recent projects - some already presented in public and others still in process - with the aim of constituting a new composition around the themes of voice, orality, marvel (and wonder), the fantastic and its effect on reality. Underlying these works is the fact that they have been produced according to a mimetic logic, as the chosen way of approaching the sensitive environment and as a stimulus to the sensory, collecting and combining visual and sound similarities between multiple dimensions of existence, in order to enhance other forms of communication.

Chão de Urtigas, dedicated especially to a young audience, was a performance designed to raise ecological awareness, based on the challenge of ‘wonder’ proposed by Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder, which took place at Sala Estúdio, Perpétuo - Educação e Cultura (Porto), in September 2024. The performance focused on language and the careful (or careless) choice of certain words (Emptiness, Nothingness and Silence); on animals hastily adapting to the environment of intense artificial lighting (the butterfly, the moth and the bat) and their interdependent connection to biodiversity; on the excess of light (light pollution) and the consequent loss of the possibility of observing a starry sky, and thus of having a meaningful experience with infinity, etc. The video brings together and combines all the material, visual and sound elements, and also expands to the digital platforms where it is available. The work is still in process and will be extended in time through the recording of an LP.

Maravilhamento (Straparola) is a ceramic piece developed over the course of 2024 from another piece entitled Ce sont les énigmes de Straparola. Ce sont les énigmes de Straparola. Elles étaient dédiées à celles et ceux qui dansaient, chantaient et riaient des nuits durant – se contant les meilleures fables de l'Est et de l'Ouest – pour échapper à la réalité du quotidien [These are the enigmas of Straparola. They were dedicated to those who danced, chanted and laughed during the night - telling the best fables of East and West - in order to escape the reality of everyday life]. This first piece was presented at the solo exhibition Langages Tissés (2021) at the Centre d'Art Le Lait in Albi, France, and was structured on the basis of an exhaustive study of the quantity and content of tales collected from popular culture and transposed from orality to paper by Giovanni Francesco Straparola in Le Piacevoli Notti in the 16th century. When the piece was produced four years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, Straparolla's book - which in turn was modelled on the literary structure of Boccaccio's Decameron - once again came to the fore, as it tells how a group of people in isolation (in this case voluntary) ‘entertained’ themselves to pass the time by telling each other these folk tales. Something similar happened in 2024 in the context of a ceramics workshop, where I met an intergenerational group of attendees who, this time, ‘entertained’ each other by effusing about the marvellous in everyday life and discussing the political scene. No matter how divergent our points of view, we invariably concluded that we were witnessing a genocide in Palestine and that ‘(the fascists) shall not pass! “.

The video O Teatro das Plantas was also the result of bringing together elements from a performance of the same name, held in February 2023 at the Soares dos Reis Museum in Porto, based on a painting by Aurélia de Souza, which depicts a garden. It is around this environment that care practices and the interdependent relationships of all its inhabitants are chosen for the narrative, between the enigmatic and the political manifesto. The video was presented at the end of the year at the Casting a Sounding Voice exhibition (CAAA, Guimarães), dedicated to the voice and hearing, human and beyond-human.

From the research carried out for the Casting a Sounding Voice exhibition, bronze sculptures are presented here, created from moulds and counter-moulds of two single matrices, and others formed from approximately life-size models of throats, with the aim of evoking the physiology of the voice and its relationship with touch and the sensory. Also included in this sample is a carpet in Beiriz stitch, originating from the area that gives it its name, in Póvoa do Varzim, with a drawing from the series Arder a Palavra e outros Incêndios, which was produced in the summer of 2023 at the Performing the Archive space (Porto). It was inspired by Ana Luísa Amaral's book of essays of the same name (published in 2018), in which the poet (essayist and queer studies researcher) defends a language integrated into the materiality of the body.

O Livro do Tigre is a project based on Le Livre du Tigre (1977), a book written and self-published by the sculptor Isabel Meyrelles (Matosinhos, 1929), and in our dialogue, which continued over three meetings in Paris. What is presented here is a visual essay for the cover of a vinyl in the process of being produced, in which I recite the author's poems in Portuguese, while Emilienne Paoli, Meyrelles' companion, reads them in French. Meyrelles, who integrates her work in the field of the Fantastic, was a specialist in the genres of Science Fiction and the Fantastic. In Le Livre du Tigre, in particular, there are references to an imaginary of alternative existences, speculating around temporal and spatial dimensions, and placing the discursive subject issuing love declarations in a scenario of unfathomable realities. The project is ongoing and this is its first public presentation.

Finally, the Funtósia tile panels derive from a water point, a fountain of the same name, well identified in Picote, in the Douro Internacional, where it is said that tales and fables were passed on by the inhabitants who took their water there. The recording of the movement of water is already recurrent in my work, but this time the panels were developed from the water ‘speech’ itself and the memory it contains, as well as the history of a region of the country deeply marked by the control and privatisation of water, a consequence of the modernisation and progress brought about by hydroelectric power stations.

Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, Exhibition view 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, The Book of the Tiger a, 2025. Oil painting. 50 x 50 cm 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, Nettle Ground, 2024. Video. 33 minutes 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, The Sense of Wonder (Straparola), 2024. Ceramic pieces on a wooden structure. 260 x 260 x 80 cm (aprox.) 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, The Sense of Wonder (Straparola), 2024. Ceramic pieces on a wooden structure. 260 x 260 x 80 cm (aprox.) 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, Exhibition view 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, Exhibition view 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, Exhibition view 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, Exhibition view 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, Exhibition view 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, The Book of the Tiger c, 2025. Oil painting. 50 x 50 cm 
Mimológica . Isabel Carvalho, The Theatre of Plants, 2023. Video. 60 minutes