At Livraria Zé dos Bois, Francisco Corrêa presents an installation that is, at once, the final memory of a life and the first step in a narrative yet to be constructed. The work is part of a broader project that will take its full form at the Raiano Cultural Center in Idanha-a-Nova, as part of a partnership between the two institutions.

At the center of the installation, pigeons and arrows trace a suspended moment, like a game someone paused midway. The scene does not move, but pulses with the tension of an outcome yet to be fulfilled. The viewer, arriving there unannounced, becomes a silent witness to this fragment—a frozen memory that no longer belongs to them, yet calls to them. It is the territory of what Ana Pérez-Quiroga calls “post-trauma”: the empathy that makes us feel the pain of those we do not know, traversed by objects that carry the life of a stranger.

Quoting António Lobo Antunes, the piece asks in silence: is this a work about death or a work that denies death? The answer may not lie in the forms, but in the way memory clings to a handful of figures—the pigeons, the arrows, the title that evokes someone else’s nightmare—and resists oblivion. There are objects that become symbols, that give form to the lives of those who can no longer speak. That which is intimate and unrepeatable becomes, for a moment, a shared territory.

If the upcoming exhibition opens with a trunk—the gesture that sets off a journey made of treasures, traps, and biographical fragments—the installation now presented at Livraria Zé dos Bois shows its reverse: a final memory, the ultimate remembrance of a character whom only fiction could save.
Between chronicle and play, Mike Tyson’s Worst Nightmare invites us to remember, in the sense that Eduardo Galeano restored to the word: re-cordis, to pass through the heart again.

Tomás Longo