from april 10 to june 29, 2025
Sala Branca Edmée Marques | Museu Nacional da História Natural e da Ciência (MUHNAC)
The exhibition is based on the artist's research into hospital patients whose stay in hospital is uncertain, due to a lack of other resources, whether public or their own. Without being given a more appropriate destination - be it a home, a palliative care center, another social institution of a more specific nature or being accompanied by family members - the situation of patients who are trapped in inpatient systems is a little-known and publicized factor, with little visibility, which came to the artist's attention through the testimonies of internists and nurses. Many of these patients do not suffer from serious conditions that justify their stay in hospital, but they are kept in hospital dormitories, with nurses and social workers as their only human contact. The isolation into which these patients fall is in itself a sentence - as damaging to their physical and mental health as an illness. will be the result of collecting the possible testimony of some of these users. In an informal partnership with the Hospital de São José and the Hospital de Santa Maria, the research has developed a new expression in painting and sculpture based on descriptions of moments in these people's lives, interspersed with the same image: their lives “frozen” at the moment of hospitalization.
Curated by Sofia Marçal
