Mike Tyson’s worst nightmare

Exhibition

Saturday 23 May · until 30 Sept

At Livraria Zé dos Bois, Francisco Corrêa presents an installation in which pigeons and arrows fix a suspended instant — the last memory of a life and the first gesture of a narrative yet to be assembled. The work is part of a broader project that will take complete form at Centro Cultural Raiano.

At Livraria Zé dos Bois, Francisco Corrêa presents an installation that is at once the last memory of a life and the first gesture of a narrative yet to be assembled. The work is part of a broader project that will find its complete form at Centro Cultural Raiano, in Idanha-a-Nova, within the partnership between the two institutions. At the centre of the installation, pigeons and arrows draw a suspended instant, like a game someone stopped halfway. The scene does not move, but pulses with the tension of an unfulfilled outcome. The viewer, arriving without warning, becomes a mute witness to that fragment, a frozen memory that no longer belongs to them, yet summons them. This is the territory of what Ana Pérez-Quiroga calls “post-trauma”: the empathy that makes us feel the pain of someone we do not know, crossed 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 lie not 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 perform the life of those who can no longer speak. What is intimate and unrepeatable becomes, for a moment, common ground. If the coming exhibition opens with a chest — the gesture that sets off a journey made of treasures, traps and biographical fragments — the installation now shown at Livraria Zé dos Bois reveals its reverse: a final memory, the last remembrance of a character that only fiction could save. Between chronicle and game, Mike Tyson’s worst nightmare invites us to remember, in the sense Eduardo Galeano returned to the word: re-cordis, to pass through the heart again. Tomás Longo. Associação Lugar de Junho.