In the exhibition space of the FEUP Library there is an inherent circularity evoked by the unique visual and graphic discourse of the book as an object of narration. The spreads that make up the panels in the exhibition space thus originate from the publication that explored the specific potential of the physical book as a unique means of communicating non-linear visual narratives, where fiction and reality are imaginatively mixed.

This strategy, understood as an extension of the nuclear book object (Contrast II), is in line with Umberto Eco's idea that books are not untouchable artifacts and that the possibility of personalizing and even going further, extending the book through other media, is of the utmost importance to mark its interest and further study.

We are thus faced with a set of photographic projects that show different strategies, different problems and visual discourses, where there is room both for reality and coherence, but also for paradox and play, oxymoron*, where memory, identity and places interrelate in a rhizomatic way.

In fact, the astonishing diversity of photographic images, some hermetic and cold in their closing process, others more welcoming and revealing of significant psychological intimacy, are reorganized on the exhibition panels based on the narrative logic of each author of the book. The link between the different projects is established through the interaction of colors and patterns that inevitably float, just as some of the images rise into the void of the panels.

The exhibition challenges visitors to find meaning in the fragments of journeys and projects it shows us through images combined with various thoughts, something that brings it closer to Umberto Eco's concept of opera aperta** because it allows for various interpretations.

*The following note first appeared in Aperture magazine #217, Winter 2014, “Lit.” | Walker Evans & the Written Word by David Campany (…) Any test met is part of one’s development.” He understood the deep connections between photography and literature. “Photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts,” he reflected in his chapter written for Louis Kronenberger’s anthology Quality: Its Image in the Arts (1969). “It will have—on occasion, and in effect— qualities of eloquence, wit, grace, and economy; style, of course; structure and coherence; paradox, play and oxymoron.” (...) https://aperture.org/blog/walker-evans-written-word/
**Umberto Eco, Obra Aberta: forma e indeterminação nas poéticas contemporâneas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2005.