Ⓓ Museu

Praça das Cortes de Coimbra,
Santa Clara, 3040-250 Coimbra.

Typographic print using movable lead types. The different typesets used in the poster's composition create a smear of irregular text. Diagramming was done in columns printed on eight A1 paper sheets.

The story is about a man searching for an unusual place in the middle of the sea. There are vague geographical references regarding its location. Still, the place's description points towards the impossibility of its actual physical existence. The tone is that of a personal account in a travel journal. The narrative evolves slowly and unobtrusively towards absurdity or nonsense. We are surprised by a sudden change of point of view and overlapping dimensions. There's no way to know if we're being presented with facts or dreams.

The poster was distributed in more than four hundred places along the main public roads of the city. Glued to the walls, it presented only one story. Perhaps because of this, it provoked a certain strangeness, as it shared the space with the information usually conveyed by that medium. The casualness of everyday life created peculiar situations in the various places where it was glued, sometimes in confrontation with advertising, sometimes confused as part of a musical show.

Bearing that the book page is the traditional space for literature, this story, printed on eight A1 paper sheets, is displaced from its usual environment. The poster transports the text to another space, and the composition moves away from literature and towards sculpture. The adopted graphic solutions seek to reconcile text and sculpture and harmonize semantics with the words' physicality. A História do Homem seems to migrate from the book to the city streets. On the walls, reading is no longer an individual act; people are attracted to each other's presence. It becomes a collective act that stimulates debate and the exchange of impressions. In this situation, the written word returns to the oral medium. With its integration into urban space, the text becomes intertwined with the informality of everyday conversations and chance encounters. The reader becomes part of the work.