Exhibition "Micélio, between the end and the beginning of everything", by Kyria Oliveira

O Imperial Palace presents the exhibition “Mycelium, between the end and the beginning of everything."by the artist" Kyria Oliveira. Curated by Clara PignatonThe exhibition brings together sculptures produced using the felting technique and developed from his poetic research on mycelium — an underground network of fungi capable of establishing invisible connections, exchanges, and forms of communication between organisms in the forest.

Possessing a refined and profoundly sensitive technique, the artist sculpts as if sewing a garment, establishing an intimate relationship between matter and body. The wool, superimposed in delicate layers, is felted by the friction between water, soap, and gesture, in a repetitive and meditative process in which the manual act becomes a kind of ritual. The soft and delicate sculptures evoke nests, viscera, fungi, unknown organisms, or fragments of living landscapes. In their softness, they awaken a desire for closeness, acceptance, and affection.

The exhibition occupies the Armazém D'El Rei gallery in the Paço Imperial, bringing together works from the Mycelium series, which invite the public to imagine new worlds based on hybrid structures that inhabit the artist's imagination, creating a symbiosis between fungi and nests, between protection and decomposition, between end and beginning. The mycelium, as it expands underground, creates networks of exchange and survival that allow the forest to respond collectively to environmental threats. More than a scientific reference, this image becomes, in the exhibition, a poetic and political metaphor: the possibility of imagining forms of coexistence based on interdependence, care, and the regenerative capacity of life.

“Just as our existence lies on the threshold between life and death, I seek that moment of ‘in-between’: between worlds, between home, between the body, and between time. Between now and eternity, we are the instant. It is believed that the mycelium, as it branches out through the forest, creates a channel of communication within the forest; regardless of any scientific proof, it is inspiring to imagine that the forest protects itself where humanity has failed,” declares the artist.

“In the Mycelium series, the artist is interested in thinking about sculptures beyond their condition as objects, proposing reflections on a political ecology of things and on materialities that resist. Nests and mushrooms appear as guiding threads of possible lives amidst the clearings and arid soils produced by human transformations on the landscape. They are forms that suggest shelter, regeneration, and continuity, even in the face of scenarios of exhaustion and ruin,” says curator Clara Pignaton.

Service
Exhibition | Mycelium, between the end and the beginning of everything.
From July 4th to September 6th
Tuesday to Sunday, from 12pm to 18pm