Literary Paths in the MATLIT LAB: A Humanities Laboratory

The Exhibition, doubly framed by the overwhelming presence of the book in the CLP room and by the synoptic representation of the PhD in Materialities of Literature, presents a laboratory in which, through successive iterations, a single reagent is poured over the literary object. Can we say that this reagent consists of the ultimate and very first question what is literature? But more than just appeasing answers, what results, we hope, is a reenactment of that very question as it echoes in several others by the variety of the exhibited contributions, materials, and authorships. Ultimately, we present an exhibition (and a catalyst) of the multiplicity and materiality of literature: a dimension that is immediately evident in the media diversity of this catalog of printed, digital, video, radio, performative, and visual works.

We can read, throughout these various works, the absence of words, notes on language and reading, re-readings and dialogues with previous texts, processes of writing and rewriting, hypotexts and hypertexts, as well as relations with and reactions to social events. Available works include book-poems, combinatorial poems, video poems, video performances, book-objects, online stories, radio experiments, combinatorial anthologies, literary-gaming applications, verbal and intermedia performances, literature that goes off the page, hybrid objects, works that are difficult to fit in any typology, and even anti-works.

Basically, the multiplicity of possibilities that we see here reflects both the collaborative nature of the exhibition, and the unlikelihood of providing a single and definitive answer to the above-mentioned question-reagent. Everything as if, however, a complex reading of the multimedia world in which we live would find its equivalent in the plural forms in which we understand and read literature.

Curatorial team
Francisco Silveira, Nuno Meireles, Patrícia Reina, Pedro Sá Valentim and Thales Estefani.