Ana Aragão in the Museum of Presidency
The work Via Utopia had the honor to enter the Museum of the Portuguese Republic Presidency (at Palácio de Belém), on march 2026.
Via Utopia was designed 10 years ago. Based on Piranesi's Via Appia, this original version consisted of 6 layers of enormous printed glass planes. Although the artwork was now smaller in size, its nature did not change. For Ana, the interest was in considering whether it was possible to enter inside a drawing. Instead of looking at the past, she proposed looking at a frozen present, a graphic list enumerating objects, symbols, figures, ironies: Trump next to a brain, Damien Hirst's cow sectioned with a world map in the form of a stain, brand-name cars and shoes, shopping malls with suitcases, large fish, a Chinese cat, Starck's juicer, A Clockwork Orange, Homer Simpson, a pyramid with self-help books, a painter under the sink, mausoleums transformed into ATM machines, tombs that are solariums…
While the old, original image by Piranesi looks at the past symbolically and nostalgically — with classical architecture and art as the object of gaze and representation — in Ana Aragão´s Via Utopia the focus is the present, with its bizarre hypertextuality and excess of information. It reflects on the uncritical relationship of contemporary beings with their environment and their capacity to think and filter information. In this case, the portuguese artist places herself in a displaced future, without place or time, and looks at the present while recognizing the absurdity of relationships between so many references.
A very special thanks to the portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, as well as Carla Cardoso and the Museum of the Presidency.
