Ana Aragão in JN

A special thanks to the journalist José Miguel Gaspar, from the portuguese newspaper Jornal de Notícias, whose words did nothing but add wonderful layers to “The Act of the Epheremal Ship”.

If we watch Ana Aragão drawing, the artist´s body immeasurably set above the white ocean of her canvas, giant as a benign Bulltop Stormalong or as Glumdalclitch,  it is possible to see the radiation of her superpower- the   drawing extends through her fingers like autonomous paint, sovereign and ruling, and prospers on the paper sheet, branching out, always ascending until it stops beyhond some innominable galaxy. 

Titanic in delicately dominating the world she just created, the architect from Porto that generates cities that are organic ink worlds made of smoke and paper, is exhibiting, until Fall, in Soares dos Reis National Museum in Porto her last fantastical creature: “The Act of the Ephemeral Ship”, a singular exoplanet with six faces that unfolds and opens like a Biombo [portuguese for folding screen] — but an utopian one that is simultaneously futuristic and ancestral. 

Aragão, graduated from Porto´s school of architecture which she never practiced, at least in a conventional way, lets herself be contaminated either by the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki or the megastructures of Kiyonori Kikutake, the star of Metabolism, post-war Japanese movement that overvalues and honors the large scale, the flexible and over-extensible structures, and the artistic bodies capable of acquiring growth similar as those of organic bodies. 

With the purpose of lengthening a megascopic line with the Expo Osaka 2025, “The Act of the Ephemeral Ship” produces a kinship with Japan and the historical Namban Folding Screens that portray the arrival of Portuguese ships to the Nagasaki Port, back in 1543.

Is “The Act of the Ephemeral Ship” architecture, drawing, art or a castle flatly built to walk inside and outside the heart? “

text by José Miguel Gaspar

in p.32, JN issue from the 11th of august, 2025

[Translated by Ana Aragão Atelier]

p. 32, JN issue from the 11th of august, 2025