EXHIBITION // TALKS
Guillaume Vieira
Guillaume Vieira holds a degree with distinction in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, completed in 2008, and earned a Master’s degree in Aesthetics from the Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2016. His artistic journey has been shaped by prestigious residencies, including stints at the Centquatre in Paris in 2010, the Lamparina project in Alandroal in 2014, and the Estufa Fria in Lisbon in 2025. Early recognition of his work came with an award at the Anteciparte’09 exhibition, presented at the Museu da Fundação Oriente in Lisbon.
His most recent endeavor, Bubuia, is a large-scale project developed in collaboration with João Mouro and curated by Liliana Coutinho. This major installation, which spans the entire infrastructure of the garden and Interpretation Center, was realized in partnership with the Lisbon City Council and received funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation.
Among his previous notable projects, key exhibitions include Da Natureza dos Afetos at the Casa da Avenida in Setúbal in 2025, and Álbum de Família within the Carmona e Costa Collection in 2024, curated by Manuel Castro Caldas and João Pinharanda. In 2023, he held a solo exhibition titled Photosynthesis at the Mu.Sa - Museu das Artes de Sintra. Prior to this, in 2022, he presented the photo-film L’Emmurée de Paris, a collaborative project with Laurent Roth funded by the Centre National de la Cinématographie, the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia, and the Paris City Council, which premiered to the public at the Cité de l'architecture in Paris.
TALK//
LIVING IS A TOUR
A long journey to return to ourselves. Tourism. [τόρνος] The idea was born in France with the Della Tour family, who coddled King Louis XV across Europe, securing exclusive trade routes for themselves. [Did you think the aristocracy bribing power was a modern concept? How cute.]
France perfected the Grand Tour throughout the 18th century as a privilege reserved for the wealthiest. Today, we celebrate its democratic descendant: the Bateaux Parisiens cruises, where every 15 minutes a ride along the Seine is sold—a round trip from the Eiffel Tower to the Place de la Bastille. To me, to you, and to five hundred more of our most intimate strangers.
Humans take photographs because memory is subjective, and subjectivity demands an apparatus to resurrect immaterial sensations. There are too many journeys now—too superficial, too overlapping, too saturated—for us to truly memorize any physical distance between them. One day, while wandering down the Champs-Élysées, I witnessed one of these supreme disciple beings utter to his peers what I can only describe as the wisest of observations: “This looks like Venice.” — Touché, I thought to myself.
Tourism has become so vast, so relentlessly grand, so contagious across all layers of CMYK, that it has evolved into an entity in its own right: the myth of satisfying desire before achieving knowledge has assumed the physical form we contemplate today.
Today, in Lisbon, it expands in so many ways that only a neoliberal can truly appreciate them. Here, it has stretched far beyond its original purpose. Finding oneself has become a pretext for imposing oneself—crossing the world without thought, without curiosity, without shame, stripped of the friction that would allow us to navigate toward wisdom. We no longer wish to feel our own pulse. We manifest ourselves through external impulses to maintain a state of perpetual estrangement from ourselves.
“Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking,” as António Machado once said.
Look around you. Where are you now? Can you find yourself? I am certain you are here, somewhere. And that is precisely why we gather: to celebrate the Art of Looking. [Procur.arte]
Yet, this is not a solitary path. We long for resonance—a comfort derived from the outside world. We trust the light of others more than the light we carry within ourselves. A mysterious force perpetually compels us to place our faith in the exterior—as if light needed to arrive diagonally in order to be seen.
But do not worry. There is no reason for FOMO (fear of missing out), as they say out there.
I will guide you the best way I can. Together, we will find ourselves.