Sílvia Real

What connects us in the dark *

 

For those who have just arrived, shall we trace back the present moment: Perdidos e Achados (Lost and Found) was born as the celebration of an encounter, and the complicity henceforth built, between Real Pelágio Productions and the artist Laura dos Campos/ Oro Íris. That said, it was no coincidence that, in 2018, this partnership’s inaugural output emerged as a collaborative proposal, where art and life coexist and infuse one another.

 

To the invitation of giving a “minimal lesson” to Group 23: Silêncio! – a research, experimentation and co-creation project formed by children, young people, and arts professionals, which developed between 2014 and 2020 with artistic direction by Sílvia Real – Laura responded as follows: “I invite each of you to bring a fruit so we can make a nice salad! Eyes speak no words and hands count breezes. Voice recordings, recordings of ourselves. The traces of language in the turns of time. Improvising during an encounter. Come, bring, and make a salad of diverse fruits!”

 

This was the trigger for a prolific artistic and pedagogical dialogue, something we have updated on different occasions, and in articulation with various projects, especially with the Letra à Voz Reading Club, a former carpentry workshop inside the Teatro da Voz building, open to the educational community of A Voz do Operário and other neighbouring schools as a truly special place to discover some of the best books for children.

 

In June 2021, we challenged Laura to create, within the brand-new reading club, a mural that would coexist well with the books as well as the children who were to come to inhabit the space. Her first intervention with paints for Real Pelágio was thus born, under the watchful eyes of the children of the Clube de Leitura Livre (Free Reading Group) who, captivated by the artist's gestures, ended up participating in the mural’s creation, adding to it a new painting, A maior flor do mundo (The biggest flower in the world), in homage to one of the club's most beloved books and to his author, José Saramago, on the centenary of his birth.

 

Thus, in this organic and vibrant way, the adventure of creating collaborative mural paintings in schools started out, having henceforth been updated to this day.

 

Back in October 2021, Laura got her hands dirty to create a new mural with a 4th-grade class for the Castelo Elementary School’s patio. As a starting point, we prepared a classroom discussion about the creation process of a self-published book by the artist, Era uma vez mais animais (Once upon a time there were more animals), a small white notebook with the spine sewn with thin red cotton thread, bringing together drawings in thick black lines where, page by page, we discovered admirable invented creatures and brief curiosities about each one. This was followed by a round of readings and conversations around fables and narratives from different cultural roots, as well as a writing and artistic expression workshop involving other animals, like us.

 

Using the materials produced thence, the artist and the children moved to the patio wall, where they cocreated a magical universe populated by imaginary beings. A mural-gift full of light, colour and varied textures that symbolises the celebration of diversity and the joy of living and growing in harmony, entitled Quase fiquei sem imaginação! (I almost ran out of imagination!).

 

The opening day was celebrated with great enthusiasm by the entire school. Under the warm early Autumn sun, a red ribbon was cut, and we toasted to life and to imagination with small glasses of plum juice. Since then, the mural has inhabited the schoolyard, alongside play activities and a small garden populated by sunflowers. The materials produced in this cocreation process gave rise to a new self-published book by Laura dos Campos, Era uma vez (ainda) mais animais (Once upon a time there were (still) more animals), which features in the Letra à Voz Reading Club’s catalogue.

 

This experience incited us to return to the school environment with a new activity combining words with artistic expression. The opportunity rose in 2024, this time at the school Escola da Graça - A Voz do Operário, in the context of the IEFP/ATIVAR Program’s professional internship, which Laura carried out at Real Pelágio Productions and the association’s Art Training Centre (alias Centro de Formação Artística) from June 2024 to March 2025.

 

In imagining a future garden for the daycare/preschool courtyard’s upper level at A Voz do Operário, and having decided that the new mural would occupy the lower wall of that space, the unifying theme that emerged was "the underground," not only as that which inhabits the subsoil, but also considering everything we don’t see that allows us to nourish the life of other visible existences. "The earth, the roots, memory, and the ancestors. What connects us in the dark and transforms with light. The water, the animals, and what remains of them when they leave. The courtyard, this place for playing and growing together, like a space for seeds to germinate in a network of connections and affections," it read on a poster affixed to the entrance of the hallway leading to the preschool classrooms, where we used the available noticeboards for an exhibition aimed at families. There, one could find ideas, words, materials, drawings, and photographs of the research and experimentation process carried out in classrooms with about 100 children aged between 3 and 7, using a set of plant elements as well as books with various approaches to the topic.

 

“The paintings began during nap time. First came the roots, responsible for nourishing the sprouts and anchoring them inside the earth. Then came the lines and puddles of water, a source of primordial life, and finally we added the stones, which aid the flow of water, air, and underground temperatures. And then life began to form: shapes, movements, plants, animals, and treasures. Different types of soil, water lines, rivers of sunlight, and tunnels of air. From this gathering, many things can emerge,” Laura wrote about this project.

 

The preparatory gathering for that collective fruit salad, it shall be said, was just the very first of a series of caring gestures that Laura directed towards us and that would become part of our shared history: delicious meals prepared with love on multiple festive occasions, irresistible cakes and fillings to celebrate team birthdays and book launches, healthy and creative snacks for the children enrolled in the Art Training Centre (ATC, alias CFA) extracurricular classes, and various painting, restoration, and signage projects conducted at Teatro da Voz – an old building turned into Real Pelágio´s headquarters, highly sought-after by the artistic community – where, in 2024, Laura also worked as Carlos Bártolo’s assistant set designer for the reprise of Casio Tone, the emblematic show by Sílvia Real and Sérgio Pelágio.

 

This collaborative journey, so briefly summarised here, is now to include the artist's Lost and Found, a book envisioned during her internship at Teatro da Voz, in which Laura dos Campos proposes a particular reading of her body of work.

 

The book is composed of a selection of drawings and textual excerpts that the artist selected from her many notebooks, dated from 2018 to 2025, articulating a narrative thread throughout which the images converse with the words. This edition is comprised of 100 copies signed by the artist, and the format chosen for the publication was meant to be in keeping with the scale of the original drawings, created in A5 and A6 notebooks, thereby calling for a particular focus in our engaging with this set of intimate records, a blend of various experiences now grouped in the same "notebook." 

 

Laura explains how she got to the book’s title: "The title came up as such before the entire book, from a sign I made for the lost-and-found box at Teatro da Voz, in which we keep what's left behind after the classes are finished. Things that are forgotten and then found."

​

Susana Ribeiro Martins

 

*Taken from a text by Laura dos Campos

 

“Laura dos Campos, a variety-show artist, grew up in Lisbon, amid family gatherings and wanderings through the city. In 2017, she graduated in sculpture from the Lisbon Faculty of Fine Arts. Since then, she has been dedicated to feet movement and has worked in various places and trades, including restaurants, fruit harvesting, schools and educational projects, and as a cook. She participates in collective artistic projects such as performances and cultural gatherings. She learns and practices the self-publishing of objects for page-turning. Nowadays she lives in Barreiro and keeps recording all these and other events on large reams of wallpaper. Oro Íris exists within Laura but comes from elsewhere; it is a state that emerges from the colours”.
Laura dos Campos