Isabelle Ferreira’s exhibition Notre Feu, at MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology), works from a gesture of rupture. Before crossing into France, Portuguese migrants fleeing the Salazar dictatorship would hand the smuggler a photograph of themselves that he would tear in two. The torn photograph, and the salto itself – the clandestine mountain crossings Portuguese migrants made into France in the early 1960s – is the exhibition’s point of departure. The catalogue follows a similar logic of separation and reunion: led by the works themselves, interrupted at the center by the texts.

Notre Feu

Isabelle Ferreira’s exhibition Notre Feu, at MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology), works from a gesture of rupture. Before crossing into France, Portuguese migrants fleeing the Salazar dictatorship would hand the smuggler a photograph of themselves, that he would tear in two. The torn photograph, and the salto itself (the clandestine mountain crossings Portuguese migrants made into France in the early 1960s) is the exhibition’s point of departure.

Ferreira (France, 1972) is the daughter of Portuguese migrants, and her process carries the same tensions as her family’s story of migration and labour: research against instinctive repetition, control against release. Staples recur across her surfaces, piercing and joining in the same gesture; the hammer often subtracts from the whole. Rupture and continuity, working both as personal memory and a wider testimony to displacement.

The catalogue follows a similar logic of separation and reunion. Led by the works and the installation views, the centre gives way to the curatorial texts before returning to the works, following the exhibition’s sequential journey. Two different papers evoke that division: a coated stock for the image sections, and an uncoated recycled stock flecked with small black dots for the text. The subtle split is activated through texture and touch more than colour.

The typeface, a serif with sharp contrasts and geometric detail, echoes the piercing, stapling, and tearing at the centre of Ferreira’s process, grounding the catalogue in the present without erasing the past invoked by the source material the artist draws on.

The cover is the single loud gesture in the catalogue: neon pink spreads from the inner cover to the blind-embossed text on the outer cover. The otabind binding lets the colour peek through when the book lies open. The catalogue reaches for a confident gesture, whilst never competing with the work inside.

Client: MAAT Museum
Category: Editorial Design
Year: 2025
Format: 195×255 mm

Editorial coordination: Nuno Carvalho
Photography: Guillaume Vieira
Texts: João Pinharanda, Joana P.R. Neves, Isabelle Ferreira, Victor Pereira