Alma-Bluco: Musa paradisiaca

First exhibition in France by Musa paradisiaca, duo of Portuguese artists composed by Eduardo Guerra & Miguel Ferrão.

Musa paradisiaca is a project by Eduardo Guerra and Miguel Ferrão which tends towards the construction of a multivoiced family of thought.

The Alma-Bluco exhibition is a family reunion: a coming-together of entities and tutelary figures which Musa paradisiaca has encountered and incorporated into its practice, into the shaping of a magical mode of thinking made of myths, stories and acts born of vernacular belief systems.

One day Musa paradisiaca made the acquaintance of Francisco, custodian of a steam-driven machine he has to fire up regularly to keep it in working state.

Last year at CRAC Alsace Musa paradisiaca presented Ecstasy & Eden, a 16 mm film that observes and ventriloquises the awakening and the vital energy of this machine, accompanying it with a group of pitch sculptures. In this work Eduardo and Miguel pin down the intense connection between the man and the machine – a kind of giant, slumbering beast that dreams together with Francisco as he rests beside it and keeps it warm.

The exhibition Alma-Bluco – “Raw Soul” – takes place at the junction of these observations and experiences, on the cusp between night and day. And CRAC Alsace, which has taken it under its roof, becomes the locus of apparition and transformation of the hybrid bodies of the Singer, Colina, Francisco, Nuna and Poppe, all of them – “Freebooter foreigner underdog bungler thief”** – sphinxes trapped between two worlds.