The words found here, in this library, once had a keeper. Someone who looked after these books, who organised them and lived amongst them. Someone who,
as a writer, also rearranged words and used them to record the passage of time. A keeper who was a poet; an explorer of all words, both his own and those preserved in the books.

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Now is the time to unearth, from those dense pages, the words and the beauty of the poetry of the custodian, Alexandre Herculano. Taking Herculano’s seminal work, ‘Harpa do Crente’, as our starting point, it is now up to us to undertake this poetic archaeology and rediscover, within his poetry, a surprising radiance and modernity.

We took the words from the book and scattered this new poetry across the library’s walls and shelves – a blend
of the classical and the modern, the abstract and the historical, and the human and the digital.

Based on the full text of ‘Harpa do Crente’, and following a curatorial exploration of this work, we present these reinvented verses in digital format – in dialogue with the architecture of the Palace Library – as they take flight from the books, both conceptually and literally, revealing to the viewer this new poetry that is kindled by the old.

This is an exercise that Collective of Two have been exploring. The mystery at the intersection of the human and the digital, and this attempt to surprise the viewer with poetry, to remove it from its traditional setting and, from these new perspectives, to rediscover it as a polymorphic form of artistic expression capable of constant reinvention.