Uma escultura deixada ao esquecimento * 2020
Colégio dos Jesuítas (Madeira, Portugal)

A Sculpture Left to Oblivion is a performative installation by António Baía Reis, part ritual, part aesthetic intervention, part civic provocation. It emerges from a specific wound in Madeiran social memory: in the 1980s–1990s, children from Câmara de Lobos, known locally as the “kids of the cardboard boxes”, were forced to beg in Funchal, collecting daily “quotas” in shoeboxes, amid a climate of coercion and vulnerability where abuse and exploitation were reported.

 

In the late 1990s, Madeiran sculptor António Rodrigues created the public artwork Rendimento Diário [Daily Income] as an homage and an “altar of consciences,” condensing that history into symbolic elements, most notably the shoebox, as a demand that the community face what it had lived through. Yet the sculpture was only briefly visible before being removed, dismantled, and stored in municipal spaces, effectively stripped of its public function and silenced through neglect.

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Baía Reis’s installation responds to that erasure. Using a “creative matrix” of musical, theatrical, and pictorial performance, he manipulates sound, voice, color, and movement to animate what has been made inanimate, transforming the absent sculpture into a presence, and the act of forgetting into a scene the audience must inhabit. The work insists on a simple question: what is public art, if it cannot be public?

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Supported by the Council of Culture (Universidade da Madeira) and the Digital Media Doctoral Program (Universidade do Porto).

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MEDIA:

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https://www.uma.pt/noticias/uma-escultura-deixada-ao-esquecimento/850/