With the exhibition Lugares de Apaziguamento (Places of Appeasement), Marionetas do Porto officially opens the museum Museu das Marionetas do Porto.
In this special year, in which the company celebrates its 25th anniversary, the opening of the museum creates a new dimension: the share of poetics and inhabited places or those yet to be inhabited, where dreams take shape and allow us to appease.
Museu das Marionetas do Porto will have the shape of a poem of the present, meeting-place between the past and the future.
“We are always searching for that sensible language that allows us to fly to beautiful places where we may find a certain appeasement. The happy ending. Through a way of making theater which is not easily labeled. A journalist once called it theater “with” puppets, a slight acuteness, meaning to manifest his oddity before a theatre that places actors and puppets on stage in tender or violent struggles for scenic supremacy. Confronting the man with his double, with his phantoms, with his condition, after all. Here is our contribution of what we could call a conscience regarding art’s role, vital in a brutalized world in which we go on, naturally and unconsciously, gaining series of repellent layers to affection and beauty. “To exist is to affront the strength of the world” (José Gil) and making theatre is our way of placing ourselves in that existential combat.”
João Paulo Seara Cardoso (1956-2010)