In 1952, Amália Rodrigues, the timeless icon of fado and Portuguese culture, sang Lisboa Não Sejas Francesa (Lisbon don’t be French). Though the song warns against foreign influence, particularly from French culture, it is ultimately a call to preserve Portuguese identity and roots. This reference serves as a metaphor for a city that, despite its openness to the world, strives to maintain its essence and uniqueness amid modernity and globalization.

Bringing together the works of 13 Portuguese and international artists, Lisboa Não Sejas Francesa (part I) presents a multifaceted portrait of Lisbon through the eyes of those who live and create there. Through various media—sculpture, painting, photography, and video installation—the exhibition explores the tension between tradition and transformation, heritage and reinvention. Each work acts as a fragment of Lisbon, capturing its layered histories, evolving landscapes, and the contemporary forces reshaping its identity.
We are invited to a poetic exploration and an immersion in a world where memory, time, and matter all blend together with grace.

The exhibition indeed leads us through a nuanced contemplation of the relationship between the intimate and the cosmic, the human and the universe. Every piece invites us to immerse ourselves in suspended realms where past echoes and future whispers collide, the intangible becomes real, and every creative movement creates a piece of history in motion. The exhibition explores the vast forces that shape the Earth and the human soul through installations that blend astronomy, geology, and nature. Matter, whether stone, bronze, or light, becomes a bearer of memory, reminding us of the deep connections between geological time and individual memory. Like imprints left by unseen forces that reverberate throughout space, the works appear to be embedded in a world that is constantly changing. At its core, this quest blurs the lines between everyday life, architecture, and the natural world, with each organic form serving as a mirror of a larger reality that hovers between the realistic and the fantastical. Texture, color, and light blend together to create lyrical ambiances where the infinity of the stars and the frailty of human life coexist. It is through their gestures that the artists guide us through this movement of space, where emotion and thought clash, where matter becomes the vessel of a poetic and philosophical thought.

The exhibition, too, plays out as a conversation between the past and the future, the lived and the unseen, featuring works that interrogate the nature of collective memory and the encroachment of modern technologies. Digital echoes, remnants of the current world, become colors and shapes, making an attempt to establish the gap between personal narration and collective memory. In this dynamic, the world we live in is a reflection of our conscience, of our emotions and thoughts.

Lisboa Não Sejas Francesa (part I) encourages to look at Lisbon differently, as a living being that is transformed by time and the energies passing through it. Each work of art, in its own way, speaks to us of the city as something more complex than just a geographical space; it is an organism, constantly evolving, where the past and the future coexist. This exhibition becomes a journey where we explore the invisible, where we resonate with the rhythms of the city, nature, and the cosmos. An open invitation to dream, to feel, and to live Lisbon in its entirety, in its complex and changing beauty.

–

This exhibition marks the first phase of an artistic exchange between Lisbon and Paris, fostering a cross- cultural dialogue between the two capitals. While Lisboa Não Sejas Francesa (part I) takes place at L’Atlas in Paris, a parallel exhibition (part II) will be presented at Foco in Lisbon, highlighting the work of French artists. This dual exhibition presents the cities not as rivals, but as reflections of each other, exploring how art bridges past and future, tradition and reinvention.