Portuguese Literature, praised and made simple

Visual identity, exhibition and collateral design.

In October 2020, Cupertino de Miranda Foundation opened a new permanent exhibition, in Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal. This exhibition tries to bring visitors-readers closer to the most canonical Portuguese writers. Curated by António M. Feijó, João R. Figueiredo and Miguel Tamen, professors at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, the exhibition “Portuguese Literature, praised and made simple” occupies the Literary Tower, an interior space redesigned by João Mendes Ribeiro and his team.

The exhibition path begins in a wide atrium, where a spiral of names indicates the authors presented throughout the exhibition.
The exhibition begins and unfolds along a slightly sloped circular ramp that runs through the entire exhibition space over several floors. The literary journey gradually transports the visitor towards the past, starting in 1970 and travelling to 1443. The pace of the exhibition is set by time frames. Each new date marks a new section in the exhibition and is determined by the publishing date of the anchor text which opens each new section.

The exhibition also includes an interactive artefact “Photomaton” - an innovative installation combining artificial intelligence and computational creativity to automatically generate typographic portraits of the visitors in real time. This installation is the result of the partnership between CDV -Computational Design and Visualization of the Lab Center for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), the Pedro Nunes Institute (IPN) and FBA.

The Cupertino de Miranda Foundation, headquartered in Vila Nova de Famalicão, was founded in 1963 and pursues cultural and social objectives and hosts, among other services, the Portuguese Center of Surrealism and the Torre Literária.