Refloresta! Maria Nepomuceno
The centuries-old books that populate the Portico Library’s Regency-period bookshelves are alive. Some of them have been sleeping for a long time, but they are alive. And now they have company.
World-renowned Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno’s expansive sculptures sprawl and stretch around the Library like giant living organisms in search of something. A new source of power? They grow through osmosis, drawing strength from the ultimate force—knowledge—and through exchange of energy and affection with the people that come to see them. There’s nourishment in the 25,000 Georgian and Victorian books encircling us in this spectacular room: visionary breakthroughs in maths, medicine, and human rights; founding principles of modern science. There are toxins too: stories of colonial expansion written by the powerful, for the powerful, as if they were histories; descriptions of fruitful new species of plants and animals to be harvested and propagated from the rainforests to the plantations; and pseudo-scientific rationales for the extraction and exploitation of peoples and their lands, forests and oceans, in the name of progress and civilisation.
Here in Manchester today, in the room at the heart of the Industrial Revolution’s ‘first modern city’, a very different kind of colonisation is taking place. Technicolour creations in ropes and pearls, built with love to disrupt and delight, are invading and inhabiting the space. And an invitation has gone out to the city’s people to come and bring it all to life. The Library’s visitors during this exhibition are welcome to pose within the central artwork with friends, family and fellow visitors and capture their interactions in drawings that will in turn be added to the evolving display.
Maria’s pieces, combining fluid forms with traditional rope-weaving and straw-braiding techniques, are shown here alongside natural history books and archive materials from the Portico’s collection illustrating Manchester’s international connections during the city’s formative years. With spiral patterns evoking biological and spiritual themes, her vividly coloured artworks have brought the vibrancy of the natural world into the Library’s tranquil interior.
Refloresta!
As we emerge from a devastating pandemic, Maria Nepomuceno asks us to remember the emergency of our time. Her exhibition’s title, Refloresta!, means ‘reforest’ in Brazilian Portuguese. It evokes the environment in which the artworks were conceived—Maria’s studio among the towering fruit trees of Rio de Janeiro—and her wish for the world to come together to reverse the deforestation still ravaging the globe. In a room and a city that bear the scars of industry—books blackened with Victorian soot and civic spaces devoid of wildlife—Nepomuceno’s organically shaped sculptures and the Library’s natural history books that accompany them remind us of what we could create: green, biologically diverse cities, where multicolour life and multicolour ideas thrive.
The central artwork, The Force (2011), has previously been shown in exterior settings exposed to the elements, and here envelops the historic bookshelves and balustrades under the natural light of the Library’s great glass dome. Encroaching into the central public space, it interrupts the Library’s activities and demands our attention, calling us to slow down, look around, and re-engage with our world. The ceramic vessel-like elements of its companion piece, Untitled (2011), resemble laboratory equipment, overflowing with life. The complete form of the exhibition will depend on its visitors, their poses and interactions shaping its content and composition as it unfolds over the months.
The Library today
Alongside those who profited from colonialism and industrialisation, the Portico’s early membership included pioneering naturalists and scientists: founders of the now long-gone Manchester Botanic Garden; anti-slavery campaigning doctors and anthropologists; and leaders in atomic theory and medical ethics. Their legacy helps to shape the Library today—its focus on cooperation, curiosity and speculative research, and its aim to nurture a lifelong love of learning in all people. This exhibition coincides with the launch of an ambitious development process for the Library, revitalising its stunning building for the 21st century as an innovative heritage, arts and learning centre with and for all of Manchester’s communities in the heart of the city. Refloresta! reflects the Library’s long international history of global connections (today’s tourists follow in the footsteps of 19th-century guests from St Petersburg, Havana and Buenos Aires) and invites us into the worlds between the book covers, and the stories between the lines.
The books
Today, the Portico Library welcomes people from all walks of life to enjoy its historic spaces and collection for free. When it was established 215 years ago during the Regency period, it served only its 400 shareholding proprietors and their guests. These writers, politicians, mill owners, scientists, doctors and clergymen—the new middle class of the fast-expanding industrial city—collected books that suited their interests: texts on technological innovations, accounts of growing empires, political tracts, and volumes on ‘natural philosophy’ (biology and physics). Illustrations of flora and fauna adorn many of these books’ covers, indicating their readers’ fascination with the natural world and their curiosity about the newly encountered lands beyond their borders. The books themselves now form a unique resource for researchers, members, and readers who draw upon the insights and evidence they contain as to where so many of today’s debates and developments were born.