Carla Cabanas

“We have compiled a manual of the strange beings that, throughout time and space, the fantasy of men has engendered.”

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero recreate hybrid monsters, fantastic creatures, fabulous animals and mythological beings through a compilation of figures drawn from literature, classical mythology, and Chinese and Islamic cultures. The work follows the model of medieval bestiaries, in which the descriptions of animals were based on abstract speculations — a reflection of medieval thought, which operated through symbolic correspondences between the real world and the transcendent.

In the bestiary created by Borges and Guerrero, creatures germinate, intertwine, and multiply: monsters composed of parts of different animals, legendary beings, mythological figures, and characters born both from ancient traditions and from the author’s own imagination. There are also references to animals from Chinese mythology and to beings with human characteristics. It is a non-linear, non-codified compendium of creatures that cross cultures, eras, and worlds — both real and invented — gathered within a single literary universe. The book constitutes a kind of fantastic bestiary of abstract ideas, symbols, and allegorical interpretations, resulting in a multiplicity of discontinuities, fabulations, fragments, and illogical, non-taxonomic associations.

This work challenged the cataloguing systems of the human sciences, leading Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, to show how knowledge organizes itself through ruptures and reorganizations. The result is an experience in which memory and temporality appear not as a straight line, but as an open field full of layers and possibilities of reading. Rather than following an objective and rational understanding of memory and time, the Book of Imaginary Beings operates within the sum of tangents between fiction and fabulation, showing that we are the result of our memories — memories that shape our identity — and that, therefore, we are narratives of ourselves.¹

In this first solo exhibition by Carla Cabanas at the Casa-Museu Bissaya Barreto, the artist presents works from the series Seres Imaginários (Imaginary Beings) through four distinct nuclei: Ouro (Gold), Tenda (Tent), Grade (Grid), and O Bestiário (The Bestiary), directly inspired by the work of Borges and Guerrero. These works hybridize fiction and imagination with reality, using photographs from the artist’s family album.

In the Gold series, the use of gold leaf applied over photographs — drawing directly onto the images — marks boundaries between the real and the imagined, between what we remember and what we forget. The visual intervention is inspired by the Japanese technique of kintsugi, an ancestral method of repairing broken ceramics in which the fragments are glued with a natural lacquer called urushi and then covered with gold powder. In this process, the cracks are not hidden but highlighted, becoming a structural part of the piece — emphasizing how imperfection and the passage of time gain material and symbolic value.

In the Tent series, photographs are transformed into bodies and creatures that inhabit three-dimensional space. The use of a material charged with symbolism and personal memory — the poles of an old camping tent — serves as a structure to support the photographic paper. These photographic sculptures were conceived to introduce restrictions in the act of seeing, referring to the way our memories also present themselves: incomplete, manipulated, fragmented by time. They are images that fold, crumple, and become difficult to see clearly.

The Grid series consists of rusted metal grilles covering large photographic prints, suggesting a space in ruins, like an abandoned house. The presence of the grids creates an effect of imprisonment and containment, functioning as a visual metaphor for the processes of memory, alternating between selective remembering and forgetting.

Goofus Bird is a sculpture directly inspired by the bird described by Borges and Guerrero, which metamorphoses with the artist’s own image to create an allegory of how the past shapes who we are in the present. The phrase used in the book to characterize this creature — *“And let us not forget the Goofus Bird, a bird that builds its nest upside down and flies backwards, because it does not care where it is going, only where it has been”*² — invites the viewer to reflect on the nature of time and memory, challenging the idea that life unfolds in a linear fashion. Like the Goofus Bird, we are often guided more by what has been than by what is yet to come.

In the final part of the series, The Bestiary, Cabanas continues to use family photographs, gold leaf, and symbolic elements from the previous series. Here, however, each piece is directly inspired by creatures from The Book of Imaginary Beings. Each sculpture arises from the intersection between the creature’s story and the artist’s personal history, resulting in unique, hybrid forms where memory, fantasy, and autobiography merge.

The proposal of the exhibition Seres Imaginários by Carla Cabanas is to understand the mental images of memory not as a static archive but as a process in constant transformation. What we remember is no longer identical to the past we lived — it is always transformed and reconfigured in the present, contaminated by perception and imagination, often overlapping the so-called objective reality.

¹ Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. Martins Fontes: São Paulo, 1999.
² Jorge Luis Borges, Margarita Guerrero, The Book of Imaginary Beings. Quetzal Editores, Lisbon, 2021, p. 102.