Dialogues with Memory and Time: A Contribution by the Marques da Silva Foundation for the Promotion of Fernando Távora’s Archive

Abstract

Travels were imperative for Fernando Távora. Drawing was the most esteemed tool for analysing and understanding what he had the opportunity to see whenever he “jumped borders”. During the month of September 2022, a substantial set of Távora’s journey drawings, archived today at the Marques da Silva Foundation, travelled from Porto to Italy. It was the subject and the objective of an exhibition, I viaggi di Fernando Távora (Cesena, from 23 September to 12 October), promoted by the Architecture Department of Bologna University in a cooperation with the Foundation. The opening event, as requested by the curators – Antonio Esposito, Francesco Saverio Fera, Giovanni Leoni and Giorgio Liverani – included a presentation speech dedicated to the Marques da Silva Foundation and its activities for the valorisation of Fernando Távora’s archive since 2011, when this Foundation took on the challenge of ensuring its conservation, study and diffusion. The speech pronounced on that occasion was an answer to both the request of the curators and the peculiarity of the circumstances: an exhibition focused on a very specific production by a single author and an event – the presentation and the exhibition opening – addressed to a heterogeneous public, composed of both architects and non-architects, having mostly a first contact with Fernando Távora’s work and with Marques da Silva Foundation itself. This contribution, although deprived of the voice and of the images it was originally complemented by, is the transcription of that communication. It also represents a state of an in-progress journey, to which new meanings and new comprehension of the relevance of this fundamental archive are continuously added in time.