From the drawing of the map emerge the same lines that draw the city, the house, and ultimately the body.

The line that writes is also the same.

Everything that is abstract can reach—through drawing, painting, and language—into the realm of the concrete. This is the pathway, this is the journey of the line proposed by two creators, Ana Aragão in drawing and painting, and Gonçalo M. Tavares in writing.

From the texts of Gonçalo M. Tavares, mental ideas will spring forth, swiftly becoming concrete and visible manifestations through the art of Ana Aragão. Text within the drawing, drawing within the text. This investigation will proceed in two directions—from writing to art and from art to writing—, culminating in an exhibition entitled City, House, Body: Maps and Language. Everything will start from a research and an initial study that aim to gather some of the numerous ways of making maps and their applications. Maps are ideas, words, drawings, lines placed in space. But everything can be mapped: from a citizen’s 24-hour existence to the world history, or even the simple narrative of a small human pain.

The map is not just the cartography of the square metre and the vast world, but also the cartography of pains and pleasures, of setbacks and almost sublime moments. Tragedies are mappable, but so are joys.

Everything can end up on a map, and the map can initiate everything it announces. The map and the territory; the city, the house, and the body. Humanity oscillates between the small nourishment that keeps the body alive and the enormous city that carries, shelters, and seduces.

The maps of cities, the maps of ideas and the body—the anatomy that becomes city through the old zoom of attention—anyway, everything—from the smallest to the most gigantic dimension—can gain visual and literary space through the collaborative work of Ana Aragão and Gonçalo M. Tavares.

To establish the connection between the drawing of the map and the arts, poetry, and literature. Creative maps and thinking maps; maps that enable human imagination to locate itself—amidst the world’s violent news from North, South, East, and West—and ascend, soar, accelerate, be expectant, and marvel.

Given the intimate relationship of the exposed universe with the themes of architecture and territor understanding, Casa da Arquitectura is proposed as the ideal stage to host this exhibition. Its content will be embodied in a set of map-drawings that will result from the intersection of word and drawing, publicly showcased in the quintessential place of Architecture.

The proposed format entails a co-organisation between Casa da Arquitectura and Atelier Ana Aragão, which will also act on behalf of Gonçalo M. Tavares.