It starts from the principle that art emerges from the separation between the individual and nature, which arises from the territory beyond the border of instinct, and from this remoteness sprouts a need to rediscover the natural world, the land, the need to participate in the organic whole that it encompasses. It is assumed that the sensitivity towards the experience of nature increases as soon as it is recognized a threatened value.

     Re tornar terra (Back to ground) ponders on the theme of nature, understood both as the material world, the physical universe and all of its laws, but also the collection of the organic whole. It covers the original reality that, by definition, is opposed to man's industry, and, what is given by nature, what’s natural, is often placed opposite the production of culture. This exhibition invites the interpellation of the relationships developed with the idea of ​​the natural world, these being real, which may be understood as established with the surroundings, and fictitious which may be understood as based on the imaginary address from which our images of nature come from.

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     In Henrique Vieira Ribeiro’s Sal da Terra (Salt of the Earth) it is highlighted the fascination of the landscape, the classic understanding of the images of the natural world, where captive, the gaze of the artist takes on the transformation, the ripple and the correlation of the elements in a limited percentage of territory. The enunciation of natural phenomena such as the chemical reactions of salt against the different types of soil appears to rule in a first instance, a documentary facet that quickly dissipates in the loss of reading as the scale of sense of reality photographed. In front of the exposed work of Henrique Vieira Ribeiro, two distinct moments of artificiality of nature stand out - the first feeds off a world that derives from a technic and a culture - the salt production - for then, to set a new artificialization of salt as a being of land, the exploitation of chemical reactions that natural element subject to the processes and techniques of analogue photography, resulting in Provas de Contacto (Contact Mark) - precious and exiguous landscapes bearing a clear determinant aesthetics.

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   Nature, within this exhibition, still regards the human nature, the nature of the human being that simultaneously corresponds to what is its own instinct and its cultural formation. The idea of ​​primitivism and a possible return to an originating stadium can, in this sense, be understood as a mistake. Paraphrasing Jean-Jacques Rousseau: it is not easy to discern what is original and artificial in the present nature of man, such as discovering a state that no longer exists that probably never will exist, and which is necessary to have accurate notions in order judge our present state. Nevertheless, the unquestionable human nature will hold the organic body, of its flesh, that tells us Anabela Mota in Verticalmente Frágil (Vertically Fragile). Through a direct statement, the artist revives the fragility of the human condition: both from the anatomical point of view, of a being whose erect physical construction culminates in a rational, wise and self-conscious mind that commands and submits the nature of the body; as it exercises the questioning about a verticality based on complex social structure resulting from the expansion as a species that dominates and acts on this planet to which it belongs and which shares with a no number of other species. Secondly, when faced with the swinging discontinuation of that verticality on a regular piece axis, it is possible to recognize a demonstration of faith, a subtle allusion to the possibility of rapprochement and return to the essence, to a reconnection of physical and mental unity with our primordiality.

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     Next, O Caderno das Paisagens (The Notebook of Landscapes) by Daniel Moreira, brings us once again to the theme of the drawn landscape as a declared change of the paradigm of its kind: here, it is no longer taken as a total perception of a territory for its deconstruction through the selection and recall of certain natural aspects. Travel routes, records on one or more territories, a collection of fragments ... The landscape is still thought of as a complex system culturally constructed which is associated with subjectivity and relationship with the viewer. Taking the form of installation it is transplanted into the exhibition space producing here a new landscape, for which Daniel Moreira evokes the memory of the experience of nature dating the illustration, the fragility of the supports and the multiple elements, rather than the natural reality which gave him its source.

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    A similar archipelago is woven in the collaborative work between Daniel Moreira and Rita Castro Neves Estudo de paisagem (Landscape study). Stemming from the combination of various times and drawing once again the imperfect act of remembering. The memories and personal objects are merged with the stories and artefacts of the natural world: the design appears either on a coiled thick fabric or on a rack, hair is used to embroider and enter another body in a printed napkin to cross stitch, printed boats sail in an old fabric, needles of a pine tree drawing a landscape on a Portuguese quilt ... We are dealing with the conversion of the melancholic process of evoking memories on an ironic protocol that does not lack aesthetic charm, and to which is assigned the lengthy and delicate character, the virtuosity of its own manufacture.

Rita Castro Neves in Soundcrafts # 1: pulse, still seems to point to the dilution of boundaries between natural and human, through the appropriation of a pine cone that she presses and holds in her hand. Before the recorder that records the sound of the action, we witness the fusion of the first two elements in one nature. In addition to the associated narrative, the work invites the absorption and contemplation of the organic structure of our bodies, the experience of our senses beyond the reviving act.

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     Sobreimpressões (overprints) by Catarina Domingues tells us about the organicity and understanding of nature as a vital force. In each of them, we are looking at the intersection of two moments formulated by distinct times and spaces, with the common denominator of landscape, organic line and feminine – not as gender but as the place of maternity.

    In its delicate design and landscape overlays it is evidenced the references to maternity through the representation of clear symbols of fertility, such as crack and hole, opening the way to the significance of nature as “Tellus Mater” (Mother Earth), like the one that gives, sustains and takes life as a passive power of reconnection and regeneration. Power that the artist seems to seek in works such as Terra (Earth) and Suspensão (Suspension), while delivering to the warmth and softness of the soil, to make her own the shafts of a plant, to be diluted in the rocks and in the darkness of a cave ... it also highlights a striking performative attitude of the artist, to which is associated with her conviction that all life is without distinction nature, celebrating "the awe and the frightening that surrounds us and, even more, which constitutes us biologically".

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     Finally, Barbara Bulhão sets us a challenge, where it is further proposed to reflect on our understanding of the limits of nature and culture, which dates back to one of the basic relationships between man and the surrounding environment, concerning shelter, security, the residence on earth. We are presented with two sculptures, two modules in the form of brick of Group 3 of non-structural use (intended for filling recesses), which result in their process of production, of a rearward practical construction in which they resort to adding salt or sugar to cement for amending the same drying time. By adopting this practice and by presenting these two elements together, as one, Barbara Bulhão reaches the combination and intersection of two time frames to form a single one, consolidating the brick of conventional and structural use for the building of the house, the intended space to the private sphere and family relationships in which, citing Peter Sloterdijk "it is not the space that is the condition of the possibility of being together, but it's being together that enables the space."

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     In re tornar terra (back to ground) are revealed six different intelligibility models of nature, which, mediated by design, installation, sculpture, photography and video, manifest parallel versions of the relationship and significance of nature, going back to the cultural transformation processes that bear the images of the natural world.