The Water Museum – EPAL (Barbadinhos Steam Pumping Station) will inaugurate, on 18 December from 6 p.m., the exhibition Água Mole em Pedra Dura by Eduardo Malé, curated by Ricardo Barbosa Vicente.
The exhibition brings together sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation, unveiling an ongoing inquiry into water as material, symbolic, and sensorial force.
Departing from the notion that water reshapes the world through persistence, Malé proposes an understanding of the artistic gesture as a process of attunement, repetition, and displacement. Water traverses the works as substance, metaphor, rhythm, and memory, bringing materials and bodies into proximity and exposing the inherent instability that constitutes us.
The exhibition path also includes an immersive soundscape featuring recordings of São Tomé rain and the subtle murmurs of the artist’s gestures, deepening an experience that entwines vision, tactility, scent, listening, and imagination.
Departing from the notion that water reshapes the world through persistence, Malé proposes an understanding of the artistic gesture as a process of attunement, repetition, and displacement. Water traverses the works as substance, metaphor, rhythm, and memory, bringing materials and bodies into proximity and exposing the inherent instability that constitutes us.
The exhibition path also includes an immersive soundscape featuring recordings of São Tomé rain and the subtle murmurs of the artist’s gestures, deepening an experience that entwines vision, tactility, scent, listening, and imagination.
Visitors are invited to move through an open cartography in which each line and each form heralds movement.
“Thus, too, operates Eduardo Malé—through repetition, through attentive listening, and through the gesture that, in persisting, shifts the world. (…) Visitors find themselves within a terrain where looking, touching, smelling, hearing, and imagining become inseparable acts, enveloped by the dense sound of São Tomé rain and by the murmuring of gestures that traverse the space.”
“Thus, too, operates Eduardo Malé—through repetition, through attentive listening, and through the gesture that, in persisting, shifts the world. (…) Visitors find themselves within a terrain where looking, touching, smelling, hearing, and imagining become inseparable acts, enveloped by the dense sound of São Tomé rain and by the murmuring of gestures that traverse the space.”
Opening Programme — 18 December
6:00 p.m. – Opening to the public
6:30 p.m. – Inaugural session with remarks by EPAL, the Ambassador of São Tomé and Príncipe, the curator, and the artist
7:00 p.m. – Guided tour with the curator and the artist
7:30 p.m. – Cocktail reception
The exhibition will remain on view until 20 March. Free Admission.
OPENING HOURS: Tuesday to Sunday | 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Water Museum, Barbadinhos Steam Pumping Station, Rua do Alviela, 12, Lisbon.
15 December 2025
