Triennial of Art of Catholic Universities, Lisbon

13.10 - 12.12.2026

The starting point for «Exercises in Empathy: Homecoming», the Lisbon chapter of the Triennial, is one of humanity’s oldest aspirations: returning home.

But what does it mean to return when home no longer exists, when it has been abandoned, transformed or forgotten? And what does it mean to return when we ourselves are no longer the same? Before being a construction, home is a way of inhabiting the world. It is a physical space, but also an inner geography. It organises our gestures, our memories, our affections and the ways in which we imagine. It inhabits us as much as we inhabit it.

Developed in partnership between Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea and Brotéria, the exhibition unfolds across three spaces in the city, proposing complementary perspectives on the idea of home.

At Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the works reflect on the materiality of home and the spaces that make inhabiting possible. At MNAC, home emerges as a psychosomatic territory, where body, memory and imagination intertwine. At Brotéria, the reflection shifts towards nature and community, understanding belonging as a condition that precedes any construction.

Between shelter and vulnerability, memory and forgetting, intimacy and community, home reveals itself less as a fixed place than as an experience in constant construction. Perhaps returning home does not mean returning to a place of origin, but finding again what, despite all transformations, continues to connect us to others and to the world.

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