Museu da Água

Rua do Alviela 12, 1700-012 Lisboa

Inauguração → 10 . 10 . 2026 → 03:00 pm

10 . 10 . 2026 → 15 . 11 . 2026

tuesday - sunday → 10:00 am – 06:00 pm

Artist

Joan Fontcuberta

Photography was born to certify the world, yet today it seems destined to imagine it. Between these two impulses — documenting and fabulating — unfolds Wunderkammer, an exhibition by Joan Fontcuberta that brings together eight series arranged as a contemporary cabinet of curiosities. As in the Renaissance chambers of wonders, anomalies, vestiges, improbable creatures, speculative landscapes, and ambiguous documents coexist here, challenging our trust in images and our very notion of nature. The Wunderkammer was not merely a space for the accumulation of knowledge: it was also a place where the exceptional, the monstrous, and the unclassifiable tested the boundaries of understanding. This fascination with singularity lies at the core of Fontcuberta’s work. His projects draw precisely on what outstrips the norm: impossible fossils, divergent taxonomies, mutant floras, imaginary animals, apocryphal archives, and algorithmically generated landscapes.

In these series, the artist turns photography into a machine for temporal speculation. The distant past and the near future intermingle in a territory where science, fiction, and visual memory intersect. Aristocratic dinosaurs, corals forgotten by Darwin, natures deformed by colonial history, visionary herbariums, and synthetic gardens produced through Artificial Intelligence all form part of an iconography that reflects simultaneously on the future of nature and the future of images. For if nature today is thwarted by genetic engineering, ecological collapse, and digital simulation, photography too has ceased to be a mere testimony of the world to become an autonomous ecosystem of visual fictions. In Wunderkammer, Fontcuberta reminds us that every image animates a latent mutation: it no longer settles for reflecting reality, but instead reinvents it, contaminates it, and projects it toward other possible worlds.