One of the characters in LED – one of our plays, originally staged in 2006, and which we’ve revisited this last year as part of the celebration of our 20th birthday – asks: “Where are we so fast?”

This question perfectly reflects our feelings in preparing this exhibition, the fleeting passage of time. We usually say we hardly notice it when having fun. That must have been what happened here.

Marionet completed its 20th birthday on 23 October 2020. Not even in our wildest dreams have we thought of ever blowing out the candles of this milestone. It has been a path built show by show, the road appearing before us at every step, as our feet touched the ground.

The selection of images and objects we made for this exhibition attempts to encompass these twenty years of activity and to create a broad panorama of what we accomplished in this period. It will hardly be able to do this. At best it might sketch some constellation of memories, little dots a viewer can trace into a broader image, its sharpness depending on how close to our activity one is and has been.

Materially, the exhibition is based on the work of two fundamental elements of the company: Francisca Moreira’s photographs and Pedro Andrade’s posters and objects.

Francisca has been photographing our shows since 2003, building the company’s image and memory that way, with her human and attentive eye for detail and for the inter-play of every stage element.

Pedro, who has also been reinventing Marionet since 2003, is usually responsible for our image, stage and wardrobe design. He keeps an extraordinarily close and lucid relationship with contemporaneity, which he always brings to the stage and which is thus reflected in the images exhibited here.