Filipe Marques' conceptual and cathartic - Metastases of Memory
was produced in 2017 as part of the exhibition entitled “Feel it, no Fear. The flesh is yields and num”. It consists in a large-scale black and white digital photo printed on fabrics. Within the stainless steel frame, the textile is displayed as curtains on a wood panel giving the image uncommon texture and relief. At the centre of the image, red neon lights radiate through the fabrics forming two short random, unrelated and meaningless sentences: “On the Sleigh!” (Theme from that Issue). Taking the viewer inside a devastated room with a balcony, the image evokes a post-war scenario. Apart from the debris and the two remaining iron bed spindles, the room was left empty. The overlapping reversed and cryptic text, the dark chromatic palette, the red glow and the hints of war give the ensemble a puzzling, tragic and sinister tone.

The use of curtains as a media for the photo print, evoking theatre draperies or a merchandise showroom device, may conjure up the Situationist International movement and the famous Guy Debord's critique of advanced capitalism in his 1967 book - The Society of the Spectacle
. The exhibition's title referring to the act of “feeling without fear” - as in front of a spectacle - and to “flesh as yields and num” also lead to the concept of capitalism as an ugly, lifeless and mechanical system where humans are reduced whether to spectators, to numbers and production, or to destitution and suffering when crushed by senseless wars. Projected at the bottom of the image, the grey-colour paragraph points to the notions of history and memory. It contains an acid critic of the archives seen as a potential process of oblivion or trivialization of the past when trying to put it at a distance, but to no avail. Past is always enacted into the present, reappearing and spreading as uncontrollable metastases.