The School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences of the University of Porto (ICBAS-UP) inaugurated on March the 21st, World Poetry Day, the artistic installation ‘O MUNDO A VOLTA A EXISTIR’, curated by the doctor, poet and professor, João Luís Barreto Guimarães.

From a selection of poems taught in the course ‘Introduction to Poetry (for medical students)’, João Luís Barreto Guimarães invites the visitor to explore the poetic universe of several contemporary authors. Irony, empathy and compassion are mixed in a place where the “poetic language and the experience of illness are connected”. 

‘O MUNDO VOLTA A EXISTIR’ confronts us with various themes of health, illness and death, ranging from subtlety /su tul ti/ to elegance, satire and melancholy. As the installation’s curator says: “since classical antiquity, the human body (and disease) has constituted a vast subject for poetry. The selection of poems presented here brings together several contemporary authors, such as Fleur Adcock, Wislawa Szymborska, William Carlos Williams and Helen Farish, and addresses issues ranging from competition between siblings for their mother’s attention, to the limit of the cognitive abilities of humans, the ups and downs of the therapeutic process , the ironic resignation of a patient in the face of adversity”. 

This exhibitionaims to celebrate World Poetry Day, but also to raise awareness among students and the medical community of “the importance of transdisciplinary practice and the increasingly urgent need to go beyond clinical excellence”, concludes João Luís Barreto Guimarães.

This exhibition is part of the ICBAS cultural strategy: to be a cultural centre for life and health sciences, promoting scientific knowledge combined with artistic development. This in turncontributes to the cultural agenda of the city of Porto.