Welcome to the page of the Official Visit to Chile

The aim of this Instituto Camões exhibition is to celebrate and pay homage to Portuguese Language and the Cultures where it is spoken via a number of Portuguese Language poets and poems that evoke the image of the sea, the all-unifying theme, the metaphorical image of this “Ocean of Cultures”, the Portuguese language. An ocean-language that bathes all continents, that is seeping further afield, that is able to capture and adapt to the specificities of each of the places it touches, every time, without ever losing its primary music, the taste of the salt and the smell of the sea air.

If “poetry is the originating language of a people and language, in itself, the most original poetry”, then poets are the best spokesmen for the Portuguese Language, as those who took it as a founding myth via which it could be unfurled in an endless universality. Thus, true homage is paid to all the authors that contributed, in Portuguese, to the creation of this culture-homeland with their work and for the emergence of other cultures which, in their particular voices, recreate themselves in constant transformation.

Literature and poetry, as a peculiar secondary modelling system, cannot survive without a structure like that of a natural language, just like a language cannot be understood without its cultural context. This indivisibility between Language and Culture affords a unique and plural perspective on the situations of Portuguese Language and allows the transmission of the unique and diverse way(s) of seeing the world. Such are the goals of this exhibition, and these goals are part of the mission of Instituto Camões – disseminating the Cultures which are expressed in Portuguese, promoting and communicating the knowledge of who we are within the World of the Portuguese Language, creating synergetic bridges between countries that speak it and the global world, in permanent intercultural dialogue, a special, more comprehensive and complete way of understanding and getting to know the Other and ourselves.

So, “Long live the Portuguese language, and let it flourish, talk, sing, be heard!” and may this exhibition, in its own unique way, contribute to that, on its journey and in its meeting the gaze that projects it onto the endless horizon.

Instituto Camões