Reincarnation – Fragments of an Unfinished Encyclopedia, 2022
Encarnação Subway Station, Lisbon, Portugal
Fragments of an Unfinished Encyclopedia traces a 26-year artistic journey by Françoise Schein through a series of sculptures exploring major geographical and scientific discoveries in human history.
The project began in 1994, when Schein, together with artist Federica Matta, completed the Parque metro station in Lisbon. Conceived as an underground cathedral, the station pays tribute to Portugal’s great maritime discoveries and has since become an important landmark in the city.
In 1995, the Lisbon Metro commissioned Schein to create a second project: an artistic pavilion called the Cartographic Café, planned for the area above the Parque station. Designed in the shape of a ship’s bow, the pavilion was intended to house 37 sculptures dedicated to major scientific discoveries. In 1997, production was brought to a halt for internal reasons, and the sculptures that had already been completed remained in storage in Paris for nearly two decades.
In 2021, after years on hold, the project was revived with a new installation at Encarnação metro station in Lisbon. Architect Alberto Barradas designed a structure within the station specifically to accommodate 32 sculptures from Fragments of an Unfinished Encyclopedia. The works found a new home at Encarnação—meaning “incarnation”—in what Schein describes as a second life, or “Reincarnation.”
For more than a year, Schein and Thomas Régent worked on the restoration of the sculptures, cleaning and repainting each piece and updating the electrical systems to meet current standards. The process brought the works back into use while preserving their original artistic character.
The monumental installation measures 12 meters long and 2.5 meters high and brings together sculptures made from steel, wood, glass, and found objects. Interconnected throughout the structure, the works explore a wide range of subjects related to human knowledge, invention, and discovery—from astronomy and biology to cartography and philosophy.
The sculptures reference major figures, ideas, and moments in scientific and cultural history, including:
- The universe, time, the moon, and temporal cycles
- Ptolemy
- The Middle Ages and the T/O map of the world
- The Silk Road and the Crusades
- Sacred mountains and the invention of God
- Maritime discoveries
- Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler
- The art of looking
- Galileo and the telescope
- Medieval knowledge of the human body
- Vesalius and Leonardo da Vinci
- Intellectual salons
- Newton
- Linnaeus and the classification of plants
- Evolution according to Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould
- Paper, printing, and translation
- The invention of memory
- Public memory: Marx
- Private memory: Freud
- Anthropology and the study of society
- Modernity
The installation was inaugurated on September 15, 2022. For Françoise Schein, its completion after nearly three decades brought an unexpected continuation to a project that had remained unfinished for many years.
