BioFiligranas® - Medically Prescribed Jewellery is the title of the exhibition by designer and esad-idea researcher Olga Noronha, curated by Bernardo Pinto Almeida, exhibiting in the atrium of the CIM - Medical Research Centre of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) until 30 June.

Held as part of FMUP's Bicentenary Celebrations, this exhibition is the first part, Internal Body, of the Metamorphoses of the Body exhibition project. The exhibition seeks not only to highlight the social role that medicine plays across the board, both in research and in the treatment and prevention of diseases in contemporary societies, but also to celebrate the deep relationship that has always existed between medicine and art, linked by representations and ways of thinking about how the body works. 

In the exhibition BioFiligranas - Medically Prescribed Jewellery, artist and designer Olga Noronha (Porto, 1990) crosses the tradition of filigree art with the current possibilities of science and, in particular, medicine. The artist takes bone fixation plates made of biocompatible material, used in surgical procedures to treat and heal the internal human body, and transforms them into strange, unexpected jewellery. Her work therefore consists of transforming these plates, previously thought of as part of osteosynthesis, ‘based on geometries’ and ‘motifs inspired by traditional Portuguese filigree’, personalising them as ‘intimate objects’. As she says, ‘the proposal is to reconfigure the devices used pre-surgery, so that, “after the fractures have healed”, these objects can be extracted from the internal body and reused as “personal and emotional jewellery”, in the form of earrings, bracelets or necklaces.

For Olga Noronha, the aesthetic component proposed in this project adds a new therapeutic function to the bone fixation plates, ‘enriching’ the healing process.

This research project relies on the collaboration of esad-idea to build a multidisciplinary team of researchers who combine art and design with medicine and engineering. 

[Text adapted from the curatorial text by Bernardo Pinto Almeida].