Legend of the Necessary Dreamer: Real time writing in Palacio Pombal

“If the architect now drew by hand a small, human-scaled figure tracking their progress as they move through the ground floor, first floor, second floor of the palácio, walking through the corridors and entering the rooms which I form, I would not know where I was on the plan, I would be the one who is lost.”   

Maria Fusco will make a performative reading and discuss her new book Legend of the Necessary Dreamer. The book is a novella, a prose essay and a real-time excavation of the historic, yet decaying, Palacio Pombal in Lisbon. The book was written on site during Fusco’s role as writer-in-residence at the Lisbon Architecture Trienale, and has been described by Chris Kraus as “a new classic of female philosophical fiction” and by Eyal Weizman as “ a new taxonomy of site-based address.” Legend of the Necessary Dreamer is published by Vanguard Editions, London.

Maria Fusco is an award winning Belfast-born writer working across fiction, criticism and theory, her work is translated into ten languages. Recent works include: Master Rock, an experimental radio play performed and recorded inside a granite mountain on the west coast of Scotland, commissioned by Artangel and BBC Radio 4 and the solo-authored books With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form, 2013 (Los Angeles/Vancouver: New Documents, 2013), Gonda, 2012 and The Mechanical Copula, 2011 (both published Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press). She is currently a Reader at the University of Edinburgh and was Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths.