LISBON.- The Chantal Akerman travelling exhibition proposes a moving and unexpected journey through art and life, along a path marked by multiple geographies: from Brussels to border zones, from the kitchen to the desert, from burlesque to tragedy, from the sufferings of the world to those of the most intimate spheres.

In addition to a selection of installations and films, some of which are being shown to the public for the first time, the exhibition brings together screenplays, project notes, and production documents from the Fondation Chantal Akerman archives.

This previously unseen "living material" bears witness to the creative conditions of the artist's oeuvre, but also the central role of writing, "the ultimate art" for the woman who also wrote a number of texts, including Hall de nuit [Night Hall] (1992), Une famille à Bruxelles [A Family in Brussels] (1998), and Ma mère rit [My Mother Laughs] (2013).

The exhibition begins with Brussels, Chantal Akerman's birthplace, training ground, and source of inspiration, where she created her earliest short films during the summer as part of her entrance exam for film school.

This period led to Saute ma ville (1968), a film she both directed and starred in. The show also features work films, television films, and previously unseen rushes, from her experiments in New York in the 1970s, such as Hanging Out Yonkers (1972), an unfinished documentary, to the musical and song-based works of the 1980s, which never forget the tragic history that struck her family and so many others.

The exhibition also charts Chantal Akerman's exploration of other forms through a series of installations, from her first, D'EST, au bord de la fiction [FROM THE EAST: Bordering on Fiction] (1995), to her last, Now (2015), including her experiments A Voice in the Desert (2002) and Maniac Summer (2009).

The installations also afford an opportunity to return to images from past films, as is the case with La Chambre [The Room] (2007), In the Mirror (2007), and Woman Sitting After Killing (2001), based on Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

Finally, a dedicated room exhibits a selection of archives from the Fondation Chantal Akerman, preserved at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (CINEMATEK).

This collection consists mainly of working documents from Paradise Films-the production company Akerman founded with Marilyn Watelet in the 1970s-and previously unseen archives recently added following donations from her collaborators.

These document teams and eras, as well as the financial circumstances surrounding productions, revealing more from behind the scenes, at a time when the artist's work was also changing, moving from "short films" to feature-length pieces, from documentaries to museum installations. Accompanying these documents is a subjective bio-filmography in which the filmmaker's own words take pride of place.

We invite you to embark on a deeply moving journey, from burlesque to tragedy, from musicals to global and personal suffering, from the bedroom to the desert. Held in conjunction with the exhibition, the film programme at the Cinemateca Portuguesa and the events at MAC/CCB invite visitors to (re)discover a body of work whose poetic radicality continues to resonate deeply with contemporary generations.

At the intersection of cinema, art, and writing, the singular voice of Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) has never resonated with as much force as it does today.

Her unique, self-taught sensibility, which led her to unflinchingly broach themes of intimacy, solitude, grief, and social injustice, as well as family heritage and the traces of history in the landscape, was already apparent in her first short film, Saute ma ville [Blow Up My Town], which she shot in her home town of Brussels when she was just eighteen years old.

Soon after, in New York during the early 1970s, she became friends with a group of underground experimental filmmakers whose contemplative use of the camera was to mark her approach to time and physical space.

A few months after returning to Brussels in 1973, she directed Je tu il elle [I You He She] (1974), before making Paris her base, without ever letting go of her ties with her home town.

The following year, she made Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, now hailed as a feminist masterpiece and topping the British Film Institute's latest ten-year list of the best films of all time.

Chantal Akerman was tireless in her exploration of the image and narration, switching freely between film genres, including drama, comedy, and literary adaptation-not to mention documentary, where D'Est [From the East] (1993), Sud [South] (1999), and De l'autre côté [From the Other Side] (2002), filmed successively in Eastern Europe, the United States, and Mexico, form a trilogy haunted by walls and borders, at once the record of the end of a world and the harbinger of disasters to come.

Chantal Akerman was also one of the first filmmakers to cross over to the "art game"-as she called it-creating seventeen video installations, which have been shown in numerous museums around the world.