Musa paradisiaca is a project by Eduardo Guerra and Miguel Ferrão which tends towards the construction of a multivoiced family of thought. Among those voices, there is Tomé Coelho.

"We met Tomé Coelho in 2011, in São Tomé (São Tomé and Príncipe), an archipelago on the West coast of Africa. In 2012, we started working from mutual influences, exchanging words for objects, and objects for words ("How to catch a fugitive?", 2013). In 2015, Tomé Coelho moved to Lisbon and we continued to collaborate at our studio.Tomé Coelho is a wood-based sculptor.

For CRAC Alsace, we searched for five tree trunks that would later become the bodies of beasts crowned by the heads of five characters gathered here for the first time. The discovery of their forms resulted from an intense research, not only for the qualities of these entities, but also on their own necessities to survive as living things. For this to be possible, Tomé Coelho decided to carefully clean the rotten parts of the wood to rescue forms that would otherwise be completely unreachable. This intuitive process offered us a subtle approach to these massive shapes, and forced us to sharply focus on the features, gestures and movements of these bodies. Instead of making these tree trunks into something, we had to gradually accept that they were becoming something of their own will. These portraits are also the result of a constant dialogue. To make these sculptures meant, first of all, to talk about them.”

—Eduardo Guerra & Miguel Ferrão, November 2015.