€28

Edited by Documenta

Portuguese

Text by João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira

2023

332 pages

Softcover, 15 x 24 cm

ISBN 9789895681099

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«An alarm bed before eternity» Mário Cesariny, «The Ship of Mirrors», in Titânia e a Cidade Queimada, 1977 1983 is the title of an installation and performance evoking a street scene, on a rainy night, in an area of ​​Lisbon by Sometimes called marginal when it comes to sex.

A bus stop, two men sitting. 1983 is also the year of the first news about AIDS in Portugal. A global crisis then revealed — like today's climate emergency, COVID or Putin's terrorism — the imminent vulnerability of human life and freedom. AIDS also revealed the structural homophobia that criminally delayed the political decisions necessary to confront it and triggered a wave of militancy that today, forty years later, manifests significant developments in anti-racist, feminist struggles and against heteronormative totalitarianism, constituting a decisive an integral part of the fight against new vacancies with a neo-fascist vocation (from Trump to Bolsonaro).

In Portugal, for historical reasons that can be considered obvious (the long period of political dictatorship and the hegemony of the most conservative versions of the Catholic religion), there is no explicit lineage of «gay art» (not even in the 60s) and much less a significant presence of queer themes and debates in the area of ​​visual arts.

The work of João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, in addition to its relevance in the specific field of sculpture/installation and «artist films» — namely queer, or camp, variations from Moby Dick and Werther — has a political and ideology that in Portugal we can consider exceptional.

[Alexander Melo]