This image is from yesterday’s official communication by the Portuguese PM about new austerity measures. It shows a reporter wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt. I know it is symbolic but I like to imagine it could be a code, a message given to rise a sort of underground army. Yes, I know, sci-fi, maybe I’ve seen “The Fight Club” too many times, but we need to believe we can take this government down, or else we’ll go mental. In the climax of our national anthem it reads “às armas”, aux armes!!! It doesn’t get more symbolic than this.
The video starts at the moment when the editor chooses to change angle to show the reporter. Thank you both!
Tag Archives: Portugal
┐ roots & fruits #13 – Ricardo Baltazar └
© Ricardo Baltazer, all Untitled, from the series Touching from a Distance, 2012
Ricardo’s project Touching from a Distance was shot in Essen, Germany, in 2012. All images are blow-ups of snapshots he took while paving the streets. Inevitably, they refer to the distance between the author and the subject portrayed, as they speak about the desire to get closer. These blow-ups are attempted gazes, attempts at assuring the account of oneself while trying to look at his surroundings. They are as much voyeuristic as they are introspective, in the sense that what one does while looking desperately out, is trying for a way in.
The camera, as an automaton one can trigger to mediate the space between the self and the other, is always a transparent and potentially authentic way of speaking about the way the author is trying to connect. To view the world through a camera is not to connect with it. Either you are in an impulsive rational process of trying to see beyond reality or you choose to try to be in the present. So this is about the process less than it is about the result. The framing, the composition, the colors, are singular points amidst an abstract composition where the lines are created between people’s gazes.
We know what blow-ups looks like, how they all resemble surveillance stills and evoke the invasion of privacy. I’d like to reference Michael Haneke’s Caché about the contemporary obsession with security which comes to be a way of spreading the false notion of power and control over one’s life. What Ricardo exposes here is the opposite, the notion of fragility, as he lets us know of his state of exception, as a foreigner, behaving as an alien who is forced to document his life through the looks of others, in order to prove his existence.
┐ Breaking Point …………………………………………………………………………….└
© Sofia Silva, 2M Demonstration @ Lisbon, 2013
It’s definitely the last time we hit the streets peacefully. There’s no turning back from here. “almost 24 hours after these events neither the President nor the government spoke about the massive demonstrations.”
If you want to read a brief description (in english) of what happened yesterday see here
┐ Occupy and Resist └
Today, 2nd March 2013, all over Portugal, demonstrations against this government and the austerity measures will hit the streets. I’ll join, of course. Wouldn’t be able not to. That said, I will not be laughing and singing along to songs that symbolize the country’s last revolution (April 25th 1974). I avoid all these nostalgic and pseudo revolutionary feelings. I don’t support pacifism as a slogan, nor the idea that democracy is about voting. If we really want to fight we need to upgrade strategies and bring theses demonstrations to the current tense, with what is at hand today. We’ll hit the streets and though I have no clue how it’s going to work out today, regarding authoritarian strategies, violence and the amount of people in the streets, I am sure today’s photographs will be seen all over the world. “I don’t have high hopes, I only hope for anarchy”.
┐ Be prepared └
© Sofia Silva, How can you sleep at night (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
Can’t stress enough how amazing this video is
┐ Holiday Greetings └
© Sofia Silva, I got the blues (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
┐ Democracy Deficit └
© Sofia Silva, Democracy Deficit (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
from left top right it reads “Bread”, “Peace”, “Housing”, “Health”, “Education”
┐ Heart is a luxury └
© Sofia Silva, Heart is a luxury – womanhood 101 (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
┐ Freedom Fighters └
© Sofia Silva, Freedom Fighters (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
the rest of the videos from the conference via The Public School (along with other great lectures, interviews, etc)
┐ an eye for an eye └
© Sofia Silva, you who bring me death, I’ll give you chaos (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
┐ الحرية لفلسطين └
© Sofia Silva, qui sème la misère, récolte la colère (wip detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
Freedom for Palestine
Resistance Égalité
┐ History is written by the disobedient └
© Sofia Silva, (sketch detail), from the series The Protester, 2012
I heard of a darkness, descending upon the old archive of words
And the muffled whispers of the elders drowning in the midst of the long rows of obedience
This you must know to be true brother: we are the dead.
The weeping past and his wretched son soon will be victims of their own doing
All else follows
And when all is done and the night is purified of all these thoughts, I will sell you as you sold me
All else follows
It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts
Rejoice, brothers and sisters! Rejoice, brothers and sisters, we are the dead…
So I tilted my head back and held on to what I knew to be true: the relief of nothingness
And reason my dear brother will not suffice.
These vast and silent glass eyed armies and their mirror shaped minds seek but virtue.
But I am corrupt. I am corrupt to the core.
It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts
Yes, we’re the dead, brothers and sisters, we’re the dead
I heard of a darkness brothers and sisters, falling down on what remained of whom we were.
And it’s with whispers that our lives have become within a measurable distance of an end
What will become of dreams my dear enemy?
When this delightful destruction of words has rendered its means
When all is done and the night is purified of all these thoughts, I will sell you as you sold me
It’s by death I am your brother
And it’s by death I do exist
And it’s by death that I owe allegiance to this darkness that undid all my thoughts
It’s only by death that you own me
I heard of a darkness sliding down the streets
Tearing apart limbs and all their deeds
and reconstructing these new men, not out of hope, but of love and sorrow
All else follows
Because it’s by death that all these confessions have become my truth.
Words written and sang by João Rui, from a Jigsaw
┐ roots & fruits #12 – Gonçalo Figueiredo └
© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Lourenço
© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Rita Tavares (left) and Lara Brandão (right), from the series The Protest, 12/2009
© Gonçalo Figueiredo, Ricardo Baltazar (left) and Gonçalo Figueiredo (right), from the series The Protest, 12/2009
These portraits are part of a series made back in the Winter of 2009 and it depicts a group of students from the Photography Department to which Gonçalo also was part, both as a technitian and as a student. In December, confronted with the lack of conditions and materials the course lacked to offer, they decided to camp at school and endure a silent and peaceful protest until they were heard.
“Let us now consider the time exposure, of which the photo-portrait is a concrete instance. Whether of a live or dead person, the portrait is funerary in nature, a monument. Acting as a reminder of times that have died away, it sets up landmarks of the past. This means it reverses the paradox of the snapshot, series to series. Whereas the snapshot refers to the fluency of time without conveying it, the time exposure petrifies the time of the referent and denotes it as departed. Reciprocally, whereas the former freezes the superficial time of the image, the latter releases it. It liberates an autonomous and recurrent temporality, which is the time of remembrance. While the portrait as Denkmal, monument, points to a state in a life that is gone forever, it also offers itself as the possibility of staging that life again and again in memory.
An asymmetrical reciprocity joins the snapshot to the time exposure: whereas the snapshot stole a life it could not return, the time exposure expresses a life that it never received. The time exposure doesn’t refer to life as process, evolution, diachrony, as does the snapshot. It deals with an imaginary life that is autonomous, discontinuous, and reversible, because this life has no location other than the surface of the photograph. By the same token it doesn’t frame that kind of surface-death characteristic of the snapshot, which is the shock of time splitting into not anymore and not yet. It refers to death as the state of what has been: the fixity and defection of time, its absolute zero.
(…)
Time exposure implies the antithesis of trauma. Far from blocking speech, it welcomes it openly. Only in time exposure (portrait, landscape, still life, etc.) may photography appear with the continuity of nature. The portrait, for example, may look awkward, but not artificial, as would be the case of a snapshot of an athlete caught in the midst of a jump. When continuity and nature are perceived, speech is apt to body forth that perception in the form of a narrative that meshes the imaginary with the symbolic and organizes our mediation with reality.
The word now, used to describe the kind of temporality involved in time exposures, doesn’t refer to actual time, since it is abstracted from its natural link with here: hic et nunc. It is to be understood as a pause in time, charged with a potential actualization, which will eventually be carried out by speech (or memory as interior speech), and is most probably rooted in the time-consuming act of looking.” excerpt from the article Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox, by Thierry de Duve, published in October, Vol. 5, Photography (Summer, 1978), pp. 113-125
More of Gonçalo’s work here
┐ roots & fruits #11 – Tiago Casanova └
© Tiago Casanova, all Untitled, from the project The Unknown Island
“The airplane begins to descend. Madeira is down there. From far we can understand the feeling that the fifteenth century discoverers had when they saw Madeira (= Wood) for the first time, and from there we can easily guess the origin of the name. An intensive tropical vegetation fills and covers the island of green, but I cannot help but noticing the various urban clusters, scattered houses, roads and highways and the megalomaniac construction of the new airport. The constructed confronts the natural on a dual mode. Large scars are open, but the consummation of the act makes the built elements part of the landscape. This new landscape causes both fascination and disbelief and it is as beautiful as ugly. (…)”
09/11/11 – (1st Day) – *Excerpt and Polaroids from my Travel Diary do Madeira Island
To see more of Tiago‘s work go here
┐ roots & fruits #10 – Cláudio Ferreira └
© Cláudio Ferreira, all Untitled, from the series Space Project nº 1 – Galaxies, 2012
“And yet, the absence of the subject does not have to be interpreted as a deficiency. Quite the opposite, it could indicate a new quality in the revolution, in a henceforth molecular revolution, and the primacy of multiplicity within it. When the subject is missing, it has not just gone amiss, as a gap (still) gaping and begging to get closed. In view of the composition of the molecular revolution there is no need for unification, or for the representation of a unified (class) subject by leaders, party and vanguard. The rejection of the primacy of the class, or of a specific class (be it the proletariat, or a middle-class threatened by decline) does not in any way imply tuning out the hierarchizing differentiation that takes place more radically than ever in current capitalist production. Differential capitalism striates the differences, hierarchizes and valorizes them. And yet molecular multiplicity raises no hopes in any of the imaginings of resistance against this machinic-differentiating capitalism that undertake to homogenize and totalize differences. Even in their negative manifestation there is no way back ahead of multiplicity, but only its dis/continuous unfolding.
But even the subject, the one, the whole, where it is no longer absent, is not the consequence of a process of collecting, forming, unifying the many, the singular, the dispersed, to be composed into a molar block. It does not follow a logic of addition, but one of subtraction. It must first be extracted from the uncountable multiplicity, detached, dis-counted in order to be one. The one emerges only when the logic of counting, classifying and identifying lays its grids on the multiplicity; when the uncountable is domesticated in the process of counting.
The subject can appear only through subtraction from the multiple.”
excerpt from Making Multiplicity: A Philosophical Manifesto, by Gerald Raunig. continue reading here
More of Cláudio‘s work here
