2025

Is democracy becoming the souvenir of an optimistic dream? It's not a question of scepticism. 2024 marked the 50th anniversary of 25 April 1974, the revolution that put an end to 40 years of dictatorship in Portugal and opened the doors of democracy to a country immersed in a repressive regime and battered by a prolonged colonial war. Also in 2024, in parliamentary elections with an abstention rate of close to 40 per cent, a populist far-right and openly anti-democratic party was the third most voted force in Portugal, now occupying 25 per cent of the overall parliamentary seats.

Rather than being a stage for tensions, every crisis is first and foremost an expression of an unsustainable structural situation coming to the surface. What can art do in this context? ‘Art, Freedom and Democracy’ brings together works by Bruno de Marco, Clara Bolota, Constança Viegas Martins, Diogo da Cruz and Mathias Gramoso, following on from the award of a prize from the Camões Institute to young Portuguese artists living in Germany. Taking as its starting point the celebration of the 50th anniversary of 25 April, the exhibition presents a series of practices that, in one way or another, outline a series of strategies aimed at answering this question.

One point is clear: there is certainly a place for art in the field of critique - and therefore politics. Judith Butler, for example, speaks of the critical gesture as a performative act of appearance, which corresponds to a claim for an alternative model of governance based on protest. In this case, talking about critique fundamentally means talking about the idea of opposition to a certain model of governance. Insofar as a gesture of opposition implies - no matter how small it is - an attempt to break away, this gesture in turn becomes the first outline of an alternative, which may or may not be continued. In this sense, in the exhibition now on show at CLB, there are two roughly distinct strategies towards this goal: on the one hand, protest in the form of performance as a claim of public space; on the other, speculation as a means of analysis and reconstruction, aimed at reformulating the future through a critical approach to the past. 

Zoti Aleyu (2023) and ultramarine (2024) sculpture and drawing by Diogo da Cruz, are two important examples of the latter strategy. Bringing the maritime element to the fore in an attempt to subvert the vertical - topographical, virtual - perspective that appropriates it as a space of potential extraction, da Cruz speculates on the possibility of a decentralised form of memory. The strategy recovers the corporeality of the element itself, portraying it as a vast mnemonic device that is both a historical repository and a political space, thus exposing the violent framework that unfolded therein. This prism allows for the evocation and analysis of a series of stories that took place there, including enslaved bodies thrown into the sea and deposited there over centuries of colonial trade routes, in which Portugal played a leading role, the development of underwater extraction and the flow of weapons, to which G3 (2024), an iron sculpture in the shape of the silhouette of the Gewehr 3 rifle, refers.

In any case, the notion of the future is important. How does a history full of violence, subjugation and appropriation determine and mould the way an element is projected into the future? there be dragons (2024 - ) , a series of flags by Bruno de Marco that document and follow recent storm patterns in southern Brazil, starts precisely from this question to propose a reformulation of the topographical language developed over the centuries of colonial relations between Portugal and Brazil. Each of the diagrams corresponds to an attempt to translate different meteorological maps into a new language. Through the appropriation of elements of meteorological language - fronts, layers, peaks -, de Marco seeks to subvert that same language by contrasting it with some archival objects, sketching a future based on this tension.

In general, both da Cruz and de Marco position themselves between the fictional and speculative field and the scientific field, an intersection that aims to highlight the unfavourable position that natural elements occupy in a power relationship with civilisation. In both cases, this relationship is subverted through satirical narratives in which human knowledge is placed in a situation of bankruptcy, either through confrontation with dimensions outside the domain of its language, as in the case of da Cruz, or through insertion (and re-signification) in narratives outside its usual scope, as in the case of de Marco.

On the other hand, the exhibition presents a set of more direct positions, which are distinguished by the way they seek to use the performance of criticism itself as a way of claiming public space, leaning towards a more immediate notion of gesture. Doublespeak (2025), by Clara Bolota, for example, points directly to the role of the image as a pole of contradictions and the way in which this pole integrates and functions in public space, based on a painting of an idyllic and youthful scene of bathers, still visible today on one of the walls of Block 7 of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. 

At first, Bolota posted a photograph of this painting in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, trying to force a dialogue with various instances of the German state - the building itself, the security forces - in order to highlight the silencing of many voices critical of the official German stance following the events of 7 October in the Gaza Strip. This work would eventually give rise to Mirror Mirror - Staatsräson (2025), a painting-installation evocative of this gesture, thereby seeking to reinforce the ambiguous role of images and their manipulation in an authoritarian context, as a form of alienation.

This desire to communicate with the public space is also visible in Muro 265 (2023-), by Viegas Martins, a website that surveys the wall of Av. Rodrigues de Freitas 265 in Porto over the course of a year. Through a set of personal archive images, Google Maps captures and social media posts, Viegas Martins compiled a website dedicated to documenting these transformations - presented here in the form of a postcard - witnessing their changes, messages and expressions over time, thus capturing the presence of various forms of manifestation and their respective erasure. 

Da Pedra Fez-se Mar (2025), an installation by Mathias Gramoso made up of cobblestone parallels moulded in porcelain, on the other hand, entails a direct reference to the gesture of resistance latent in public space itself. Starting with the Portuguese cobblestone pavement, an important architectural element in the Portuguese cultural panorama, Gramoso dissects a spatial element that played a central role in different notions of identity and in the Portuguese colonial project, while at the same time subverting it through its arrangement on the ground, a reference to the use of stones as throwing objects in protest situations. The installation thus manages to simultaneously evoke a collective imaginary and highlight the potential for resistance that underlies it, thus exposing the fragile nature of stability and tradition in the face of the weight of different socio-economic and historical contexts.

From a critical point of view, it is true that the itinerary proposed by these practices is not exempt from possible contradictions, particularly because of its speculative nature (is speculation a dimension belonging to the realm of fiction itself or rather a critique of reality?) Claire Bishop, for instance, emphasises the redundancy to which most artistic practices that set out to criticise beyond their own medium are condemned, precisely because they don't go beyond the boundaries of the artistic field. However, isn't it precisely in the ability to respond to this challenge that the constructive potential of all these practices lies?