Porto will celebrate the 50th anniversary of April 25 with a program entitled “Revolution, now!”, crossing the municipal cultural program with the ephemeris, focusing on poetry, image and thought, also reaching the city’s prisons.
“We’re interested in April insofar as we talk about the present. We’re interested in the archive, in memory, in the past, insofar as we can act, think, use the poetic word in the here and now, in today’s everyday Porto, in contemporary Porto,” argued Jorge Sobrado, one of the commissioners of the commemorative program “Revolution, now!”, which was presented today.
The director of the Museum and Libraries of Porto, who curated the program together with professor José Augusto Bragança de Miranda, was speaking during the presentation at the Viscounts of Balsemão Palace, in Carlos Alberto Square, at a session that was also attended by the mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira.
“The name we’ve chosen, ‘Revolution, Now!’, may seem like catchy, provocative rhetoric, but we think we need this rhetoric today. Public and political discourse today is impoverished, emptied of a category that has become almost scandalous: the category of dreams and poetry,” Jorge Sobrado explained.
As such, the commemorative program will bring to the streets of Porto 50 original poems about the revolution by 50 authors, including Adolfo Luxúria Canibal, Andreia C. Faria, Daniel Jonas, Hélia Correia, Mário Cláudio or Regina Guimarães. Faria, Daniel Jonas, Hélia Correia, Mário Cláudio or Regina Guimarães.
The authorial mark of the works will be removed from the segments displayed on 440 ‘mupis’ in the city for 21 days, “in order to promote collective appropriation”, becoming “a common place in the city” and making them “stain, contaminate the public space, bumping into distracted citizens, passers-by or curious citizens”, explained Jorge Sobrado.
The program also includes the return of the Forum of the Future, this time with a 10-conference format, between March and December, with 10 contemporary thinkers, including Markus Gabriel, Dario Gentili, Catherine Malabou, António Guerreiro or Maria Filomena Molder.
The co-commissioner stressed that cinema will have its own place with the Other Revolutions cycle, curated by Edmundo Cordeiro, which will feature works by Phillipe Garrel, Manoel de Oliveira, Jonas Mekas, Michelangelo Antonioni, Glauber Rocha and Pedro Costa, among others.
Already underway is the Liberdade Project, which works with inmates in three prisons in Porto (Magalhães Lemos Hospital Prison Wing, Polícia Judiciária Prison Establishment and Santo António Educational Center) in Literature and Writing, Photography and Video and Ceramics and Painting workshops.
The program also includes the so-called Participation Exhibition, at Casa do Infante, “based on the revelation of ‘periodicals of the Revolution'” and period films from the municipal library and archive, or cycles already established in the city, such as the Short Courses or An Object and Its Speeches (about the statue of General Sem Medo [Humberto Delgado, on April 6, and about the former PIDE headquarters, on April 20).
The “Revolução Já!” program also includes the exhibition Destruir o Silêncio… [Destroy the Silence…], about music as a form of protest with KISMIF [a project about subcultures], the cycle Cinema de Revolução [Cinema of Revolution], by the Cineclube do Porto, and the musical program Ao ritmo da Revolução [To the Rhythm of the Revolution], with Portuguese, French and Russian music.
There will also be other municipal programs, such as the one on the night of April 24-25, with a videomapping show by Alfredo Cunha, Rodrigo Leão and Vhils, the cycle Se o Cinema é uma Arma, by the Batalha Centro de Cinema, activities by the Department of Contemporary Art (Escuta Ativa, Abril Febril and Cultura em Expansão) and oral history projects at the Museu do Carro Elétrico, with memories of STCP workers during the revolution.
