Transgenealogies of Portuguese Performance Art

Performance art temporalities: relationships between Museum, University, and Theatre

“…Many of the works produced in Portugal until the mid-1980s dealt with Portuguese social performance issues (through themes inherent to the Revolution of 1974 or the Dictatorship, andColonial War -1961-1974, for example) (Madeira 2007(Madeira , 2016(Madeira , 2017, a factor that cannot be ignored when thinking about the absence of records and documentation that led to their early invisibility. Works such as Música Negativa (Negative Music -1965), by E. M. de Melo e Castro, Identificacíon (Identification -1975) by Manoel Barbosa, Rotura (Rupture -1977) by Ana Hatherly , or o pombal (The dovecot -1973), os dias cinzentos (The grey days -1981) by Carlos Nogueira, or Revolution my body nr.…”

“…These actions, events, rituals or happenings (the terminology is very diffuse, even for the artists themselves), predominantly emerged before the art market. With the revival of the Portuguese art market during the mid-1980s, a process coinciding with a progressive democratization of Portuguese society that diminished art's function as a means of protest, the artists' paths were diverted into other professional activities or even other media linked to the market, such as painting or sculpture, losing track of the performative practice of the works from their past (Madeira 2007(Madeira , 2016(Madeira , 2017. Considering, however, the precarious condition of the memory of these eventswhich mostly exists in the minds of artists or witnesses that are rapidly disappearing, what remains of this story and how can we recover it and transmit it, to enhancing the possible futures of these works?…”

“…With the resurgence in Portugal of a new cycle of performance art at the dawn of the new millennium (Madeira 2012(Madeira , 2016, there have been artistic projects incorporating a number of these aspects. In Porto, for example, A Sala (The Room) (2007) explores the dichotomy private-public, by presenting performance artworks in the living room of António Lago and Dr. Susana Chiocca (PhD in Performance Studies).…”

“…This exhibition presented many performance artworks. Besides Luís Vaz 73, however, no performance artworks were showed as performance.6 Here, we must not forget that performance art practice is intimately linked, in various ways, to the social performance and is often a resource in the research and transmission of these contexts and social, political and cultural conjunctures(Madeira 2012(Madeira , 2016(Madeira , 2017.…”

Arte da performance e a guerra colonial portuguesa: relações no tempo histórico

“…Também os surrealistas em Portugal fizeram algumas intervenções performáti-cas, associadas a maior parte das vezes às suas turtúlias e exposições (Madeira 2007(Madeira , 2016c re-apresentou, ou melhor dito, recriou, por diversas vezes e em diversos contextos esta peça que simbolizava o silêncio imposto durante a ditadura portuguesa até 1974. E, importa, também, referir que Melo e Castro nunca se definiu nem como artista plástico, nem como homem de teatro, mas antes como poeta experimental ou poeta visual, e foi a partir daí que criou esta e outras peças que podemos incluir hoje na história da performance portuguesa.…”