Wposters, emblems, stickers, postcards, banners, ashtrays, plates, discs, objects of the most diverse natures and from the most different political parties, which illustrate the enormous difference in the public visual landscape that emerged after the end of the dictatorship are part of the exhibition “Signs of Freedom — Iconography of Democracy in the Ephemera Archive”which is open to the public from April 14 to May 28, at Tribunal da Boa Hora, in Lisbon.
The exhibition forms part of the celebrations of the 25th of April in the municipality of Lisbon and intends to publicize what was the history of the Carnation Revolution, told from these “iconic objects”, said the councilor for Culture, Diogo Moura, on a visit to the press.
The exhibition is part of a larger program of the municipality, running until the end of the month, with various initiatives in museums and municipal libraries, which end on April 24, with a concert at Terreiro do Paço.
“There are practically no captions, because the idea was to portray a fundamental aspect of freedom”, clarified historian José Pacheco Pereira, responsible for the Ephemera archive, for whom the exhibition intends, more than showing the “signs of freedom”, to portray “the joy of freedom”.
“Only those who did not know the period before the 25th of April do not understand to what extent this landscape instills joy, I like to live, to talk, to discuss, to differ, which are fundamental characteristics of democracy”, he said.
Pacheco Pereira considers that this is “also an exhibition against censorship and against new forms of censorship, which lives off iconography, images and objects”, through which an attempt is made to “portray the variability of political action”.
Emphasizing that it is not important to see which party is most represented, because the intention was never to make an accounting, the official stated that “what matters is that the objects translate the plurality of political life and the plurality of images”.
From a set of pieces spread over several rooms and arranged chromatically, José Pacheco Pereira highlighted 10 objects as “being the most significant, which are not only valid in themselves, from an aesthetic point of view, but also from a historical point of view”.
The first is a poster of a woman without legs, part of the “We want to respond” series from a CDS campaign in 1976, which, at the time, provoked very negative reactions, given the violence of the image.
In glass displays with several pieces, the bronze bust of Vasco Gonçalves, by Abílio Belo Marques (1926-2004), stands out, a series of three interchangeable cubes, dated 1976/77, representing Mário Soares, Álvaro Cunhal , Isabel do Carmo and Arnaldo de Matos, as well as an orange Barcelos rooster, used by PSD candidate Fernando Reis in the campaign for Barcelos in 2009.
“One of the best examples of the arrival of democracy” is a set of pocket calendars and stickers, which were a cheap way to advertise a candidacy, mainly in the first municipal elections, without ‘design’, without ‘marketing’, nor agencies of communication when resources were scarce.
JSD’s “little orange” in sponge, from the 1990s, a small ceramic statue of Álvaro Cunhal dressed as a Futebol Clube do Porto player and a cup with the emblem of Sporting, from 1974, when this club became the first champion of football in freedom, are other pieces highlighted by Pacheco Pereira.
One of the pieces that Pacheco Pereira highlighted is a ceramic mug, which represents António Guterres naked “showing the ‘stick'” to the opposition, with the inscription “the opposition that puts the stick” on the belly.
According to the historian, “everything in this mug is a ‘casting’ error, Guterres being represented, and being represented as tough”.
At the end of the exhibition, a ‘slideshow’ of around 200 images of graffiti and graffiti from across the country from recent years can be seen.
“We don’t collect anything for aesthetic reasons, there are many objects here that are ‘kitsch’. Sometimes the more ‘kitsch’, the better”, stated Pacheco Pereira, stressing that the Ephemera collection, “the largest private archive in Portugal and, probably , the largest in Europe”, has six kilometers of shelves, more than 250,000 titles, more than 500,000 pamphlets and thousands of photographs and objects.
On the choice of the Tribunal da Boa Hora to present this exhibition, Pacheco Pereira recalled that this was “one of the most sinister places of the dictatorship, where trials of political prisoners were held, which were an authentic puppet” and where, often, even the lawyers were arrested.
In these trials, the political prisoner was condemned before entering the room, accompanied by the escort of the PIDE (International and State Defense Police), political police of the dictatorship.
The coordinator of the Ephemera project also added that under the protocol with the Lisbon City Council, this exhibition is just part of the “great exhibition of the 25th of April” that will take place next year.
This larger exhibition will have “iconography, documents, films, enormous amount of material, in most cases unpublished, all original, and later including unique documents about the 25th of April that, in some cases, were never seen”.
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