Pedro Adão e Silva was speaking at the first official public meeting with the Minister of Culture of Brazil, Margareth Menezes, in the “Luso-Brazilian Cultural Dialogues” initiative, at Casa da América Latina, in Lisbon.
Margareth Menezes is in Portugal as part of the five-day State visit of the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which begins today.
A Brazilian artist with more than thirty years of career, and who took over the Brazilian portfolio of Culture, Margareth Menezes recognized “the emotion” for having her first intervention outside Brazil in Portugal, stressing that her focus is to represent the cultural diversity of the country .
There is a “cultural and ethnic melting pot”. “We are giving the opportunity to have a new way of making this culture. We want this diversity represented. We are living this moment in Brazil, with this thought and to resume what was interrupted (with the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro)”, he said.
In a crowded session, Pedro Adão e Silva said that this is “a moment of mutual discovery” and “an enormous joy to have Brazil back”, after an “interregnum too long for everyone”, in a reference to the four years of administration of the predecessor of Lula da Silva.
“There is a responsibility in the way we project ourselves, because there is a lot of reciprocal ignorance, in the way we look at Brazilians and how Brazilians look at us, the Portuguese. It is a time to thaw these reciprocal images. preserves an identity that probably never corresponded to an existing identity and is not the one we have today”, said the Portuguese Minister of Culture.
On the eve of the celebration of the 49th anniversary of the Revolution of April 25, 1974, Pedro Adão e Silva said that it is necessary to look at the history of the country.
“We have to know how to live up to this pride in shared history (with Brazil) and not forget that if we have a shared history it is because it is the result of a history of violence, of the way in which Europeans arrived in South America. these historical, far-reaching, complex processes, full of contradictions, must be faced by facing this complexity”, he underlined.
In the session, both remembered that the Portuguese language unites the two countries, but it was the music that served as a bridge, with Minister Margareth Menezes taking the microphone and singing “O que é, O que é?”, by the Brazilian Gonzaguinha, accompanied by a large part of the audience, at times, moved.
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