Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 27

Another installation titled Inventário: Mensagens de Natal (����) features
a number of television screens endlessly repeating original footage of
Christmas messages the soldiers had for those at home. These messages
were transmitted by Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP) from the theaters of
war, intended to document the soldiers’ wellbeing. In the installation’s loop,
however, the standardized texts the soldiers were permitted to utter prove
exactly the opposite (Figures � and �).
Aerogramas para 2010 (Figures ��–��) engages with a free transport system
for messages from the colonies, offered by Transportes Aéreos Portugueses
(TAP). Anticipating terminology to be introduced in the next section, it can
be said that this transport system served as a link between those who had
knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering and those who had not; between
those who personally experienced actual suffering and those who did not;
and between those who took risks and those who did not. This system is
alluded to in a fusion of drawings and handwritten texts reproducing letters
or instructions for use from the original aerograms (Porfírio ����:��). The
texts include statements by nowadays rather well-known figures such as
Antunes whom I quoted above. More important than the current celebrity
status of some of the letters’ authors are two things. First, as Rothberg
(����:���) notes in his discussion of Charlotte Delbo’s Les belles lettres,
“memory in the form of letters (understood broadly) can take part in the
necessary task of re-forming what counts as public and, therefore, what is
politically thinkable.” Secondly, the letters were written by people who, in
contrast to the artist, were on location when something happened to which
they could—and did—testify based on own experience; they were eyewitnesses
of both the suffering they inflicted on others and the suffering
inflicted on them. These texts increase both the authenticity of the artworks
and their emotional and affective power. They strengthen what I would like
to call the artworks’ having-been-there-ness.
Figure 8. Manuel Botelho,
Inventário: Mensagens de
Natal (����); photograph
taken at the occasion of
the exhibition Professores,
Centro de Arte Moderna,
Fundação Calouste
Gulbenkian, Lisbon,
December �, ����
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