C U V E T E 2017 | Page 36

The second thought is that each of them reveals some personal or common tragedy. Szapocznikow's tragedy was illness and hopeless trial to memorize her own body. Abakanowicz captured the whole community involved in a willingness to have a precious life even though the politics and society environment. Ana Rita Canhão’s work directly guides us to the risk of human persuasion. At the end we can state that each of them can be situated in the chain of historical reflection about the human condition. Thinking about humanity as the set of individual bodies that the artist tries to protect from unification.

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Empty Vessels

Eduardo Marques da Costa

The flourishing of any doctrine or ideology, the stabilization of any regime or group, needs to be able to instill the following generations with the values and ideas it upholds. The children and youth’s indoctrination is essential for any idea to take roots and grow. Throughout the twentieth century every regime and ideology used all the tools available to mold the minds of the younger generations, so as to solidify and perpetuate its positions. This indoctrination was, at least, as relevant as the violence they exerted as means to achieve their goals.

Ana Rita Canhão’s Have You Not Heard? dives into the sounds and illusions of these propaganda machines and their, quite often, sweet and enticing mechanisms. Unlike the violent and tragic tools used by such regimes and ideologies, this side of their political systems is usually either forgotten or still cherished by many as harmless or colorful. Yet, they played an essential role in the solidifying and expansion of these dictatorial or totalitarian regimes and ideologies; and its relevance should not be neglected.

The artist asks the audience to remember such mechanisms for what they were and to look at them in a globalizing perspective so as to allow us to see how they are so similar from one regime to another and from one ideology to another. But this is not merely a glimpse into the past, Ana Rita Canhão seems to ask us if we are listening to our present day world. Are not many of the same tools being used today? As we see the surfacing of so many nationalistic, religious and radical ideas, movements and parties, can we not also see such tools being used on our youth? The artist wants us to ponder, look around and consider how much we are oblivious of what is taking place right under our noses.