Projects

A Tradição como Aventura

Installation composed of reproductions of a hellenistic profile (9 gelatin silver prints, 127.5 × 80 cm), altered texts by Laing and Saint Augustine (2 gelatin silver prints, 127.5 × 80cm) and one or two Mandalas (variable technic and dimensions), 1978.


My secret wish (conviction, faith...) is that their [other artists'] production, their work or process, becomes so intimate to me that I'll turn into the respective author! I have made films, audiovisual works, videos, photographic series, happenings, installations... and I continue to produce. But the traces or the products of my actions only make sense with the works of others, the Portuguese aesthetic operators to begin with; and beyond that first horizon, all the other ones.
All the other ones that have added something to this avid being, Me. (...) tradition is an adventure, or there is no adventure without tradition. So although this "art" is fairly cosmopolitan, it clearly echoes the sea from Fernando Pessoa's Ode Marítima or from Fernão Mendes Pinto's Peregrinações; the rigorous calculations of Almada Negreiros or the Olympias of Camões. Cosmopolitanism is aesthetic, ethics are vernacular.

Ernesto de Sousa, "Uma Cena (Moderna) Portuguesa; ou uma Tentativa para um Canibalismo de Amor", catalogue of the exhibition "25 Artistas Portugueses Hoje", MAC, São Paulo, 1981.


This installation's presentation at Galeria Quadrum also had three more panels with pages from the foldout books (books-in-progress) This is My Body nr. 3, This is My Body nr. 4 and Nomes Próprios e Impróprios. The exhibition aimed to promote a discussion about the social space and the sacred space and included a get-together area, with documentation of other of Ernesto's activities, and a panel for audience interventions.

Versions presented at:
"A Tradição como Aventura", Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, November 1978.
"25 Artistas Portugueses Hoje", Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, September-October 1981.
"Itinerários", Galeria Almada Negreiros, Lisbon, May-June 1987.