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S de Saudade, Restos de Colecção

In this performance, Senhor S is confronted with the people who circulate in the public space. Sitting inside a shop window and surrounded by obsolete objects that take us back to another time, he reads the newspapers and magazines of that time that announce the death of Salazar.

This performance integrates the series of works S de Saudade started in 2007 and has developed up to the present day.
The S de Saudade project consists of a set of works, a critical view of the dictatorial period of the Estado Novo, where painting, photography, drawing, performance and video complement each other in images that question the role of the visual arts in representation and at the service of political power.
The study of history is always a study of its celebrated forms as told by those who hold that power. Art must serve to question and eventually refute the fixed and standardized forms, from generation to generation, of collective memory. This work relates to forms, means and methods, images and their stories that have become a common “heritage”.
It is not the personage of the dictator that is questioned, but the symbolism itself concentrated – a figure of the absurd – as a representative of a collective past.

Some have refused to clean the latrines of memory. Interestingly, this fashion has remained practically unchanged over the last four decades in Portugal and despite certain families hiding these memories in their closets, the present times are proving to be fruitful for keeping the moths away and publicly displaying these vintage garments.
My generation suffered the blowout from a frustrated revolution and the following ones with the collateral damage that resulted.
There is an urgency for critical thinking. In a society of flexible customs, this slow erasure of memory corresponds to collective amnesia.
Time is fickle. Our children do not deserve a cowardly country.

2011, Paulo Mendes, S de Saudade, Restos de Colecção, performance-installation for Rubi shop, Porto.

Paulo Mendes

Paulo Mendes is a visual artist, curator of exhibitions and producer of cultural projects. His work is presented both individually and collectively since the early 1990s, and is represented in numerous public and private collections. Over the last thirty years, he participated in approximately three hundred curatorial and performative projects, having curated and produced more than seventy exhibitions, both independent and institutional, which marked the work development of a new generation of creators and provided him with an extensive knowledge of the Portuguese artistic practices. (www.paulomendes.org)