Different Isms. Pessoa and the Avant-Garde
With the participation of Fernando Cabral Martins and Marta Soares. Moderated by João Fernandes
Held on 07 feb 2018
Despite an interest in the predominant European movements at the time — Vorticism in Britain, Italian Futurism, Ultraism in Spain — Pessoa was never a mimetic follower of the innovations stemming from the cultural, economic and political centres of his time. Instead, he preferred to plot his own route, incorporating Portuguese idiosyncrasies through a series of “isms”: Paulism, Intersectionism and Sensationism
The first, Paulism, identified turn-of-the-century languages in Portugal, giving a name to the textualities and visualities of Decadentism which were linked to Saudosismo, a form of regeneration of symbolism in Portugal. More tightly bound to avant-garde languages, Intersectionism counterposed the multiplicity of Cubist representation with an intersection of planes and references devoid of a figure or unifying principles. Sensationism was the predominant project of the theoretical body of Pessoan aesthetics and philosophy, in particular when its central role in the Portuguese avant-garde is focused upon. Based on the axiom of “feeling everything in every way”, uttered by the heteronym Álvaro de Campos, this ism described the convergence of all feelings, no matter how contradictory.
Coined and embarked upon in different theoretical and poetic texts, these isms fastened, in a programmatic framework, Pessoa’s textual output and the output of other avant-garde poets together, as well as other visual and performance works in the Portuguese avant-garde. Therefore, they are pivotal for gaining awareness and formulating an account of modernity which is at once plural and diverse.
Related activity inside the programme
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
illycaffèParticipants
Fernando Cabral Martins is a professor of Portuguese literature at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He coordinated Dicionário de Fernando Pessoa e do Modernismo Português in 2008 and has published Introdução ao Estudo de Fernando Pessoa (2014).
João Fernandes is deputy director of the Museo Reina Sofía and co-curator of the exhibition Pessoa: All Art Is a Form of Literature.
Marta Soares is an art historian and a specialist in Portuguese modern art. Alongside Raquel Henriques da Silva, she co-curated the exhibition Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso / Porto Lisboa / 2016 – 1916 (Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Porto, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art – Museu de Chiado, Lisbon, 2016).
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
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Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
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The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
Situated Voices 36
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The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
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The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.
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His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.