EXHIBITION Out of the Monument Souvenirs from the 1940 Exhibition From June 25th until 30th October 2016 Monument to the Discoveries COORDINATION Margarida Kol de Carvalho Maria Cecília Cameira EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Conceição Romão CURATORS Maria Cardeira da Silva
(coordenation)
Marta Prista
RESEARCH AND COLLECTING TEAM Maria Cardeira da Silva, Marta Prista, Sandra Oliveira, Laura Almodovar e Sílvia Gomes CRIA - Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia / Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa ART CONCEPTION AND REALIZATION António Viana PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Nuno Magalhães SCIENTIFIC-EDUCATIONAL SUPPORT Serviço Educativo Padrão dos Descobrimentos GRAPHIC DESIGN OF THE EXHIBITION Rita Cruz Neves GRAPHIC LAYOUT - GRAPHICAL MATERIALS Oland - Creative Designation Of Origin CONSTRUCTION AS Pinheiro, Lda VINYLS AND WALLPAPER Escarigo Factory - Centro de Produção Digital AUDIOVISUAL PROJECT GMSC - Informática e Audiovisuais, Lda LIGHTING PLAN Vitor Vajão SUBTITLING Sara David Lopes / Il Sorpasso TRANSLATION Kennis Translations e Melinda Eltenton
Padrão dos Descobrimentos Avenida Brasília, 1400-038 Tel. 213 031 950 www.padraodosdescobrimentos.pt
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS António Viana Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa | Fotográfico Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo Biblioteca Camões | Biblioteca Municipal de Lisboa Biblioteca de Arte – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Biblioteca e Arquivo Histórico | Ministério da Economia Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal Carlos Caria Cesário Pires da Silva Cinemateca Portuguesa | ANIM Colégio de Santa Doroteia | Irmãs Doroteias Ecomuseu Municipal do Seixal Eduardo Kol de Carvalho Elsa Peralta Emília Carlos Espaço Memória | Arquivo Municipal Barreiro Família Henriques Família Melo e Sousa Fernando Azevedo Fernando Motta Francisca Bagulho Francisco Freire Fundação António Quadros Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações Gabinete de Estudos Olisiponenses Gabriel Prista Serpa Global Media Group Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa Henrique Burnay-Bastos Humberto Azevedo Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda Joana Bagulho Joana Lucas João Alpuim Botelho João Cravela Antunes Joaquim Vitorino José Bento dos Santos José Luís Mendes José Manuel Gaspar Nero Leitão e Irmão – Joalheiros Liliette Cardeira da Silva Luís Nunes dos Santos Maria Isabel de Campos Andrada Oom de Mello Maria Manuela Paiva Antunes Maria Margarida de Campos Andrada Oom de Mello Miguel Costa Museu da Carris Museu do Vidro | Marinha Grande Museu Manuel Bulhosa, Clube de Futebol "Os Belenenses” Nuno Soares Paulo Marcelo Pedro Prista Rancho das Ceifeirinhas | Anços – Soure Rancho Regional de Veiros – Estarreja Sílvia Gomes Sociedade Central de Cervejas e Bebidas, SA. Sociedade de Instrução e Recreio Areosense
THE VISITORS
AMAZEMENT AND THE SENSES
These are the people who visited Belém and the Portuguese World Exhibition, co-authors of the exhibition now on display: 28 women and men, all of whom were children or young people aged between 3 and 20 at the time of the event. They were the children of factory or shipyard workers, of dressmakers, of the architects and artists who made up the tribe of paintbrushes who assembled the 1940 Exhibition, of housewives, sailors, prominent republican figures and swimming teachers, some of whom opposed the Salazar regime and some of whom accepted it. Some were residents of Belém and other areas of Lisbon; some came to the capital for a one-off visit.
Yet there were others who, oblivious to the movies and the official mouthpiece of the National Broadcast, saw the planes flying over Lisbon and became disgusted by those who were circumventing the blockade in order to carry supplies to Germany, taking them away from a city where hunger was rife. Travelling was difficult and expensive, and information was censored by the PVDE (Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado, which would later become the PIDE). Everyday interactions and contact with the outside world hinged on a profoundly unequal distribution of resources and education.
A Tagus that overshadowed the tank.
Key differences in family background, gender, class, type of household, culture and literacy have shaped the course of their lives and have evidently had a bearing on the way in which they remember things. All of them bespeak specific spheres of Portuguese society that intersected rarely but were instantly identifiable to one another. Amélia Rei, Ângela Lucas, Aníbal Vicente, Antónia Guterres, Antonieta Roldão, Armando Nazaré, Carlos Lopes, Celeste do Ó, Cesário Pires da Silva, Emília Carlos, Fernando Azevedo, Hortense Lapa, Humberto Azevedo, Isabel Cottinelli Telmo, José Carlos Antunes, José Pedro Martins Barata, Lina Branco, Manuel Broco, Manuel Revez, Manuel Sá Marques, Maria de Lourdes Alves, Maria de Lourdes Batista, Maria de Lourdes Campos, Maria José Sousa Ribeiro, Maria Luísa Blanc, Maria Manuela Antunes, Victor Coimbra, Virgínia Monteiro.
Rua de Macau Col. Família Melo e Sousa Transport and Portuguese World Exhibition tickets, 1940 Col. Carlos Caria
This is an exhibition about recollections of another exhibition.
REMEMBERING FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING AGAIN Cable Car Col. Irmãs de Santa Doroteia
Colonial Section Col. Estúdio Casimiro Vinagre Biblioteca de Arte (FCG)
The Archive, which, like photography and tourism, is a Modern invention, gives precedence to the eye as the chief organ for sensing and registering experiences, vouching for their authenticity. However, the memory retains emotional and sensory experiences that go well beyond merely gazing. The surprise and amazement that these visitors felt when faced with the innovations and technology flaunted in the exhibition, or their indifference or outright revolt against that ostentation, which they felt to be specious and staged, the smell of paint, coffee and elephant dung from the Historical Parade, the feeling of being out of place or disquieted by the displays relating to race and naked bodies in the Colonial Section, the heat, the sense of smallness when looking up at the sheer scale of the pavilions, the fear of losing one’s parents in the crowds, the sounds of the Philips speakers, the colonial flavour of the foods on sale at the event, all of this shaped different memories, which could not possibly be condensed down to an index card or even a photograph.
Although originally made of plaster and intended to be a temporary exhibit, the Exposição do Mundo Português (Portuguese World Exhibition), which opened in 1940, made a significant contribution to the composition of the nation’s symbolic cartography and memory. This cartography was reproduced in the many publications that lauded the Estado Novo, in formal records and archives, in the blueprints for the pavilions, in the official photographs, and in the official broadcasts and films released by the regime. It became indelibly inscribed upon the area of Belém, some decades later, with the rebuilding of the Monument to the Discoveries in stone. The exhibition that is now being presented intends to reveal personal cartographies and unscripted recollections out of the Monument, going beyond the institutional records and memories recorded in the official archives and monuments.
That Tagus was festooned with flags commemorating the founding of Portugal for the bicentennial Great Exhibition, celebrating the consolidation of the nation, but above all that of the Estado Novo, with its pavilions and its spectacular Water Fountain, its speeches and erudite concerts, its folkloric dance groups and Verde-Gaio ballets, its parades and pageants for the Portuguese Youth. This Tagus dragged Portugal away from its dead-end somnolence, ushering it into a world of pomp and merriment that camouflaged the repression with acts of Amnesty, welcoming foreigners, settlers and people from the provinces on pilgrimages like the journey to Fátima, drawing attention to the Portuguese World and proclaiming to everyone else that Portugal was not a small country.
A Sunday at the Cruz Quebrada beach PT-TT-EPJS-SF-001-001-0076-2410O - Imagem cedida pelo ANTT
Those who visited the Portuguese World Exhibition talk about their recollections and things that they have forgotten in equal measure. They talk about the strain of remembering, and the obstacles and distractions in their way, but also about the joy of being able to recover their experiences of the past today, in their own way. They waver between vague memories and feeling as though they are being transported back to that day. They apply their memories to the traces of the past or lament the disappearance of things that would have made them more present. As they go back through time, they variously experience feelings of longing, regret or scorn, and relive feelings of happiness, sadness or indifference. They remember the very act of remembering and recognise its ephemeral nature.
THE TANK AND THE TAGUS
THE WAR AND RECREATION
Over the course of a year, which roughly equates to the time taken to prepare the Portuguese World Exhibition, a team of anthropologists interviewed Portuguese women and men who visited the Exhibition as children or teenagers. The exhibition is based on their recollections, recorded in video and supplemented by small objects and photographs that evoke sensory impressions and personal emotions. With these memories we set off from the bank of the River Tagus, leaving any thought of reconstructing events behind, and simply wander around Belém and other neighbourhoods in the city as they were at the height of World War II, ranging between humdrum life and grandiose spectacles, between power and resistance, between poverty, work and entertainment, between amazement and the commonplace.
How the needed children play in Lisbon PT-TT-EPJS-SF-001-001-0071-5225N - Imagem cedida pelo ANTT
They discern the same sense of transience in the whole Portuguese World Exhibition project, which for some started with demolished buildings and evictions, and for others only came to an end in February 1941, when a hurricane hit the country, sinking the Nau de Portugal.
It is our hope that this exhibition will jog and elicit other private and personal memories of Belém, which tend to be overshadowed by its monuments. Swimmers saluting the Chief of State at the Nautical Afternoon Infante D. Henrique PT-TT-EPJS-SF-001-001-0076-2612O - Imagem cedida pelo ANTT
Today’s visitors are also invited to add their own recollections to a new archive, entitled Fora do Padrão (Out of the Monument), which will enter into a dialogue with the historical archives and the Memory that was enshrined by major celebratory events held in Belém at the behest of the Estado Novo.
Refugee children departing to America in the Mousinho PT-TT-EPJS-SF-001-001-0080-1232P - Imagem cedida pelo ANTT
The Germans entered Paris just a few days before the opening of the Portuguese World Exhibition on 23 June 1940. In the midst of its festivities, Lisbon was defying Europe: ‘How can they target me when I am putting so much effort into not hiding away? When I am showing myself to be so vulnerable? wrote Saint-Exupéry, one of the many foreigners and refugees on their way to USA who found shelter in Lisbon.
Write to arquivoforadopadrao@egeac.pt
to share your reminiscences.
Nau Portugal Col. Família Melo e Sousa
Visiting the Exhibition Col. Manuel Broco
Yet neither the refugees, nor the lack of coal, sugar and olive oil stopped many of the Portuguese visitors from seeing (or remembering) the war as a show happening in another country. Some of them were already accustomed to hunger, deceived and sustained by what was known as Sidónio’s soup (from the soup kitchen). And it did not interfere with the playtime enjoyed by other boys and girls, nor the leisurely pursuits of adolescents: trips to theatre shows that gave them a window to the world; going to Cruz Quebrada beach, to the other bank of the river, or out to Estoril, which had now been given a certain glamour by the exiles; frequenting recreational clubs, pubs with bench seats or tea dances; playing board games.
The tank was the tank in the Jardim Colonial where the children of the sporting club Belenenses would learn to swim. For the duration of the Exhibition, it was home to a number of crocodiles.
They tell us that memory is our awareness out of time. Our memory stems from our own efforts at remembering in the present, an endeavour that is constantly being renewed. Our memory it is not the memory that lies dormant, on what other people, today or in times gone by, have fashioned for us.
Here the tank serves as a metaphor for the way in which memories of everyday life in the different neighbourhoods of Lisbon, particularly Belém, were eclipsed by the construction of the Exhibition, which led to facilities being demolished and repurposed, along with the rerouting of the trams that went to Pedrouços. This was the Belém of the builders who toiled at the sites out at Alcanena, of factory and trade workers, of custard tarts and beer tarts, of republican associations and recreational clubs, of the old market, the schools, the shipyards and the beach beside the Torre de Belém, of fishing boats and the docks swarming with submarines and aircraft. The Tagus was the river that served the port of Lisbon and the industrial sites on its opposite bank, where the workers were oppressed. One had to cross it in order to reach the beach at Caparica or buy coal. It was where the cod-fishing boats were blessed as though they were Caravels heading out on major expeditions, where the Nautical Afternoons took place, and where the Nau de Portugal berthed during the Portuguese World Exhibition. Here, the Tagus is a metaphor for memories of a Portugal that the regime sought to keep as both provincial and cosmopolitan.
Effects of the cyclone PT-TT-EPJS-SF-001-001-0079-0315P - Imagem cedida pelo ANTT