tabu |taboo
print on verona paper | 2007 | 2/3

A discussion with Irene Pimentel (Historian/Researcher) about censorship in the Estado Novo strengthened the will to work on that subject. How censorship was enforced, how writers, jounalists and artists used metaphors to convey their messages beneath the eyes of the censors – such were some of the questions posed. Creativity and freedom of speach were supressed and a new means of expression developed, one that made a full use out of figures of style. The popular variety theater, cartoons, social intervention music and press satyres – published in newspapers such as “Mosca”, “O Diabo”, “Sol Nascente”, “Almanaque”, Árvore” – were some of the genres that expressed the veiled subversive messages.
A text by César Príncipe well illustrates the nature of censorship during the Estado Novo, and also my intention with this project: “There was no prior exame. No political prisioners. No suicides. No shanty towns. No colera. No raising of the prices. No abortions. No war. No hippies. No strikes. No drugs. No flue. No homossexuals. No crisis. No massacres. No nudity. No fluddings. No yellow fever. No imperialism. No hunger. No rapes. No polution. No derailments. No tifo. No Communist Party. No frauds. No extra-matrimonial affairs. No racism. And the rulers (impavid, serene, luminous) didn’t travel, didn’t get sick, didn’t suffer car accidents, didn’t eat, didn’t improvise and, when they were discharged from duty, they always did it “at their own request”.
The words used in the work were chosen because they were key-words of the Estado Novo. Others were chosen because they were excluded from its political discourse. The goal was to investigate the evolution of each word through the years, its change from dictionary to dictionary, from author to author.

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video | color | loop | 2007
The power to act is one of Man’s main features, making him enter the public sphere, exhibit himself and start new endless and potentially timeless processes. When Man is enforcing action, he seizes to be a slave of needs, leaving behind him work and labour and becoming free. He desintagles himself from the domestic realm, the oikos, and enters the polis, the political space. Action itself is freedom, and one is only free in public spaces. With the growing elimination of the political dimension from life, the public space has diminished and there is the risk of a progress towards slavery, making the animal laborans take over the zoon politikon.
An action of great repetitiveness, sincronized or not, intending to symbolize the boredom of existence, the absence of meaning in human life. The non-stop search for something – the “I” – using the house as a metaphor for the mind and the body.