Galerias Municipais is pleased to announce the launch of the publication for Duarte Amaral Netto´s exhibition 14-21, which is on view at Galeria Boavista through September 26.
Duarte Amaral Netto’s exhibition 14-21 at Galerias Municipais spans a cycle of seven years between 2014 and 2021. The representation of this time frame opens with photographs taken by the artist during a one-week trip from Portugal’s North to South in the midst of the 2014 crisis and the European Troika/I.M.F. interventions in Portugal. The exhibition closes with a new film that forms a critical assessment of the real estate market, which seemingly led the way out of that state crisis (for some) and resulted in a housing crisis (affecting others) during the years that followed, and accompanies us into the present.
This publication unites two new texts alongside reproductions of the works produced for the exhibition at Galeria da Boavista. Under the title NEW GREY YEARS (he wanted to know who we are), João Seguro introduces the work by Duarte Amaral Netto, recalls José Saramago’s journey from 1979/1980 from Portugal’s North to South, and outlines the moments of reliving the memory of economic poverty, social divides and runaway unemployment during the 2010s in Portugal. Seguro connects Amaral Netto’s photographic series Recta (2014) and the new work Raquel (2020), both of which resonate with the Portuguese socio-economic phenomena that coined the epochs they were produced in, with photographic languages developed by Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler as well as notions of the Other, as expressed in Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida’s writing.
Architect and researcher Ana Gago’s essay for this publication specifically introduces the powerful co-dependency between tourism and property, and the resulting real estate and rental prices, which cater to a global market where average local earners are unable to find affordable accommodation or climb onto the real estate ownership ladder. Gago expertly explains overtourism (“excessive tourism”), which haunted Lisbon (as well as Porto and the Algarve) in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The exhibition, as well as this book, can thus be considered as documentation of the past decade, an encouragement that change is possible, and as an invitation to collaboratively develop the tools that help us shape a sustainable, inclusive and diverse city, which does not render itself dependent on any one type of economy.