14-21
NEW GREY YEARS (he wanted to know who we are)
By João Seguro
In 2014, during the period of economic and social crisis that Portugal had been living through since 2010, and which was a repercussion of the global financial crisis of 2008 – itself aggravated by the request for a financial bailout made by the Portuguese State to the European Troika/I.M.F. while the government of José Socrates was in power – Duarte Amaral Netto began a field work trip that was simultaneously to be a photographic investigation. He would document diverse aspects of the Portuguese territory.
Amaral Netto decided to undertake this journey when, in the aftermath of the huge upheavals felt around the country, a friend had suggested that he emigrate as a way of continuing, in good spirit and with perspectives for the future, that which seemed to be impossible for the younger generations in the country. Facing a decision on emigration, Duarte Amaral Netto decided to set out on a forthright photographic expedition attempting to find out more about the country, which he had been seduced into abandoning. His own ignorance unsettled him. Is it possible to abandon something one doesn’t even know?
His fieldwork consisted of a constant negotiation of his own impressions and the different ways of approaching the objects of observation. Truth, documentation, fiction, memory, narrative, mise-en-scène, geography, tableau, uncertainty, theatricality, opportunity, moment, deception – are the words that have served, to different degrees, to describe the essential characteristics of the photographic work of Duarte Amaral Netto over the last 20 years.
To the paradoxically idealistic and realistic photographic gaze that normally characterised Amaral Netto’s work, one could now add the ethnographic observation, sociological analysis, psychological rapport and existential humanism that so many have questioned over the course of the last century. One recalls the journey José Saramago made in 1979 and 1980, where he travelled from the north to the south of the country, taking notes on the persons, places, cultures and idiosyncrasies of a territory that had just recently come out of dictatorship. Or the journey undertaken by Miguel Torgadecades prior, which resulted in a register that glorified the past and opened up space for a mythicised vision of the nation; or the journeys so many others carried out as theoretical or artistic manifestations that sought to accommodate a vision of the world with the pragmatic knowledge of the geographic space and the territory.
The journey was a tour by car in a straight line. It began to the north of the city of Chaves close to the northern border with Spain and was to end in Portugal’s extreme south. For the duration of one week, Amaral Netto was to feel the pulse of a country, which, while small in territorial terms, revealed itself to be very diverse, heterogeneous and unrepresentable.
The expedition was triggered by a serious sense of incompleteness and ignorance of the real country felt by Amaral Netto and which worsened on a daily basis by the events that took place as a result of the then socio-economic and political condition of Portugal. At the time, the country was just beginning to come out of a period that the then Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, described as being “one of the most difficult in the history of the country since the dictatorship.” But despite all the adverse situations experienced in those years because of the bailout plan, a certain hope was also beginning to emerge. During 2013 the same Pedro Passos Coelho announced, that “(…) in the course of 2013 one can expect an inversion of the recessionary trend”.
Amaral Netto, incredulous at the political stances that predicted the country’s future, saw his journey as a form of confrontation with the realities that the news and statistics did not present. Over the course of that onerous period in the country’s recent history, he asked questions about the country and representation thereof. Gathering, reading and analysing newspapers and other periodicals allowed him to sew together an enormous patchwork quilt (in sociological, economic and cultural terms) of the polyvocal national entity. From there he sought to build an image of the country, which corresponded, not without reason, to a territory that was still stuck in a past and that prevented itself from imagining a future.
In this sense, Gramsci’s famous idea of “[t]he crisis [that] consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”, seemed to fit Portugal of 2014, as if tailor made. We were, in those new “grey years”, condemned to reliving the memory of economic poverty, social divides and runaway unemployment, and facing a general climate of mistrust in the capitalist models imposed by the “European project”. Following the serious drop in buying power that resulted from the adoption of the single currency and the penalising geo-political and commercial conditions that had been imposed on the country, Portugal was going through a period of economic contractions that werevery different to the scenarios anticipated by Passos Coelho in 2012.
Duarte Amaral Netto’s journey was to be carried out in a straight line and the stops were to be calculated by luck, in accordance with the numbers on a Euromillions ticket from the week in which Amaral Netto began his journey, which commenced on 14 July 2014. This gave the journey arbitrariness propitious to the practical and ideological liberty that a project of this nature entailed.
FRONTIER WORLDS – POETIC IMPRECISIONS AND GEO-POLITICAL IMAGES
History throws up clues as to what one is about to see.
Duarte Amaral Netto set out on his journey in northern Portugal; to the north of the city of Chaves and close to the Spanish border, to be exact. Today, the border is a thing of the past and there remain only a few vestiges of its physical presence. The border that separates Portuguese territory from the neighbouring country and the rest of the European continent is now merely administrativeand bureaucratic. The non-existence of borders was one of the founding ideas behind the creation of the European Union and the free movement of people, goods and merchandise; together with the implementation of the single currency, this appears to have created the conditions for the standardisation of lifestyles. What has been the result of this? Is it possible to continue to think of the visual identification of the country as a permanent and stable unit, especially when the historical circumstances of the last 70 years above all remind us of a huge irregularity that calls into doubt any possibility of a stable national identity? Precisely what national identity can one speak of today, knowing that the representation models are always inadequate, incomplete and seldom capable of being inclusive?
The true point of departure for Amaral Netto would seem to be this: to observe and photograph a country that no longer has a concrete image of itself, that is fragmented by the multiple attacks on its socio-cultural and economic uniformity, that has various open wounds left by the drastic political changes that the human and territorial fabric have suffered at least since the Second World War, including the dictatorial regime, the revolution of 1974 and the later attempt to update all this by having the country join what is now the European Union. The image was that of a country that went from crisis to crisis until the now distant crisis of 2010 hit. Amaral Netto took with him the humanistic pictorialism that was common in his profession. He allied with a non-ideological desire to observe (while remaining conscious of the fact that this was an impasse in terms of documental cohesion) and the certainty that he was about to enter an openly political dimension that thus far had existed only in an encoded form in his work.
Aware of the fact that bringing the image’s formal dimension and its potential political content closer together was problematic. Amaral Netto appeared to adopt the humble and singular position of the reluctant observer (and the parallels that can be drawn to those who preceded him on his type of journey are by no means by chance). For the reluctant observer the image was “nothing other than another form of writing, a kind of graphic sign that takes over what it represents, or the form that the latter seems to have, or that which it in essence is”. This demarcation was not meant to distance him from the object of study, but, above all, to support the historicity of his action and the relationship of reciprocity and belonging to the field of the social dynamics that he aimed to observe and comment on.
One of the characteristics of the group of images that make up the work Recta (2014) is the strong inclination towards the landscape. Given the need to report on the presence of human life, the actions involved and other elements of the contemporary material culture, there are other isolated forms of approximation that are also employed. However, the image of the territory is what defines this work. One of the pivotal elements of said visual examination is the image of the interior of a country (and the interiority and desertification of the interior regions in Portugal has been a heightened reality since the mid-20th century), which has been one of the main political problems of the democratic era. The instability caused by the systematic exodus of population from the interior, of citizens heading to the metropolitan and coastal zones, is perhaps the main factor responsible for the demographic imbalances that have negatively affected the economic structure of the country, contributing to a lack of protection for people in the areas of health, education and employment, a drop in the birth rate, a lack of public services, the neglect of the material, tangible and landscape heritage and the resulting losses all these factors together generate and cause.
In a particularly shrewd image in the series of photographs, the viewer is confronted with a small scarp, of the sort one encounters along paths and roads without giving them any further thought.This is a vestige of the land that was stolen from the territory on behalf of a certain idea of progress. The small gradient still bears the marks of the digger that tore at the land in order to enable spatial control and reorganisation. Indeed, many of the images in this collection highlight human action on the natural environment. But this image in particular, in its simplicity, articulates the omnipresence of an idea of progress, which, since the 20th century, has been revealing the dichotomy of the uninhabited territory that bears in its insides the marks that the political centres have chosen for it, against the legitimate interests of the native populations.
Another likewise pointed image shows a medium-sized four-legged animal (a dog?) obliviously walking along a deserted road that runs alongside buildings. Some of the buildings have beencompleted, but one does not know if they are lived in. Others are still to be built. Given the gleam of a natural horizon one can observe from the point where the photographer places the viewer. One can imagine that this is a small, contemporary urban development that has risen rapidly out of the once rural landscape; contributing to what Álvaro Domingues defines as the “transgenic landscape.”
But what seems to really interest Amaral Netto is the phraseology of the territory (to use a term borrowed from Roland Barthes). Phraseology, as an analytical practice, enables one to single out and characterise the elements that make up a sentence or a text, to question its morphology, to attempt to decode the specificities of a certain use of words and of the rules that bring them closer together. By traversing the landscape that unfolds before him like a kaleidoscope of words and that synthetises the myths, actions and memory which the landscape entails as well as the new actions that remake it, the artist speculates on mythical and circumstantial qualities. These allow the viewerto observe the impact of the perfidious socio-political nature of the present, which shamelessly affirms itself in the balance we once recognised in the contrasting pairings of country/city, centre/periphery, so typical of 19th-century societal organisation.
The roughly 150 images that Recta (2014) is composed of, are annotations in which Amaral Netto essays a morphological analysis of the landscape of the national territory by means of the expressive projection of the socio-political circumstances of the moment in history that was the global financial crises and the Programme of Economic and Financial Assistance 2011-2014 in course at the time.
Cars parked outside house gates or on forest paths; people inside cars, parked in residential streets, or driving through the centre of the nearest city; recently built house facades, often still unfinished; gardens and yards broken up, with earth recently removed; factories and industrial constructions, windowless walls, safety walls, the backs of urban developments; abundant vegetation, both natural and humanised; construction sites and building materials. These are the motifs that feature in thelandscape discovered by Amaral Netto, a landscape caught between the idea of the natural world that ceased to exist a long time ago and the new forms of life, which, given the economic instability of those who live from crisis to crisis, turns out to be just a mirage. This image of the country echoes Allan Sekula’s characterisation of Canada in his Geography Lesson, a country that is absorbed by the idea of belonging to a certain North American society by which it is largely ignored. Both the domestic political decision-making centres and those in the wider scope of the European Union likewise largely forget the country Amaral Netto describes. One can really replicate Sekula’s works and affirm that the Portuguese interior occupies a zone of conceptual indifference: ignored, insignificant, at once the same and different, but in ways that do not seem to be important in the “European” scheme of things.
CONTRADICTIONS OF OPTIMISM AND IMAGES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH
During the 2015-2019 period Antonio Costa’s first government was in power. It became known in media speak as the geringonça (obsolete gadget) because, in contrast to what was going on in the rest of Europe at the time, it was formed with the support of a parliamentary majority on the Left.An economic miracle took place. That miracle was based, in particular, on the rise of an economic development model which, given the inability to focus on the mining and processing sectors, dedicated itself to selling those assets that best characterised the country: an average of 2,500 to 3,200 hours of sunshine a year; a podium finish amongst the safest countries in the world according to statistics compiled by Global Peace Index; diverse and largely unexplored landscapes of great natural beauty; a cultural heritage of unique quality and historical value; a gastronomy to match; and attractive and cosmopolitan cities. Add to this list of qualities the low cost of living (an aspect highlighted by many travel sites, making Portugal the veritable El Dorado of contemporary tourism), a direct consequence of absurdly low salary levels, below the average for OECD countries, and a property market logic that corresponded to that remunerative level, albeit with quite a few variables, due to a culture of erratic habitation and disparity of lifestyles in diverse areas of the national territory. It was against this backdrop of heavy commitment to tourism as the driving force of economic development that Amaral Netto produced a large collection of photographs of the interiors of residences, most of which are located in the country’s main cities (Interiors). Amaral Netto had the clearly commercial mission of documenting said interiors so that the owners could advertise them on short-term letting platforms for the tourist market.
This work – technical, neutral, dispassionate and free of ideology – takes on a very important place in the course of the work that Amaral Netto had begun in Recta. Thus it was not, at the outset, creative or artistic work, but commissions that served very clearly defined practical purposes. Avery specific visual language was to be applied, despite Amaral Netto’s determination in satisfying said commission. This group of images enabled Amaral Netto to rethink certain socio-cultural and economic aspects that characterised the fluctuation of the property markets due to the heightened adhesion to the hospitality culture and mass tourism. The photographic investigation he carried out in Recta, while still in the editing phase, was in a way compromised by the market that pressures and asphyxiates the already fragile dynamics of the national housing system. This technical and anonymous work made it possible for Amaral Netto to interpret and synthetise some of those aspects, which, while already present in his previous work, were not yet quite the focal point of his investigative tendencies.
The group of images Amaral Netto has chosen for this exhibition is the connecting line between the image of the country in a perpetual economic and social crisis that is revealed in Recta and the systemic difficulties identified in Raquel (2020). In this family of images, Amaral Netto identifies a radical mechanicity that places them “in opposition to the possibility of a non-ideological aesthetic; for any reaction to an image is rooted in social knowledge – specifically in the social understanding of cultural products”. This body of work is thus, in addition to being a point of contact between the preceding work and the incursion into the openly socio-economic universe of Raquel, an example of critical (self)-deconstruction of the current circumstances of the photography medium and the insidious forms through which a medium with such a revolutionary potential can easily cede to and become comfortable with neo-liberal requirements.
RAQUEL, A GIVEN NAME – THE VOICE OF THE OTHER IN US
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
A voice on the radio asks why certain species of birds migrate and others don’t. That opening line comes as our eyes focus on the fluid rhythm of the lights of the cars on the road at rush hour on one of the expressways into and out of the capital. The response provides the classic explanation in answering the question – competition for food in their original habitat means that some species, mostly those associated with tropical zones, migrate to other geographic regions in search of food.
The camera becomes fixed on a housing development in a dormitory suburb of the capital that is mostly known for housing workers who travel to Lisbon every day in order to support an economy that is principally based on the tertiary sector, and which, at least until the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic, provided the monetary return that is essential for the sustenance of life.
A middle-aged woman wakes up in the living room of a small apartment on the periphery. In between the first things she does in the morning, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette on the balcony, we learn that she lives with an aunt, with whom she exchanges impressions on the day to come. The two women reveal a timid but tender relationship, a friendship that transcends familial affinity – both of them live in a country that is not their own, struggling against the adversities that were imposed upon them, that forced them into emigration and still inscribe deep social and remunerative inequality in their daily life.
The lack of opportunities epitomises the efforts involved in any migrant situation, subject, as it is, to the rules of the dominant system that subjugates, dehumanises, demeans and weakens the vulnerable.
While she is performing her work as a chambermaid in a hotel in the capital we find out her name: Raquel. She takes a break to phone someone, to reschedule a visit for an apartment she wants to rent in another development in the suburbs. At stake is her capacity, in the midst of a health crisis and all the economic and social effects that entails, to find her own place and regain the independence that many immigrants lose when they are forced to share their private space due to financial fragility. She will also have a job interview later, at a company, which, in a move towards regeneration, seeks to hire a salesperson that can bring something new to the business. Raquel is an actress, and that potential seems to be welcomed by the manager carrying out the interview. Acting was not her destiny in the host country, but the manager imagines her showing the products to customers and presenting new products on the social networks and other dissemination platforms.
It is immoral that an actress has to improve her craft on such a stage, but this aspect of the film also aligns with the direction taken by Amaral Netto’s commentary. The character performs her own role, a strange and obscene mise en abyme. That role, like so many others in the history of cinema, has a narrative that needs to be told in flashbacks.
Her name embodies an old dialogue (or a dispute) between two countries and two cultures (betweentwo world views) and exposes the retroactive effects of continuous domination and colonisation. The woman striving for a dignified life in Portugal bears a name that materialises the violence her predecessors have been subjected to since colonial times; a name that functions as a vestige of that domination and is recognised and emphasised by Amaral Netto when he chooses precisely the woman’s name as the title of the film. As Craig Owens, citing Derrida, points out, a given name has the function of “(…) inscribing the person (or the place) it designates in a system of differences, thereby obliterating uniqueness by making identity a function of position within a system. ‘To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute’”. This matter of the name is important because it identifies and raises questions about an imminent “anthropological conflict” that characterises the idea of name-giving as an extension of the subjugation and violence of the colonial past and its subtle continuation in the current socio-economic complex.
The credits reveal to the viewer the fact that Raquel, the film’s title, in addition to being the name of the character Raquel, is also the name of the actress, Maria Raquel Rocha. By means of that approximation, the artist reflects the intricate problematic of the relationship between factual truth and documental proof and the construction of a fictional narrative, for that is one of the fundamental questions of representation.
One of the greatest issues in the representation of a figure – be it in photography, film, literature, a newspaper or on television – is the difficulty in representing that Other without that representation being false, incomplete, inappropriate, inopportune or out of time. That question is amplified when one thinks that, to a subjective Other, be it individual or collective, one can add an inalienable number of points of view of the artist; points of view that here should be understood as natural positions and levels of contact that the artist establishes, not only because of the strategic need of someone who requires that definition, because they are going to represent, but because that position in relation to the Other is assumed, in a way spontaneously, in the dialogue that the observer and the potential representee assume in the real world, as the subject and object of that conversation. It is for this reason that the name Raquel assumes the importance, by calling the ubiquitous “anthropological conflict” contained in the name which invokes the view and language of the oppressor, of simultaneously establishing the basis for that conversation that allows the oppressor’s descendant to add their voice to hers, in a moment of mutual appreciation.
If Amaral Netto’s photographic language is, as we have surmised, a nebulous territory where the rawness of the neutral representation of documental language merges with the poetics of everyday life (perhaps thus opening up another meaning for the idea that photographers, more than creating fantasies, can “add truth to bare facts”, just as Henry Peach Robinson predicted in the late 19thcentury), the truth is that Raquel obliges the viewer to consider the double sidedness of representation.
Thus, the whole historically charged discussion that questions the place of the artist to speak, and their legitimacy to represent or to speak on behalf of an Other, is, in said artist’s work, mediated by an unquestionable personal belief in the naked and likely unprotected positions of his/her interlocutor.
Amaral Netto incorporates in his work the inversion Foucault refers to in his notable conversation with Deleuze and assumes that the Other he is referring to, which may be socially or culturally close to varying degrees, is also an integral part of his personal (hi)story. It is from this shared point, where the personal (hi)stories meet, that Amaral Netto constructs his view of collective historicity in a period of a health crisis that created the conditions for the understanding and sharing of the singularities of the human condition that is dumbfounded by the iniquities of the financial and political system.
In Amaral Netto’s recent work, representations serve, above all, as reflection on the shared points and circumstances that bring the social subject closer to the creative agent and to the figure of the Other, as a personal and social fellow human being. That renovation of the communicative desire can be seen in his previous work, for example in Luda, produced in 2006.
There would thus appear to be an endeavour to use his voice in the service of the excluded or underrepresented Other, after having gained “permission to narrate”. As Gayatri Spivak points out on Derrida, on a rewriting of the utopian structural impulse as a form of “(…) rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us”, that would seem to really be a prerogative that also extends to previous works such as Z or Recta, though less forcefully than in Raquel. Said “permission to narrate” is, of course, symbolic of an important change to Amaral Netto’srepresentation proposal. In his recent work beginning with Recta, Amaral Netto formulates an approach to the reality of his country, in which he amplifies questions on the limits of documental representation and the construction of a fictional narrative that previously formed the core of his investigation, making said approach behold the need for reconciliation that all representation seems to favour today. That change or deviation is rooted in a general discomfort with the socio-cultural circumstances of the life models based on market economics, with the discrepancies that, in a post-industrial development phase, are late in being resolved.
Amaral Netto places Raquel at the centre of a dispute for space in a city that has surrendered to financialisation and is oblivious to the vital needs of its residents. A city, which, as the corollary of the utopian unconditional hospitality Derrida speaks of, is no longer a city but a merciless neo-liberal metropolis. As Pedro Levi Bismarck argues: “if one can speak of a neo-liberal metropolis, then this is not only because neo-liberalism reproduces its own spatialisation – linked to its financial processes – but because it triggers a whole new political economics of urban development that breaks up the relationship between the three fundamental axes that resulted in the social democratic city: the political model (the Social State and Keynesian policies), the production model (Fordism) and the territorial configuration model (the Nation-State)”. It is exactly that post-human city model which is dealt with in Raquel and which Amaral Netto retroactively analyses in Recta and Interiors.
Amaral Netto acquires, in Recta, a dose of projection and identification with his Other (those who live in his country). This allows him – after years of social and economic crisis – to break with the prohibitive ethics that the indignity of representing the Other has forced, through the use of certainrepresentation discourses since the 1960s, so as to present a disturbing interpretation that includes him as an interested party in the reconfiguration of said representation of the Other. The aim is not to enact the bourgeois conscience of those who “cannot or may not represent themselves”, as Marx argued in The Eighteenth Brumaire; it rather tends to question the limits of the representational apparatus and the difficulty of the photographic image in a world where everything, even the very notion of representation, seems to have been restricted. In praxis, and as Said points out, “where are facts if not embedded in history, and then reconstituted and recovered by human agents stirred by some perceived or desired or hoped-for historical narrative whose future aim is to restore justice to the dispossessed?”
At the end of a workday, which began with the first rays of the sun, and included conversations, an interview, and a search for a place to live, Raquel is surprised by the news that the house she was looking to rent was no longer available. Tired and disillusioned, she returns to Lisbon like someone returning to a place where they do not recognise her.