Alice Geirinhas’ Existem Pedras nos Olhos [There are Stones in the Eyes] opened in February, but it dates from March. All feminist struggles are said to belong to March. This is not stated by the artist, who turns her practice into everlasting resistance, without paying any heed to the whims of the month. Among others, the Guerril-la Girls have said so in a pop-quiz directed at the institutional art system: “if February is Black History Month and March is Women’s History Month, what happens the rest of the year?”. Their answer is obvious: “discrimination”. Nevertheless, we must consider that the March “stage” is an opportunity to revitalise the struggle that never ends, but reverberates until emancipation.

This “March”, Galeria Quadrum offers us an aesthetic proposal for feminist action, through Alice Geirinhas’ imagination. Indeed, the imagination is common: between a plethora of media and devices, we are introduced both to Portuguese cultural memory – of what it was like to be a woman – and to the artist’s personal and intimate memory. Between the archive, memorabilia and authorial output, we are taken to a very familiar territory. I must point out that this feeling of proximity to Geirinhas’ space of resistance also came about for me, especially because of two factors that influenced my perception of the exhibition: the fact that I went to visit her on Election Sunday and the fact that I went with my mother. Two happy coincidences. With the “new” emergence of the extreme right and neoliberalism, fifty years after the collapse of “our” fascism, I fully believe that this exhibition’s curatorship, through Geirinhas’ practice, is an attempt to rouse the masses who have resigned themselves to the “state of affairs”. With my mother at my side, I could get more involved in a memorial imagination that is not mine (although it has become mine through behaviour and communication), but that of the generation born in the 60s of the previous century.

In truth, Alice Geirinhas’ exercise in archival appropriation promises and delivers a redeeming of history through memory: “Democracy Yes, Phallocracy No”; “Women Decide!”; “Out with Them, This is Ridiculous”. These words are torn from the windows of the gallery’s main façade. The artist and curator Ana Anacleto tell us that this site-specific work – conceived to be seen from the outside, i.e. by passers-by and not just gallery visitors – was built from a sample of slogans found on banners used at the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLM) Demonstration/Performance on January 13, 1975, at Parque Eduardo VII. The words break out of the windows covered in the same white as the bordering wall, resembling the transgressive and subversive graffiti that we see all over the city – they are almost prompting the Urban Hygiene department to clean them up, as a result of the aesthetics and the use of slogans (even today), tenets of transgressive creative writing. Actually, the exhibition is centred around the event described above, which has been deeply misunderstood and overlooked – and also acts as a critical review of this historical episode. The movement (MLM) behind this manifesto included writer, poet, feminist and author Maria Teresa da Horta, who wrote the verse that titles the exhibition – from her book Minha Senhora de Mim, censored by the PIDE/DGS in 1971.

The memory of what it was (and is) like to grow up a woman in Portugal is shown among personal objects representing cultural memory – among the Anita and Carochinha books -, while others only refer to personal memory – of what it was like to grow up as Alice in a dictatorial Portugal – and an authorial output that tries to contradict and subvert the “capitalist disciplining of women” as Silvia Federici, quoted by the curator, describes it. Using various media and devices, we are taken into a provocative, erotic and critical environment where, by means of a poetic and humorous disposition, a historical revision of female identity and sexuality is offered – one that longed for an integral and transversal liberation after the Carnation Revolution, but which is still pending the honouring of this promise, extended to everyone.

Obviously, cultural memory and personal memory converge in the anti-fascist struggle narrative, distancing itself from the Salazar’s mantra “God, Fatherland, Family” by subverting it: “I’m going to stop believing in God and. when I grow up. I’m never going to get married,” says a comic strip called Como Eu Sou Assim. I recall these promises in the feminist struggle of that (and perhaps my) generation. I’m reminded of the poetic-comic tone of Geirinhas’ creative claims, where subversion is probably above reason, a disposition that functions in the same way as the stages of a revolution.

A sense of community and sorority is visible when she adopts or integrates the work of other artists who have shared (and still share) the same anxieties, reflected in her creative work. From recovering a work by Paula Rego, in her series about abortion, to the section Mulheres na BD that she designed for the fanzine Decadente, featuring a selection of female comic book authors, a kind of quasi-Warburgian archive is built up, based on a feminist imaginary applied to post-modern and post-dictatorial Portugal. The rhizomes behind this image library break out of “dialogical universes” which, by operating within the contradictions of the bourgeois public arena, openly and playfully lay bare its imaginary flaws and allow us – creatively, collectively and critically – to reflect on the issues that Alice Geirinhas has been tackling throughout her career: “sexuality, gender identity, resisting the historical, the politics of the private and the poetics of the political,” according to the curator.

As a final note, Geirinhas’ work clearly connects with materialist, class-conscious artistic research. Her creative work, on display in this exhibition, is not guided by the logic or criteria of the institutional system and the art market. On the contrary, it moves in tandem in the counter-public, independent and proletarian realm and allows an alternative archive to be built to the one we have access to. Understanding that the site of artistic transformation is the site of political transformation, Alice Geirinhas’ artistic output and research can become an ideal field for building the neglected surrealist, expressionist, existentialist or feminist historiographies called for by Hayden White (1978) in The Burden of History. As well as understanding Geirinhas’ work, her preference for a collective and circular authorial output admits to us that feminist liberation is anti-capitalist.

Alice Geirinhas’ Existem Pedras nos Olhos is on show at Galerias Municipais de Lisboas – Galeria Quadrum until April 28, 2024.