Appleton is staging two apparently distinct exhibitions until April 6, but they seem to come from the same place: the past^[1]. They share an inclination to revisit it through memory – historical and/or affective – translated into different narratives. There is an awareness raised through bodies, clashing, embracing, lying down, sculpting, projecting bodies. Bodies.

In these exhibitions, Vasco Araújo, Catarina Mourão and Catarina Câmara Pereira are storytellers. The different installation devices reflect their ability to recount myths or tell stories that can awaken a deeper insight into our personal and collective identity. By revisiting the past, we can start to explore other perspectives on the way we experience the world – the identification of repeated patterns in human behaviour and established social systems (based on and arising from pervasive images, tales and stories) is precisely how we learn about who we are. This hint of a revisit across both exhibitions is coupled with questioning of morality (and its ambiguity), lessons about good and evil, power and identity.

However, we should now talk about one and then the other. On the first floor, Vasco Araújo immediately seems to propose tackling one of the cornerstone themes of his artistic output: deconstructing and reconstructing behavioural codes. More than twenty sculptural groups, consisting of two or three figures standing on metal tripods, enact different mythological episodes from Classical Antiquity. Quarrelling, contending, squirming, fighting each other, they emerge as a sort of portfolio of primordial behaviour, of stories from the dawn of time that overshadow the way we perceive the subject and this subject in the world.

Eros e Thanatos, the exhibition’s title, leads us straight into mythology. The two figures are archetypes or opposing principles of human life. Eros is regarded as the god of the urges of desire, passion and creation; Thanatos is the god of death and fate. He represents the inevitable and implacable force of nature. The final destiny of all living things.

Vasco Araújo’s conceptualisation of their power is drawn from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, who argued that the death wish is present in everyone, but is largely controlled and moderated by the life wish. This coexistence of both instincts, both forces, is behind many human behaviours, influencing our choices and dictating our behaviour throughout the ages. Eros e Thanatos together are driving us. This conflicting relationship, depicted in Vasco Araújo’s sculptures, prompts us to critically reflect on our actions, violence, love, inequality and issues of gender, identity and sexuality. Just as in the exhibition by Catarina Mourão and Catarina Câmara Pereira, a series of complex, conflicting and contrasting psychological emotions are brought to the fore through visual means – but we shall address those in a moment.

In History, there are definitely certain moments or episodes that we can notice – and that we should pinpoint – in one system or another, which stem from specific political, social, economic and cultural circumstances. “Certain erroneous propositions are the result of insufficiently advanced knowledge or the influence of preconceptions from which even the greatest minds cannot fully free themselves.”^[2] Vasco Araújo’s exhibition seems to be an attempt to convince us of how important it is to recognise and, in some way, relive the stories that make up History. Then, by scrutinising themes based on concepts or preconceptions that have been continually narrated, we can reconstruct behavioural codes, opting for new alternatives, new perspectives within human relationships and a possible rebuilding of reality. The reassessment of dominant narratives, interpreted from specific or biased perspectives, is crucial for considering new starting points, new evidence that leads us to review our own assumptions, so as to promote a more inclusive and even honest understanding of ourselves.

As I said earlier, the bodies’ performance is the leitmotif of these narratives. Vasco Araújo is using a tool associated with the seventeenth-century sculptural tradition to present a historical memory, whilst Catarina Mourão, on the other hand, “uses cinema as a way of materialising this memory, but an affective one in this instance, with all its personal and sensory subjectivity”.^[3] The memories that shape Catarina Mourão’s story are based on accounts, memories associated with a place, sensations, a specific era and aura.

Investigating archive images (professional, amateur and family films) leads to the narrative device on the lower floor. It is both para-fictional and meta-cinematographic, experimenting with possible storylines around the figure of the “Homem do Apito”, a character who wandered the Portuguese beaches during the Estado Novo regime. A quasi-mystical figure sporting a white beard and a black suit who, with his whistle, lured or scared children away.

The hissing of summer sands is a construction of a fictional portrait – or perhaps not – of this eerie individual, who ends up also being a snapshot of that society back then. The beach is the setting stretching into the exhibition room. We sit side by side with Homem deitado com cão (2024) or with Amantes (2024), Catarina Câmara Pereira’s full-scale sculptures in papier mâché and iron. With their apparent nonchalance and indifference, these figures stand in stark contrast to the emotions we experience during the film’s 15 minutes.

Besides dealing with the finding of love, submission, affection and sexuality in the Portuguese context during those years, it also brings a sense of discomfort resulting from an apparent acquiescence and inertia when faced with the grooming of children, an ad inviting people to go for a walk on the beach to see “beautiful women with harmonious anatomies”, reducing them to mere objects, and statements such as “shhhhhhhh I wanted to scream and run away. But I didn’t“.

As with Vasco Araújo’s exhibition, it triggers a willingness to ponder social norms, the individual’s psychological and social position in society, challenging notions of right and wrong, morality and urges. Both exhibitions, with an undeniable poetic quality, deal with affection, desire, but also fear, confrontation, the fragility ¬– of the subject and the system – and the relationship between identity and power, bearing all the dramatic weight that comes from the figures’ gestures and the testimonies of a not too distant past.

Vasco Araújo’s Eros e Thanatos and Catarina Câmara Pereira and Catarina Mourão’s the hissing of summer sands can be seen at Appleton until April 6, 2024.

^[1] The title of this piece is a line from the poem Body, Remember… by Konstantinos Kavafis, featured in the book available at the exhibition.
^[2] ALLERS, Rudolf. (1946). Freud – Estudo Crítico da Psicanálise. Livraria Tavares Martins, p. 287.
^[3] Excerpt from CINEPT’s text on the film The hissing of summer sands.