The Municipal Galleries have committed this April to a programme that reflects the month’s symbolic events, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the overthrow of fascism in Portugal. Not from a celebratory perspective, but from a critical viewpoint. Out of its five spaces, at least three offer a careful and subjective analysis (between imaginations) of what liberation was, is and could have been. Between Eduardo Gajeiro’s timeless account of the popular struggle, in the Torreão Nascente of Cordoaria Nacional; Alice Geirinhas’ feminist work at Galeria Quadrum; and Délio Jasse’s anti-colonial exercise at Pavilhão Branco – we are presented with a range that cuts across the social struggle that (still) persists since the coup d’état. Luísa Cunha’s sound piece Pronomes pessoais is no exception. Set up between the five areas of the Municipal Galleries and Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, they repeatedly announce (in a loop) that “the April 25 is all of us”. In fact, this is a six-part work; the previous sentence belongs (only) to the sixth section, installed at Pavilhão Branco, which is related to the last pronoun and the last point of the itinerary to be travelled between the proposed spaces scattered around the city. I would also suggest visiting the others, or a few of them, so that you can enjoy not only the whole of Luísa Cunha’s work, but also the exhibits housed inside the areas occupied by the artist – their entrances – and benefit from the proposed exercise of derivé, or wandering – applying the words spoken to us, or at least reflecting on them.

As I have just mentioned, the six parts of Luísa Cunha’s work all erupt at the entrances to the exhibition areas – that threshold gap between the street and its immediate opposite, the aseptic white cube. That place between the informal and the institutional. Last year, in an interview with the newspaper Público, the artist told us that her studio is the street. This proximity to the city, to urbanisation and the community as a reason for the arbitrariness and relativity of conventions, practices and language is constant in her artistic production and, in this particular case, it is crucial. The entrance, that non-place establishing the transition between the public and private domains – halts the sharing of the sensitive and distorts the attributions of meaning similar to the ways of being, seeing and listening. Therefore, it is a fragmentary site which, when challenged by a voice and marked by a period of time, forgoes the ambiguity with which it is usually associated and finally becomes a place. A place of listening.

If there is a relationship between body and voice, Luísa Cunha dematerialises it using the sound system that replaces her presence. By contrast, the listening position to which she “forces” us to attend restores this complicit and synesthetic correlation between corporeality and (the reception of) orality. In The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (1990), Corradi-Fiumara claims that listening is what generates discourse and not the other way round, thereby connecting listening to welcoming and the attribution of meaning. While this text is somewhat dated – actually it comes from the same decade as the emergence of Luísa Cunha’s artistic output -, I still find this premise somewhat effective, as it prioritises the viewer when receiving and interpreting the work. This is why I believe that, in this work, the repetition, both in resorting to the loop and in referring to the persistence of the same axiom in each of the parts, is designed to free the viewer from events outside the actual sphere of revolution. There is no chance, and using various personal pronouns also assures this: April 25 is me, you, him, her, us, you, all of you. There is no escape from perspective: the revolution and liberation belong to those who made it, make it and apply it every day. I’m well aware that the loop is an intrinsic feature of Luísa Cunha’s work; nevertheless, in this case, I do not think it is an aesthetic or formal coincidence – but rather the highlighting of an echo that has lasted for 50 years and an invitation to everyone to take part, so that it continues to reverberate for many more!

As a final note, it should be emphasised that between the colloquial tone and the urban bodygraphy suggested by the artist, the confrontation between instance and sensory substance is once again raised, restoring to the voice and the body a place of speech, in other words, a political topos. Pronomes Pessoais, uma Obra em Seis Partes, by Luísa Cunha, is on show at Galerias Municipais – (1) Galeria Avenida da Índia; (2) Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional; (3) Galeria da Boavista; (5) Galeria Quadrum and (6) Pavilhão Branco – and at (4) Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar until May 5, 2024.