“The shaft swallowed men by mouthfuls”: on the exhibition-video installation “…depois de pulsar mais uma vez com os sentidos todos a terra em redondo”, by Paulo Mendes
We listen to the soaring call to arms of the miners’ hymn consecrated to their patron Saint Bárbara[1]. I transcribe the first verses:
Nas Minas de Aljustrel
Trai larai larai lai lai la
Morreram muitos mineiros, vê lá
Vê lá companheiro, vê lá
Vê lá como venho eu
[At the Aljustrel Mines
Trai larai larai lai lai la
Many miners have died, look
Look, my brother, look
Look at me now]
Along the lines of an unabashed melody, several episodes are narrated that only stoicism can turn into music. The blood of fellow labourers, brothers who fatally perish in the ore extraction industry: non-healing wounds. From these wounds, and others, artist and curator Paulo Mendes presents at Sala Estúdio do Teatro Aveirense … depois de pulsar mais uma vez com os sentidos todos a terra em redondo, a title taken from Aquilino Ribeiro’s 1943 novel Volfrâmio, during a year in which the city of Aveiro is the Portuguese Capital of Culture and in which, of course, the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution is being honoured – a topic closely tied to mining expansion in the Centre and North of 40s Portugal. The alleged national neutrality enforced by the fascist regime and the sale of tungsten, crucial to weaponry manufacturing, to both the Allies and Nazi Germany during the Second World War, is the starting point for this work of strong documentary quality.
This exhibition-video installation, running for 1 hour and 15 minutes, stars Fernando Gomes, a former miner at Minas do Pejão in Castelo de Paiva. He is a timeless character who spans the three eras making up this work. He journeys through the 1950s and 1960s, the height of Estado Novo mining in Portugal; through the 1980s, the post-revolutionary period, through VHS recordings of Empresa Carbonífera do Douro; and into the present, primarily with shots depicting the company’s facilities already crumbling, at times the target of an ironic invasion by nature. Fernando Gomes, clad in typical miner’s attire, explores this building’s archive, something he probably never had access to as a worker. Between the architectural rubble, or its harbinger, lies the memory debris. In view of this visible clutter, we are encouraged to approach the archive from an anarchic standpoint, but one that is no less document-based.
These different eras are quite distinct. If the aforementioned ruins grant us a foothold in the present, other shots in this work rapidly take us back to the past, which is twofold in this case, as already mentioned. Fernando Gomes is thus a sort of avatar for the spectator and we interact with the sometimes highly plastic shots, always on a grand scale, through him, through his sometimes noticeable and other times ghostly presence. We should note how these ambiences align with the ontological concerns of the photography itself. They are sites of an apparent motionlessness, of a certain presence that is felt or an absence that is noticed, magnified by the sometimes ravenous intensity of the soundtrack, whenever we see images of Empresa Carbonífera do Douro’s facilities in their current condition. When the shots reveal the mine itself, this sonoplastic feature is removed, replacing it with the shimmering sound of water running through it. This leaves a feeling of uncertainty and unrelenting peril. The silence is insidious, the sound is distressing.
For just a few seconds, some of the visible images are paired with Fernando Gomes reading excerpts from the publication attached to this video installation. An object, purposefully similar to a newspaper, in which Paulo Mendes sticks text clippings by authors such as Aquilino Ribeiro, Jacques Rancière, Jonathan Crary, Pedro Araújo or Émile Zola. It also contains written accounts of the Estado Novo mining period, as well as passages from the official gazzette Diário do Governo, also from that time. Excerpts from the newspaper O Pejão serve as captions for 50s and 60s images, which have been typographically cropped. They are praiseful passages which clearly intended, at the time, to gloss over the obscure practices related to these labourers’ working conditions, aligned with the propaganda tactics typical of the regime that would collapse in 1974.
The mine is shown as a place of struggle, in the fiftieh anniversary of the Carnation Revolution and faced with the widespread rampant right-wing extremism. Paulo Mendes once again delves into proletarian and labour issues in his research, bringing them up for debate in contemporary art, as he has done previously in efforts such as Trabalho Capital (Centro de Arte Oliva) or Ensaio para uma Comunidade – Retrato de uma coleção em construção (MAAT).
… depois de pulsar mais uma vez com os sentidos todos a terra em redondo can be seen until July 31, at Sala Estúdio do Teatro Aveirense.
[1] The citation in this article’s headline refers to Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885), an excerpt found in the publication supporting this exhibition.