A merging of personal and cartographical histories was evident throughout Ana Vidigal’s solo show, particularly in two attention-grabbing works, stationed near the gallery entrance, whose elements and titles both offered valuable clues as to the exhibition’s larger concerns. The first, a mixed-media piece titled sem família (say it in modern greek) (Without Family, [Say It in Modern Greek]) (all works 2017), incorporates burlap scraps from Sharjah and a Greek-language phrase book for tourists in a framed collage resting upon twenty-four sandbags. Connecting the composition’s elements are strips cut from both the vintage albums and the translucent envelopes used to store postage stamps; these bands perhaps symbolize the routes taken by displaced populations immigrating en masse from far-flung nations to various European havens.

For many in Portugal’s older generations, stamp collections, often inherited from parents or grandparents, offered a first glimpse (even before the Eurocentric geography lessons of grade school) into the world’s diverse cultures and complex geopolitics. And if, as Vidigal’s exhibition suggested, every individual’s apperception of the world constitutes internalized perceptions of geography that in turn determine, sometimes subconsciously, an idea of self, location, and relationship to others, such construals of geography are always political—or so the second work near the entrance indicated. That mixed-media piece, Há manhãs que cantam (There Are Mornings That Sing), references the phrase le lendemain qui chante (the tomorrow that sings), an expression coined by Marxist thinker Paul Vaillant-Couturier, who associated the idea of communism with the youth of the world. In Vidigal’s piece, a series of posters and pages from children’s books—all instances of 1970s propaganda drawn from the Chinese Cultural Revolution—are interspersed with contemporaneous signage produced by the Popular Democratic Union, a Maoist-inspired Portuguese organization. The piece introduced a second thematic undercurrent running throughout the show: an interest in hope and its vicissitudes. How is it possible, Vidigal ponders, that some of the twentieth century’s worst crimes against humanity were committed by regimes that functioned as beacons of hope to European intellectuals and optimistic youth? The disappointments that emerged in the wake of these revolutionary regimes are on full display in Sempre foste o meu cãozinho (o bicho quase morto) (You Were Always My Little Dog [The Nearly Dead Animal]), in which Stalin’s official portrait appears upside down and partially occluded by an embroidery pattern depicting the outline of an adorable cartoon dog.

Vidigal belongs to a generation that witnessed the 1974 collapse of the right-wing dictatorship that ruled Portugal for half a century, followed by the intense political struggles that marked the country’s ensuing democratization. Extreme left-wing parties played a major role in those subsequent “revolutionary years,” leaving a generation with memories of youth in which intense hope was inseparable from a certain militancy and the forcefully exuberant visual iconography developed to bolster it.

Over the past thirty-five years, Vidigal has often combined painting, drawing, collage, and assemblages on paper; her latest works unite diverse materials ranging from film posters to knitting patterns and instructional brochures. The artist’s selection, fragmentation, and recombination of scraps and documents—and their forcible aggregation via staples and pushpins—come to inform and even direct her design and color decisions in admirable works whose formal elements, as it turns out, all have roots in archival material or personal memorabilia, and are laden with biographical and sociopolitical meaning. Together, Vidigal’s works are witness to a sort of collective history of hope, one beginning in colonialism’s perverse enchantment with the exotic, extending through the illusions and crimes of political radicalism, and ending with the demise of optimism in the face of the twenty-first century’s refugee crisis and looming ecological disasters. 

Fable and allegory seemed to be key aspects in one additional work on view: Só a poesia nos pode salvar. Há lugar para mim? Bambi a fugir de lá (Only Poetry Can Save Us. Is There Room for Me? Bambi Fleeing from There). Incorporating an actual deer hide, the piece takes Bambi’s story as a point of departure and poses a problem faced by the most vulnerable human beings, if not all of humankind: How does one survive in the wilderness—and find love—before falling prey to a hunter? 

—Alexandre Melo

Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers.