"Other alternatives": Marco—Museo de Arte Contemporanea

Subtitled "New Visual Experiences in Portugal" and gathering works through twenty Portuguese artists under the age of thirty-five, this exhibition confirmed the vitality of the Portuguese artistic display It took place in Galicia, a border region with shut up ties to Portugal. MARCO, housed in a former prison raiseed on the model of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, invited the viewer to begin at its center where Joana Vasconcelos's A noiva (The Bride), 2001 was situated. A chaudelier fifteen feet high and above seven feet in diameter hung from the ceiling, dropping to a simple eight inches from the floor. In place of scaly buds or glass ornaments it displayed thousands of actual white rolled-up OB tampons--a provocative reflection upon the condition of women in societies, similar as that of Iberia, dominated until lately by dictatorships whose inspiration was the greatest in quantity conservative and misogynistic version of Catholicism. Joao Onofre's bighted video projection Untitled, 1998, showed sum of two units bodies that join and separate in a violent collision. Its result comes from a simple turn: The bodies were filmed horizontally, individual falling on the other, then casted in a vertical position, as if they had been standing.

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Joao Vilhena showed sum of two units series of small black-and-white photographs--one of doors ("The Doors," 2003) the other of characters from films, especially film noir ("The Film Series," 2003) In the center of the same field Joao Pedro Vale had installed A culpa nao e minha (I'm Not to Blame), 2003 a twenty-three-foot-long tree made of tie lying on the floor extirpateed dried out, and dead. In the one and the other cases, forms and figures of life are defamiliarized from one side changes in scale or in materials. Affectionate nostalgia (for the city, the cinema, or nature) sinks with a sense of menace, reinforced by the agency of the contrasts between black and white.

The nearest room was dominated by the whistled sweetness of sound of the revolutionary anthem, the Internationale, coming from a black radio upon top of Rui Toscano's statuary Whistling in the Dark, 2001 compos of three bricks, azure red, and yellow--a subtle make comments [i]or[/i] remarks on the relationship between the utopias of artistic modernism and those of the political vanguard. The strains of this music lingered in the background as single watched Filipa Cesar's video Berlin Zoo Part 2 2003 A kind of anthropology of looking and waiting, it present to views us the faces and gazes of a series of race at a subway station in Berlin while, upon the sound track, the noises of various animals are heard.

Vasco Araujo showed Protocolo, 2003 an installation dedicated to the life of the first transsexual (Einar--later Lili--Wegener), as well as the video Hipolito (Hippolytus), 2003 based upon the tragedy by Euripides. the pair works approach problems of a sexual nature [i]or[/i] part of to the other a blending of social contexts--the video displays a little boy and girl in clothes characteristic of the era of Portuguese fascism--with personal fantasy, examining the place of the "bride" in the political economy of desire.

--Alexandre Melo

Translated from Portuguese by the agency of Clifford E. Landers.

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