Move | João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira

João Pedro Vale (Lisbon, 1976) and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira (Torres Vedras, 1973) live and work in Lisbon, where they have been collaborating since 2004 on sculpture, photography, performance, exhibition and film projects. Themes in their work revolve around queer identities, the construction of the community, migration and global capitalism. Joao Pedro Vale graduated in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, and studied at the Maumaus School. Nuno Alexandre Ferreira studied Sociology at Lisbon’s Universidade Nova. They are currently working on solo shows for the Galeria da Avenida da India and for the MAAT- Museum of Art and Architecture, in Lisbon, and on a project for LIAF2019, Lofoten International Art Festival, in Norway.

This reading/performance aims to restore dissident memories of the integration and assimilation process to their rightful place, which according to Luso-descendent and sociologist Albano Cordeiro led to the Portuguese community into becoming ‘an invisible community which wiped its own memory’.
The project takes as its starting point the letter published in the French daily, Le Monde, on 9 January, 2018, by Victor Pereira and Hugo dos Santos, which articulates its opposition to the manipulation of the history and memory of Portuguese immigration. This letter criticized the fact that the Portuguese emigration was being presented as an example of good integration as opposed to the allegedly bad example of immigrants from the Maghreb or the ones recently arrived.

Accordingly, individual stories are explored such as that of Lorette de Jesus Fonseca, a Portuguese immigrant who at the end of the 1960s was a community activist and leader of the protest movement fighting the demolition of the slums of Massy, a suburb south of Paris. The Ducky Boys, a pro-violence multiracial group founded in 1983 by the Portuguese João Cordeiro to combat the xenophobic and racist attacks on immigrant communities committed by skinhead gangs. Mário Cesariny, a Portuguese homosexual writer, who in 1964 was jailed in Fresnes for indecent assault, and also Jerôme Rodrigues, a Luso-descendent and member of the Gilets Jaunes, famous for the rubber bullet which left him blind in one eye during one of the movement’s many operations.”

With the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Fondation.