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Dividida em oito livros – "Poema Feio", "Folclore Íntimo", "Livro de Maldições", "O Resto da Minha Alegria", "Útero", "A Cobrição das Filhas", "Três Minutos antes de a Maré Encher" e "A Remoção das Almas" –, Publicação da Mortalidade é a terceira "poesia reunida" de Valter Hugo Mãe (Saurimo, Angola, 1971), depois de Folclore Íntimo (2008) e de Contabilidade (2010). (...) A avaliar pelo itinerário poético de Valter Hugo Mãe e pelo que o autor afirma nas notas autorais das suas duas primeiras coletâneas de "poesia reunida", publicação da mortalidade anuncia futuras recolhas de poemas. Se é de esperar que ao poeta interessará que esse novo livro seja "a passagem para um tempo outro mas como um estádio intermédio e nunca uma fixação definitiva", já quando acontecerá essa nova publicação é, no mínimo, imprevisível. Apenas dois anos (de 2008 para 2010) separaram as duas primeiras recolhas, enquanto que da segunda para a terceira há um intervalo de quase uma década.

No mundo ocidental, são muitas as vozes que nos vão lembrando, de tempos a tempos, que já não sabemos encarar a morte com frontalidade e dignidade. Assumiu-se que falar da morte é produzir uma dor ou um mal-estar que colidem com os valores da nossa sociedade, cada vez mais voltada para o culto da beleza e da eterna juventude. Até sensivelmente às décadas de 70 ou 80 do século passado, a sociedade portuguesa, sobretudo a mais rural, não escondia dos mais novos as doenças, o envelhecimento e a morte dos entes queridos, e o cancioneiro infantil e juvenil era uma das grandes expressões e uma das fontes de todos estes temas. Hoje, estas são questões praticamente silenciadas, dir-se-ia até proibidas, e por isso muitas crianças são educadas sem o conhecimento da morte. Partindo destes pressupostos, abordaremos neste artigo a questão da morte na poesia oral e tradicional infantil portuguesa moderna e contemporânea. Veremos, em particular, se a morte aparece mais como personagem ou mais como acontecimento, refletiremos sobre os seus tipos e as suas incidências semânticas, simbólicas e pragmáticas, e discutiremos se vale a pena trazer estes textos para o contexto educativo.

In this article we try to show how the work of the Portuguese writerLiberto Cruz establishes a compromise between the poem as text freeof any ideological imposition and the poem as social and politicalaction; between the internal and personal experience of the authorand his commitment to the history of the country; between the selfsufficiency of the poem and its links to the larger world; betweencommunication and elevation; between the work’s expansion ofimage and semantics and the communication of feelings, emotionsand ideas; and between the textual “I” and the biographical “I”.

The phenomenon of urban art is one of the forces shaping contemporary urban spaces. Historically fought as vandalism in its “writing” component (the “black sheep” of the urban actors performing in the contemporary city), urban art has recently become more appreciated as an artistic expression, especially when regarded as a stage in the historical evolution of muralism. As several examples worldwide have shown, in the context of urban renewal, urban art can set off positive dynamics. Focusing on the Italian scene, I recognize the importance of past Italian interventions realized both in big cities, such as Rome, Turin and Bologna, and in small cities, such as Grottaglie (Taranto), Gaeta (Latina), Catanzaro, and Dozza (Bologna). In addition, the growing number of urban art festivals and public interventions seems to voice the citizens’ will to take the streets back, particularly where institutions are unable to intervene effectively in the urban domain due to political short-sightedness or lack of financial resources. The first aim of this paper is to illustrate and analyze some collective projects and informal actions through which citizens, associations, and institutions have given added value to the urban space. I will focus particularly on Turin, which has become one of the most interesting and rich urban art territories, thanks to public projects such as Murarte, Picturin, Nizzart and B.Art: Arte in Barriera. This study offers insights on how, by way of artistic deeds and apparently “weak” transformation systems, urban art may take innovative action so as to regenerate the city’s architectural heritage. The second aim of this paper is to propose a methodology for architectural surveying techniques applied to urban art. isIn current critical analysis, as well as in the representation and documentation of this type of work, the fundamental importance of the physical, architectural and urban environment in which the work is placed is often overlooked, if not completely omitted. In acknowledgment of these limitations, this paper proposes a documentation methodology that respects both the values of the process and the work itself. In this regard, painted walls must be considered as inseparable from the space in which they are located, from the material substrate supporting them, and from the time conditions in which they were realized. The process of examination and documentation therefore requires observation in situ, new digital and traditional survey techniques, and a variety of representations at different scales; with a view to understanding the reasons that led to the selection of a particular place in the city, and the way in which artistic action arises in relation to the historical environment and the social and political system that influenced its creation.

The Egyptian revolution of 2011 produced a massive transformation in the perception of urban space and the interrelated dynamic of people, their bodies, and the language within that space. Cultural expressions such as caricature galleries, makeshift exhibitions, chants, poetry readings, and memorial spaces defined the square as a place where activism and art intersected weaving a lyrical tapestry of the revolution. The most prominent of these expressions was the street art of the revolution where the act of painting on walls re-territorialized the city making it the revolution’s barometer by registering the shifting political discourses as they unfolded. Documenting and preserving these visual expressions was the driving force behind a three-year book project, entitled Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution, which narrates the revolution through striking images of the art that transformed Egypt’s walls into a visual testimony of bravery and resistance. This article will serve to offer a detailed analysis of the methodologies and tools used in creating the book as well as managing, financing, and collecting all of its necessary components. Primarily focused on qualitative visual research methodologies, the book is layered into three components or levels: one level is a visual journey of the revolution through a chronological image-timeline. The categorization and indexing of images by artist, photographer, date and translation was an important function allowing quick access to images visually placing them in a larger continuum. The second level is a reference-based timeline of events where a connection between the art and the historical/political events is presented. The third level involves the essays and analysis supplementing the timeline with historical implications, political and social contexts and personal voices collected from artists and activists.

There is an abundance of books, magazines, films and internet-forums dedicated to graffiti. How this documentation has influenced and been a part of the graffiti subculture has not been studied much. Drawing on personal experiences, as a documentarian and publisher of graffiti media over 27 years, Malcolm Jacobson recollects how the positions of participant and observer incessantly have twisted around each other. This has been mediated through development in media technology as well as by the coming of age of graffiti and its practitioners.

When discussing the paradox of displacing the street art aesthetic, i.e. commissioning street artists to create work for art galleries, museums, or public murals, one inevitably has to address issues of co-opting, appropriation, and the institutionalization of a movement that began as a countercultural form of expression. Two commissioned pieces by OSGEMEOS are used as a case study. This paper parses through the discourse surrounding their production and removal. The goal therein is to break down these narratives and gain insight into the mechanisms at work and the inherent contradictions in the process of institutionalizing street art.

It is the goal of this paper to aesthetically rethink Street Art’s artistic process and question its narrative in urban and public space. We intend to highlight the anonymity, ephemeral, and transitory element as a key feature of its artistic creation. To this end, we will use as a starting point the relationship between the street artist and Baudelaire’s flanêur, to reach Foucault’s point of view, which somehow finds the key to the street artist’s aesthetic features, synthesized in the understanding of Baudelaire’s modernity, understood not as a mere historical period, but rather as an “attitude.”

What is the role of art in the reinforcement or rejection of current models of public space management in our cities? To answer this question, we must attend to the ties of all artwork with public institutions, and whether or not it questions the dominant order. In this article, I will focus on the works of the Ana Botella Crew, a group of artists from Madrid, as an example of “artivism” that challenges the City Council’s management of public spaces in Madrid. My aim is to explore how useful internet tools can be to articulate artistic interventions that challenge the hegemonic uses of public space, in what Sassen has called the global city.

This article addresses the notion of the socially engaged visual arts. The first part explores some fundamental historical periods to help understand this practice, from the Greek concept of teknè until the present time. Then, the idea of a machine for the emancipation of creativity is explained, as well as its operation in two neighborhoods of the Portuguese city of Amadora. Finally, as a result of this immaterial machine, the focus turns to a detailed description of an archive of audiovisual elements that represents each activity undertaken within the project.

Nowadays, walking around any city is a guarantee of seeing graffiti, while the public transportation are still a good canvas for writers. It is a well-established social phenomenon and has catch the attention of ethnographers, academic artists and other scholars that have entered the worlds of graffiti writers to explain their origins, trajectories, motivations, their identity construction, their conception of the self and their role and relation with society at large. However, still there is no synthetic effort of categorisation that provides understandable and communicable approaches to graffiti in the real world. From some sectors graffiti is still something to “deal with”. Generally speaking, authorities and dutyholders consider graffiti as threat a security and safety issue, turning it into something that needs to be addressed. For social workers, for instance, graffiti can be a means of communication with certain youth sectors or even a tool for social cohesion generation. Departing from this perspective, Graffolution was designed: an EC funded project for generating awareness and advance in the provision of best practices for tackling graffiti in Austria, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. The first rule encountered is no-one-size-fits-all and referring to graffiti and graffiti writers, this requires a complex understanding of the phenomenon, their trajectories as well as individual and collective dispositions. The aim of this paper is to provide a consistent typology of graffiti writers, offering a comprehensive picture of whose are the hands behind the graffiti cans. This serves a double level purpose: advancing at the theoretical level putting forward the sociocultural approaches to careers and social backgrounds provided by ethnographic approaches, as well as capturing the complexity of the phenomenon to serve as an operative conceptual basis for practitioners, professionals and decision makers. In doing so, the analysis is made on the transcripts obtained for 22 semi-structured interviews, carried out in the four participating countries. The transcripts have been analysed according to the “persona” methodology, which constitutes a systematic and novel approach and a qualitative technique for clustering information. As a result, three main categories have been defined according to important ambitions, challenges and stages of typical ‘journeys’ or ‘pathways’ of actors. These findings contribute to form a basis of a) highlight the misconceptions around graffiti as a petty crime, and b) offer a guide to understand graffiti writers under a socio-cultural perspective.

Recently there has been a resurgence of murals in several European and American cities. Street art visual practices have privileged murals as one of the most suitable formats to address public spaces. Despite the increasing recognition and significance of murals for the visual culture of these cities, this contemporary urban art practice has not received much attention from recent literature. This paper provides a literature review on contemporary murals, giving an account of their popularity, their relation to location-specificity and global presence, as well as the means of dissemination of such art expression. The study will then focus on a set of case studies in Lisbon, regarding the paradigmatic shift from sculpture commissioning to mural commissioning within Portuguese Brazilian cultural relationships. The works of OSGEMEOS, Bicicleta sem Freio and Nunca will be discussed in this framework, questioning what the contributions of contemporary mural works might be for the public spaces of the city.

This article sets out to show how a sociological research project on the production of street art in Lisbon was built, from the construction of an object of research to the development of a methodological approach that enabled the collection of a diverse set of expressive data. The notion of 'route' serves not only as a valuable instrument of research in the first stages of an investigation in urban sociology, but also as a powerful visual depiction of the development of a specific methodology and the set of techniques adopted. The diverse set of interrogations about the object that stem from these incursions, as well as the specific urban context at hand, allowed the researcher to conceptualize street art as a component of contemporary urban space and as a visual means to reveal social dynamics between the several actors involved in its production, and the city itself. Therefore, in this paper it is briefly shown how this object is theoretically framed, namely in what concerns the street artists and the way they build an artistic path and attribute meaning to the act of intervening artistically in the streets of the city, and how this connects with the worlds of contemporary art and the several contexts of production of street art; the contexts in which street art is currently created in Lisbon, from individual initiatives to the actions of associations or collectives, and the municipality; and the way in which the city, through its institutional powers, can instrumentalize street art as a way of creating 'images of the city', and how this can be explored in terms of tourism and the marketing of cities, and the conflict or opportunities that these processes reveal for the actors involved.

Konsumkunst. Kultur und Kommerz bei Banksy und Damien Hirst (2012)

Wie gehen Damien Hirst und Banksy mit Konsumkultur um? Welche Strategien wählen die Künstler, um aus dem Konsumkreis zu entfl iehen? Auf welche Weise tauchen diese Phänomene in beider Kunst auf? Diesen Aufsatz zusammenfassend überspitzt Hirst die radikale Säkularisierung unserer Gesellscha.. ; Banksy politisiert ähnlich der Karikatur durch sein Aufdecken von inhärenten Widersprüchen. What is Damien Hirst's and Banksy's attitude towards consumer culture? What strategies choose the artists to get out of the consumption cycle? In what way do these phenomena of capitalism appear in their art? Generally speaking, Hirst exaggerates the radical secularization of our society; Banksy is politicizing similar to the cartoon by uncovering society's inherent contradictions ¿Cuál es el posicionamiento de Damien Hirst y Banksy frente a la cultura del consumo? ¿Qué estrategias adopta cada uno de ellos para distanciarse del ciclo del consumismo? ¿Cómo representan el capitalismo en su obra? Grosso modo: Hirst exagera la radical secularización de nuestra sociedad y Banksy, acercándose a la caricatura, critica decisiones de tipo político mediante la exhibición de las contradicciones inherentes a ellas.

After centuries of symbolic and political oppression, Galicia has been recognized by the Spanish constitution as a historic nationality. However, despite a certain degree of political autonomy, Galician identity is threatened by increasing homogenization in the economic, social, cultural and linguistic fields. In the early 1990s the aesthetic movement Bravú constructed an aesthetic community, sustained by an ideological project, and with the aim to, on the one hand, prevent Galician culture from becoming folklore stuck in a time warp and, on the other hand, to validate Galician identity. The Bravú artists refused the historically inherited outsider position and contributed to a reinvention of Galician identity and of a political ideal within a cosmopolitan, internationalist framework and by reversing social stigmas through their works and performances.

Centred around Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, this paper employs a critical globalisation theory framework to argue that the 1990s notion of ‘changing the world from below', understood as resistance to capitalist globalisation through a ‘transnational civil society', requires re-theorisation in the light of the contemporary developments in Our America. I make a methodological case for a neo-Gramscian approach to argue that ‘counter-hegemony', together with an adequate theorisation of the state and power, should be the preferred concept over the inherently apolitical and under-theorised ‘alter-globalisation'. Whilst the alter-globalisation movement's ideational and normative challenges to hegemony (captured in ex-British prime minister Thatcher's There-Is-No-Alternative-Doctrine, TINA) are undisputed, the transformation of the global geographies of power through local actors alone has remained illusory. Rather, the experience of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples' Trade Agreement (ALBA-PTA) strongly suggests that counter-hegemonic globalisation theory will have to consider the roles of both the ‘state-in-revolution' and the ‘transnational organised society'. This will be shown through the analysis and theorisation of the ALBA-PTA as a multi dimensional inter and transnational counter-hegemonic regionalisation and globalisation project that operates across a range of sectors and scales.

The concept of ‘resistance' has turned into a critical tool in different areas of political, philosophical and sociological thought. At the same time, the notion seems to be as productive as it is diffuse. ‘Resistance' is used in very specific contexts in scientific or technical disciplines, and with extreme flexibility in social and cultural studies. In the latter two areas, the concept is often used without prior reflection on its characteristics and limitations. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze provides a possible framework for conceiving cultural and political practices of resistance as positions of force, when he defines contraction as ‘a contemplation that preserves the preceding in the following'. The purpose of this article is to understand political ecologism in its activist and poetical dimensions, in light of a Deleuzian interpretation of resistance.

Professionalization and political engagement are usually placed as incompatible in the case of journalism and the mainstream press, resulting in an identification of cultural resistance exclusively with alternative/amateur vehicles. I will use the concept of journalistic field as introduced by Pierre Bourdieu to review these assumptions and discuss a form of political resistance that acts in one's own area of knowledge, is not overtly political and whose effects are not immediately accountable for. Drawing examples from my research on two literary newspapers published in the 1950s in Brazil and Uruguay, this paper will focus on the implications of didacticism for literary criticism as a genre of newswriting. The analysis of these newspapers will lead to a reflection on two main issues: a) the conflict between the professionalization and democratization of literature; and b) the definition of resistance as necessarily an action that is against something. The article will reconsider education in journalism as a form of resistance, taking into account its risks of becoming political indoctrination and commercial manipulation, but emphasizing its potential as a way of expanding access to literature.

This article offers a pragmatic and relational analysis of the controversial heuristic of cultural resistance and presents some of the problems that affect the production and distribution of the poetic discourses of resistance and emancipation. To that end, it focuses on the incorporation of the historicity and the historic contingency of conflict as key elements of the subjectification constituted by the poem of resistance as “poem for the political”. It also explores the applicability of certain notions common to the contemporary critical tradition, as developed by scholars such as Badiou, Mouffe, Rancière, Bal and Žižek.