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Solo exhibition
Universidade Católica Portuguesa - Escola das Artes, Oporto
17.01 - 14.03.2025
This exhibition features a work by João Maria Gusmão, All them Swines, inspired by another, a cartoon version of the masterpiece by English writer George Aurelius, a work that comments on the prevalence of porcine authority within the human kingdom. If we don't know the deeper intentions of the writer's verve, everything leads us to believe that this is a metaphor. Aurelio insinuates that Stalin is a mean, ugly pig and that the people who joined the Marxist revolutionary movement in the land of the Tsars are animals. We couldn't disagree more, Stalin, like other pigs of the twentieth century, is not only evil, he's also a prince of darkness. Whether it's ugly or not depends. I like moustaches. In the meantime, more than seventy years have passed since that magnum opus. The fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to the KGB, but it didn't destroy the intelligence agencies of the other empires. In today's light, Aurelio's work still leaves the slight impression that we live in an agricultural exploitation at the mercy of a historical destiny controlled by perverse, deeply extractivist designs. When you read this prose, you feel tones of legitimate commotion for those who are unworthily exploited, and solemn solidarity with the uprising against the profit-hungry foremen who do everything they can to ensure that the hens lay more eggs, the cows give more milk and there is more bacon, shavings and streaky meat on the carcass of the good pigs. It even seems that two of the great appanages of modern times, the dignity of work and the right to leisure, apparently irreconcilable, are crystallised in the image of delight of the owners of all this. The farm of a mean, ugly, slave-owning pig produces too much for him to enjoy his holidays forever. The master of the animal farm is perfidious: he first tamed the dog and then subjugated the sheep: the former he taught to bark and bite, the latter to do as he was told.