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History through Art: Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local, at Museu Municipal de Tavira
Opened on the 24th of May at the Ermida de São Roque, the exhibition is made of four works by four artists who sought to “engage in a collaborative dialogue, to include and pay tribute to the resident communities” (in the words of the curator, Hugo Dinis, on the exhibition sheet) in the SAAL neighbourhoods in the area: “1º de Maio”, in the city of Tavira, and “Amigos Unidos de Cabanas”, in Cabanas de Tavira.
July 2024 marked half a century since the implementation of the ‘Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local’ (Local Ambulatory Support Service), which would come to be known as ‘SAAL Operations’. It consisted of an official program issued during the PREC by the Secretaria de Estado da Habitação e Urbanismo (State Secretariat for Housing and Urbanism), under Secretary of State Nuno Portas, and lasted two and a half years. SAAL’s goals, presented by Nuno Teotónio Pereira three months after the 25th of April, framed one of the main concerns of Portuguese society in the post-revolutionary period: how to house around a quarter of the population, who were concentrated in “peripheral agglomerations of precarious housing”1. In one of the songs on his 1974 album À Queima-Roupa, Sérgio Godinho proclaimed that “there will only be true freedom” when there is “peace, bread, housing, health and education” for everyone equally. It was with the noble intention of guaranteeing decent housing for the Portuguese, many of whom lived in shacks without conditions, that SAAL was conceived. Although brief, the SAAL process, which successfully articulated central power and popular power, left positive social marks and a changed urban landscape throughout the country. It also left an indelible cultural legacy, embodied in films such as Continuar a Viver – Os Índios da Meia-Praia (António da Cunha Telles, 1976), Elogio ao ½, by Pedro Sena Nunes (2006), and As Operações SAAL (João Pedro Dias, 2007), or in the song “Os Índios da Meia-Praia”, which José Afonso composed for Cunha Telles’ film (finished after the end of SAAL), or even in the melody that José Eduardo created, inspired by that of Zeca Afonso (released on the CD A Jazzar no Cinema Português, which the Cineclube de Faro produced in 2002). The exhibition “Serviço de Apoio Ambulatorial Local”, which can now be visited in Tavira, is proof of this legacy.
Opened on the 24th of May at the Ermida de São Roque, the exhibition is made of four works by four artists who sought to “engage in a collaborative dialogue, to include and pay tribute to the resident communities” (in the words of the curator, Hugo Dinis, on the exhibition sheet) in the SAAL neighbourhoods in the area: “1º de Maio”, in the city of Tavira, and “Amigos Unidos de Cabanas”, in Cabanas de Tavira. The vocabulary of the presentation is, therefore, heir to the collaborative spirit of the operations themselves, as is the relevance attributed to the populations. But what do the works/installations by Nuno Nunes-Ferreira, Susana Mendes Silva, Ângela Ferreira and Ana Vidigal say to those who, regardless of whether they have been a beneficiary (direct or indirect) of SAAL, visit the exhibition?
The choice of three female artists helps to highlight their fundamental role in democratic processes2 for History. The installation by Nuno Nunes-Ferreira (b. 1976) is located at the entrance to the exhibition space – after the main door to the Chapel is closed, access is via the back, where, on a table in the anteroom, a series of books dedicated to the study of SAAL are available for consultation: Nunes-Ferreira establishes a bridge between the bibliographic material that precedes entry to the exhibition and the exhibition itself, where he installs six towers of newspapers from the period, where articles related to SAAL operations can be read. Aligned and immovable (the weights on top of them suggest this), they can be understood as the altar of History, the columns on which the edifice of historical memory stands, made up of both the news of the day and its yellowed remains. At the opposite end of the chapel, at the full height of the main door and serving as a curtain, we see The Curtain, a piece by Ana Vidigal (b. 1960) that combines the visual aspect of a (French) comic strip, in the style of the 1950s, with the contemporary “flag fabric” support with digital printing. The image of the comic strip appears only partially, as the print captures the very gesture of drawing back the curtain, preventing the reading from becoming static and, thus, mimicking the erasing/revealing effect of the wind of History (to cite the metaphor of a certain angel that Paul Klee drew and Walter Benjamin knew how to read).
The environment of Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local is therefore marked by a piece that deals with the idea of the threshold of what is seen or not seen, and by another piece that transforms the daily news into the fixity of six columns. Among these reading landmarks, Ângela Ferreira (b. 1958) displays a palanquin - adjusted to the religiosity of the place -, a wooden and cardboard volume replicating a dwelling, referring to the builders/residents of Cabanas de Tavira and alluding to the mobility of the housings built in some neighbourhoods of SAAL – bringing to mind the images of the “Índios da Meia-Praia” that Cunha Telles filmed carrying a house literally in their arms across the sand (the “ambulatory” nature of SAAL, besides signifying a process without a fixed headquarters, decentralized, is present in this piece). The installation by Susana Mendes Silva (b. 1972) dialogues in the same way with the other pieces and with the chapel. This is perhaps the work that most clearly reveals the conceptual core of the female popular force in the specificity of the SAAL program in the Algarve: in this region, it was largely women who carried – on their heads, between their arms – bricks to build the walls of the houses they would live in (the men, after all, did the work), highlighting the idea of self-construction that, in a new paradigm, from the bottom up, supported the SAAL. It is a tripartite work: a set of bricks arranged in the shape of a wall under construction (which the soundtrack, the second element, confirms), on which the third element is projected, images that spill over beyond the wall, invading the high walls of São Roque and taking on contours similar to the remains of the decorative frescoes of the chapel. The projected photographic images are of “women and children”, the mythical protagonists of Zeca Afonso’s song and a symbol, after all, of the popular force that gave meaning and form to SAAL, especially in the Algarve.
The exhibition is on view at the Ermida de São Roque – Museu Municipal de Tavira until September 20.
1 Bandeirinha, José António (2007). O Processo SAAL e a Arquitectura no 25 de Abril de 1974. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, p. 13.
2 No arranque do SAAL, Maria Proença coordenou os contactos iniciais com as populações e os municípios. Margarida Duque Vieira, Margarida Coelho e Bárbara Lopes foram outras figuras relevantes no processo.
BIOGRAPHY
Ana Isabel Soares (b. 1970) has a PhD in Literary Theory (Lisbon, 2003), and has been teaching in the Algarve University (Faro, Portugal) since 1996. She was one of the founders of AIM – Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers. Her interests are in literature, visual arts, and cinema. She writes, translates, and publishes in Portuguese and international publications. She is a full member of CIAC – Research Centre for Arts and Communication.
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