CRITICA

Lisbon, 2025. The 54th IPA Conference, Psychoanalysis: an anchor in chaotic times, gathers at the Centro Cultural de Belem. Across the street from the conference venue, the Monument of Discoveries is revealed in its grandiose presence. While walking around the margins of the Rio Tejo during breaks from panels and discussion groups, I am prompted to consider my relationship with Portugal as a Brazilian. The monument built to celebrate the Portuguese Age of Discoveries represents an idealized version of the Portuguese exploration, taking the form of a forward part of a caravel, the ship used at the time. Edging the central slab are two ramps that converge at the river’s edge, where the statue of Henry the Navigator stands prominently. Lining each ramp beside Henry are 16 figures—33 in total—depicting key personalities from the Portuguese Age of Discovery. Pedro Alvarez Cabral, the discoverer of Brazil, stands on the left side. Growing up, I heard that story many times – Pedro Alvarez Cabral portrayed as the central character of our history, our discoverer, the one who arrived in Santa Cruz Cabralia (which was named after him) to find some native people looking at him in awe and deference. As a child, the figure of Pedro Alvarez Cabral was celebrated in history lessons. Our history was portrayed from the perspective of the conqueror, with us, Brazil, existing only after and through the eyes and actions of our colonizer. Looking at that monument, I felt a complex sense of becoming small, almost disappearing in the grandiosity of those conquerors who celebrated not only their colonization of Brazil but also the many other colonies. Brazil, the largest one, was exploited for many years, and the Portuguese culture is embedded in our language, habits, architecture, food, and, mostly, our collective imaginary. The celebratory take on that was disturbing to say the least.

As much as Portugal feels familiar, the familiarity also evokes a complicated and silenced history of domination/oppression. That history, not named openly in our history classes, pops up in small ways in our daily Brazilian life. Being a colony is evident in our relationship with public spaces and services, which are often exploited rather than respected or utilized as common, collective, shared assets. In our collective imaginary, our land and its inhabitants are means to an end, pawns in a game where the king takes it all. Brazilian politics is infested with those underlying ideas, and an idealization of the colonizer, intertwined with a desire to merge with them, infiltrates the culture, relationships, class, race, and social dynamics.

Navigating my discomfort and wondering about the invisible ways we normalize oppressive individual and social actions, I was curious about the colonization of the mind, the one that happens as we immerse ourselves in the symbolic realm of our existence, which defines the contours of our desire. I started to ponder the ways one’s mind is conquered, leading to an impossibility of critical thinking. The normalization of oppressive discourse in our psyches maintains the colonization and overpowering mechanisms impeding dialogue and reflection. Through this logic, the colonizer is idealized, the native is dismissed/feared/devalued/exoticized, and the inner dynamic guarantees the perpetuation of the colonizer’s power. Through this logic, our freedom is, by definition, compromised.

It was a relief, in my dislocated space, to go to an Art Show at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian named “Entre os vossos dentes” featuring the work of Paula Rego and Adriana Varejao. Paula Rego is a Portuguese artist of the late 20th and early 21st century who focused much of her career on women’s and abortion rights, exploring themes such as abortion, incest, genital mutilation, sexuality and sexual abuse, submission, and gender intergenerational differences. Adriana Varejao, a Brazilian contemporary artist who references the effects of colonialism by Europe on Brazil in her work, examines this theme in the context of race, body, and identity. She explores the process of absorbing and incorporating foreign influence into native Brazilian culture.

At the opening of the show, we encounter Varejao’s large sculpture of yellow and blue Portuguese tiles, described by Wienerroither (2025)  as “the column stands upright because of the flesh. Raw flesh, getting thinner in the middle, morphing into a strange form and then into tiles again. Flesh. Blood and body. Tiles. Being in Lisbon, where every façade is covered with historic tiles, the sculpture at the entrance asks the visitor how to position your body in a traditional space.”

Their work was presented side-by-side, the title referencing a poem by Hilda Hilst³ that alludes to the Brazilian dictatorial regime. Through representations of literal and metaphoric bodies, they invited us to consider “how patriarchy, colonialism and many forms of oppression mutually interact, ‘chewing up’ people and their stories” (Varejão, Freitas, and Gorgulho, 2025).  That was inspiring – those two women, from different times and intertwined cultures, reflecting on the destructive impact of colonialism, one that controls bodies and minds to the extreme of reducing them to disposable objects. And so to the point of our current invitation from Critica’s theme, “Deadness and Aliveness.” In our issue, writers, poets, and artists engaged with the theme to weave together ways to question, dialogue with, wonder about, think, and expose the many facets of a sense of aliveness in opposition or conversation with deadness. As you traverse the following pages, we hope you will find, like I did at the “Entre vossos dentes,” space to be moved by the underlying dynamics of power and struggle that we, human beings, have to contend with, grapple with, and find representation in art, words, and thoughts. And then, hopefully, to fight against our minds being swallowed by a deadening silence where repetition of the past is the only possible outcome. 

³Poemas aos Homens do Nosso Tempo II
Hilda Hilst |

Amada vida, minha morte demora.
Dizer que coisa ao homem,
Propor que viagem? Reis, ministros
E todos vós, políticos,
Que palavra além de ouro e treva
Fica em vossos ouvidos?
Além de vossa RAPACIDADE
O que sabeis
Da alma dos homens?
Ouro, conquista, lucro, logro
E os nossos ossos
E o sangue das gentes
E a vida dos homens
Entre os vossos dentes.

English Translation:

Beloved life, my death lingers
What to say to man
What journey to propose? Kings, ministers
And all of you, politicians,
What word besides gold and darkness
Stays in your ears?
Besides your RAPACITY
What do you know
Of the souls of men?
Gold, conquest, profit, deception
And our bones
And the blood of peoples
And the lives of men
Between your teeth.

References

Varejão, A., Freitas, H. and Gorgulho, V. (2025) Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão. Between Your Teeth – catalogue. CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian and Lenz Press.

Wienerroither, A (2025, July 21). A cut to set free: Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon. https://www.juliet-artmagazine.com/en/a-cut-to-set-free-paula-rego-and-adriana-varejao-at-centro-de-arte-moderna-gulbenkian-lisbon/