Maria Filomena Molder tells us that in the letter Walter Benjamin wrote to Florens Christian Rang in 1923, there is an excerpt which reads «art does not save our night, art illuminates our night like the stars, the ideas [...] Illuminating, however, is not only not necessary, it is indispensable.»*

Verklärte Nacht, by Miguel Leal (the title was taken from one of Arnold Schönberg's first pieces of music, 1899), is a work from 2001 and was part of the artist's solo exhibition Atlas at the Marta Vidal gallery, in Porto. A light box, reused from a medical object that had been used by his radiologist grandfather to view x-rays, is converted into an artistic object through photographic printing on milky film on glass. The illumination of the box by two fluorescent lamps is “indispensable” for observing the “x-ray” of this “transfigured” night. In the middle, and to the right, two open flashes burst into the black and blue darkness (are they the lights of lamps on a road lost somewhere? A film of changes and transfigurations, we don't evoke Lynch's title in vain); on the left, three houses illuminated from the inside (where someone will be sleeping): O Licht im schlafenden Haus!; where there will be those who are awake, like us). Spaces of memory and imagination, places of intimacy and refuge, the distant houses and their lights are, as Gaston Bachelard suggests in La Poétique de l'espace, “eyes open on the night”, as if the stars of heaven were coming to inhabit the earth.

And then, as in a story by Vila-Matas, we could see, sitting at one of these tables, Walter Benjamin, who would certainly have admired Schönberg and, as Georges Steiner said, “was a passionate connoisseur and pilgrim of cafés”, writing a postcard in his almost microscopic handwriting, to Marcel Duchamp, telling him about boîte, another one, which, from the rigorous calculation of the light of uncertain radioscopy / like us, “transfigured”, had come to illuminate our night like the stars, the ideas, at the Café Santa Cruz, in Coimbra, under the constellated vault of the second room.

António M. Costa

* Maria Filomena Molder, O Químico e o Alquimista — Benjamin, Leitor de Baudelaire, Relógio d’Água, Lisbon, 2011.

** In italic, quotes by Ossip Mandelstam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Bachelard, Enrique Vila-Matas, Carlos de Oliveira, Walter Benjam
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Territory and Action

This new cycle is included in the program of strategies aimed at civil society, which involve placing some of the CAPC's activities in places in the city with greater demographic circulation; it is specifically intended to capture the attention of those who do not regularly attend the CAPC or are not even aware of their role in the production and dissemination of contemporary artistic production and thus socialize the artistic and symbolic added value that is realized in the different spaces of the CAPC (Círculo Sereia, Círculo Sede). From an expectant cultural space that awaits its spectators, its visitors, a space representing the contemporary artistic field, the CAPC would assume a social contract with the anonymous citizenship of Coimbra, migrate its contents to the Civita Augescens circle, that is, to the dynamic interior of Coimbra, to its capacity to receive and welcome others, to the culture of multi-ethnicity and supranationality that define the city's efforts to get away from demographic and economic decline.

It is the CAPC that descends to the city, questioning and disconcerting citizens, mobilizing everyday life, promoting critical reception capacity. The general Territory and Action cycle will consist of four cycles: Santa Cruz, Espelho, Linha defensiva do Mondego, and Link.
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Santa Cruz

Instead of the altar, in the “head of Christ”, a series of artistic initiatives will be organized critically and reflectively exploring the protocols of representation in a society that is itself profoundly iconocratic and marked by distracting, escapist and growing semantic ambiguity processes of mediation.

In a place that, in the first phase, had a monosemic and prescriptive position, anchored the liturgy of the divine, the sounds, textures, smells, the visual impact of those moments, and which, due to the obstacles, inhibitions and anxieties of great history, was accommodated to new functions of which the inclusive, plural, tertualian Café de Santa Cruz is the most recent; in a place with this “excess of historical awareness”, CAPC proposes to reheem a dialogue with the city in which it lives and does so through the artistic problem (what is art? when is there art?), a problem that in the last fifty years he has been debating, trying to clarify but also to undetermine; the investigative attention proposed by CAPC in the face of this problem is expressed here, at this initial moment, both in its condition of experience, of something that is extrinsic, that is of the order of the subject who observes, who lives together, and in his condition, a significant form of work.

This CAPC initiative is added to a theme, the protocols of representation, which persists and is refined in the contemporary artistic object with other practical outcomes.

Indeed, the historical permutations established by the modernist symbolic revolution between an aesthetic of comparison (the narrative dramatization of the apparent narrative, the dialectic between verisimilitude and artifice, between secrecy and transparency) and an aesthetic of appearance (of the named and the unrepresentable) are not only audible but also active in today's artistic practice.

By dismissing the Imitatio as the only active principle of the act of representation (of repositioning in the world) the artistic culture of the 20th century, regardless of the proposed paradigm or periodization, opened up to the spectator (even the most inexperienced) new possibilities for negotiation and poetic mobilization in their relationship with the lived world. This Art brought human interest closer to artistic interest, even though it was residual, forcing the subject who observes to convalesce from the deterministic pathos of the picturesque, of the “easy”, of the “expected”, of the “similar”, forcing him to paraphrase Kant, to “audare sapare (dares to know)”. Whether it succeeded will be another discussion.

It is certain, however and contradictorily, that when nothing is recognizable, when not only the spectator's perceptual search is prolonged but also defamiliarized, it becomes strange, difficult to interpret what is seen, Art, (and the works that will be exhibited here will speak of it), develops, (perfecting, criticizing, renewing the mechanisms of representation), a historical effort to root “We” and “Them” on the same conceptual plane, that is, the correlation of forces between the I (I am Imago, so I am an exaggeration) and the difference of the “Other” (the persistence of others anthropologies of identity and of the perception and representation of the world); Art trains us to question the world outside of our ends, of our preconceptions. And it is this effort that is also positive here in the headwaters of Santa Cruz.

Pedro Pousada and Carlos Antunes
January 2012