Experiências d'Áfricas: a estadia de Cruzeiro Seixas em Angola, 1952-1964 / Experiences of Africas: Cruzeiro Seixas' stay in Angola, 1952-1964

Jorge Croce Rivera


Palavras-chave: Cruzeiro Seixas; Surrealism; Angola

Participação: presencial

During his stay in Angola, from 1952 to 1964, Cruzeiro Seixas (1920-2020), a young artist linked to the surrealist movement, developed intense artistic, poetic and critical activity, in addition to organizing several exhibitions of his work, that of other contemporary painters. and ethnographic art. His stay in Angola, motivated by reasons of economic survival, but also of existential and aesthetic radicalization, constituted for him a decisive moment of his creativity, a period of intense artistic production -of drawings, paintings, sculptures - and literary, of poems , but also critical essays - which he will repeatedly evoke later. “Africas” came to mean, in the different aspects of his work and thought, an experience of freedom, the true civilization. Carrying out various professional activities that allowed him to travel through various regions of the country - radio salesman, insurance broker, advertising painter, employee of the Museum of Angola - Cruzeiro Seixas, always attentive to the forms of violence of the colonial power, collected images of the landscapes and the communities visited and gathered an important collection of ethnographic art. This collection formed the basis of some of the ethnographic exhibitions he organized at the Museum of Angola, having been sold to businessman Manuel Vinhas to pay for the artist and his family's return to Portugal, as he disagreed with Portuguese colonial policy. This communication, never disregarding the aesthetic and political dimension of Cruzeiro Seixas' attitude, presents the first results of the research carried out in the different nuclei of the Cruzeiro Seixas estate, in Lisbon, Famalicão and Évora, to reconstruct the scope, using especially images and unpublished documentation of the exhibitions, travels and objects from the ethnographic collection of Cruzeiro Seixas, whose whereabouts have since been lost.


Referências


Cruzeiro Seixas : ao longo do longo caminho / comis. e coord. Marlene Oliveira, Perfecto E. Cuadrado ; apresent. Pedro Álvares Ribeiro, Perfecto E. Cuadrado, Marlene Oliveira ; fot. Guilherme Carmelo, Joana Rosa de Sousa; [S.l.]: Centro Português do Surrealismo, D.L. 2019.
Cruzeiro Seixas: O sentido do encontro, coord. Marlene Oliveira, Perfecto E. Cuadrado ; textos Graça Fonseca... [et al.]. Vila Nova de Famalicão; Lisboa: Fundação Cupertino de Miranda: Ministério da Cultura, 2021.
Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas. Obra poética II - Poemas de África, org. Isabel Meyrelles. Porto: Porto Editora: 2020.
Teresa Matos Pereira, Uma Travessia da Colonialidade. Pintura, coleções e intervisualidades. Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio, 2020.
Maria Catarina dos Santos Leonardo, Objeto Surrealista como Estrutura de Pensamento e Expressão na Estética Surrealista. O Caso Particular de Cruzeiro Seixas. Dissertação de Mestrado em História da Arte Portuguesa, superv. Maria Leonor Barbosa Soares. Porto: FLUP, 2013.



Bio


Jorge Croce Rivera (1960), graduated in Philosophy from the Portuguese Catholic University (Lisbon, 1983), Master in Philosophy in Portugal from the University of Lisbon (1990), PhD in Philosophy from the University of the Azores (1999), is currently a professor at the Department of Philosophy of the School of Social Sciences of the University of Évora. He teaches courses in Philosophy, Philosophy and History of Science, Landscape Architecture and Visual Arts. His interests have been mainly theoretical, within the scope of Ontology, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, directed above all to the problems of truth, historicity and subjectivity, also extending to questions of objectivity and scientific and artistic collections. Organizer of the collection of the philosopher José Marinho (1904-75), at the National Library of Portugal, he is the literary editor of the "Obras de José Marinho", of which eleven titles have already been published by the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda.


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