The ACARTE Digital Timeline 1984-1989
Structured as a lens through which to observe the Serviço de Animação, Criação Artística e Educação pela Arte [Animation, Artistic Creation and Education Through Art Department]/ACARTE in the 1980s, the digital timeline ACARTE 1984-1989, composed exclusively for this purpose, seeks to open up future research on ACARTE and the portuguese cultural recent history. Originally crafted as a part of the research work published in A Curatorship of Lack: the Gulbenkian Foundation ACARTE department 1984-1989 (Sistema Solar, 2021) aims at situating situate this Service in its context of emergence, paying particular attention to the ways in which its action contributes to a reconfiguration of the experience of corporeality that takes place in the portuguese 1980s.
What was ACARTE?
In 1984 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation inaugurates the ACARTE Department. Madalena Perdigão, founder and first Director, justifies its creation by explaining that
Madalena Perdigão, founder and first Director, justifies its creation by explaining that “the Portuguese cultural scene was lacking a Department focused on contemporary culture and/or on a modern approach to timeless themes, as well as a Centre for Education Through Art aimed at children. It was necessary, then, to establish the conditions for the Modern Art Centre, created by the FCG on 22 August 1979 and inaugurated on 20 July 1983, to be not just a Museum, in the narrowest sense of the term, but also a Cultural Centre”. (Perdigão 1989)
Created in 1984 by decision of the FCG’s Board of Directors, the ACARTE safeguarded «the clear separation between [the museum’s] acquisition policy and the cultural events and activities policy» (Perdigão apud Ribeiro 2007, 370). In 2000 the ACARTE became a Department of the CAM and by the end of 2002 it was dissolved. The ACARTE directors were, chronologically: from 1984 to 1989, Maria Madalena de Azeredo Perdigão (1923-1989), also responsible for much of the 1990 programme; from June 1990 to 1994, José Sasportes; from 1995 to 1999, Yvette Centeno; from 2000 to 2002, Jorge Molder, with Mário Carneiro (the deputy director) as the ACARTE programmer.
The «Encontros ACARTE – Novo Teatro/Dança da Europa»
In 1987 the «Encontros ACARTE – Novo Teatro/Dança da Europa» [ACARTE Encounters – New Theatre Dance of Europe] were created: an annual festival held in September that was to become one of the Department’s highlights, to the extent that until the ACARTE’s extinction it was often confused and conflated with the ACARTE Encounters, as if the ACARTE was nothing but this festival, or nothing but a permanent festival. There are also a number of emblematic projects and initiatives that began within the Department and would later, with changes in the Foundation’s structure, become autonomous entities, such as «Jazz em Agosto» [Jazz in August, still ongoing] or the Animation Cinema courses – later replaced by CITEN – Centro de Imagens e Técnicas Narrativas [Centre for Images and Narrative Techniques, nowadays included at FBAUL].
Dissertation, book and digital interface
This digital interface refers to the early years of the service, between 1984 and 1989, when Madalena de Azeredo Perdigão, the service’s founder and first Director, was in charge. It was originally conceived as part of the doctoral research in Communication Sciences carried out at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, which later gave rise to the book Uma Curadoria da Falta – o Serviço ACARTE da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian 1984-1989 (Sistema Solar, 2021). The research project attempted to survey the activity of the ACARTE in and across its various contexts, while also offering access to selected documents from the ACARTE archive (organised, classified and digitised) so as to open this collection to future research in various artistic fields and disciplines.
The work was carried out under the scientific supervision of Professor Paulo Filipe Monteiro, and tutored by Professor André Lepecki at the Tisch School of The Arts at New York University. It received financial support from the FCT and the ESF under the III Community Support Framework. The defendants were Professors Cláudia Madeira, Eugénia Vasques, Luís Trindade, Maria José Fazenda, Raquel Henriques da Silva, Rui Torres, Paulo Filipe Monteiro and João Mário Grilo (President).
In 2016, this work unanimously received an Honorable Mention in Contemporary History from the Mário Soares Foundation Prize, whose jury included Professors Maria Fátima Nunes, Paula Borges Santos and Francisco Bairrão Ruivo.