Exposição panorâmica, literária e visual [Panoramic, literary and visual exhibition]

Ana Hatherly's poetic and visual work is part of the literary and aesthetic canon of the twentieth century, at the forefront of Portuguese Experimental Poetry. This poetic movement emerged in the 1960s, embedded in an international context that emphasized the problem of written and visual communication, on the fringes of literature and existing movements, such as the Futurism/Modernism of the magazine Orpheu and Surrealism. This serves as the reasoning for Ana Hatherly and E. M. de Melo e Castro to write about the foundations of this forefront and publish the book PO.EX: Textos Teóricos e Documentos da Poesia Experimental Portuguesa (1981).

While working as a college professor and essayist, Hatherly simultaneously researches Mannerism and Baroque texts in a segment of Portuguese literature from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, confronting it with the Plastic Arts, i.e. identifying and anthologizing visual texts that represent the contribution to what she named to be an archeology of experimental poetry, as stated in A Experiência do Prodígio (Lisbon,1983).

As Ana Hatherly stated in 1978, Art is not synonymous with producing a certain object, nowadays it is a concept that above all indicates the widest and deepest possible ways of communication/intervention (Ana Hatherly, Lisbon, 1992). The postulate, which allows her to, on one hand, break the tradition of the materialization of the artistic object and, on the other, explore different languages and territories that provide a unique identity to her work and make it strongly contemporary, is where this conception is based. It is no surprise that the path taken towards the internationalization of Portuguese contemporary art after the Carnation Revolution found in her work a trailblazing and unique voice to be represented by, at the 1976 and 1978 editions of La Biennale di Venezia, and the 1977 edition of the Bienal de São Paulo.

The publication of the poetry book Um Ritmo Perdido, in 1958, marks her literary debut, and her 1963 novel O Mestre gets reissued several times. Ana Hatherly opens a well-known four-book cycle dedicated to the poetic meditation of, as she stated, writing as painting and as a filter of life with 39 Tisanas (1969), and closes it with 463 Tisanas (2006). In an exercise in self-reflection and clarity, Hatherly claims her work started with writing and from there moved on to painting, through experimenting with calligraphy and words. Some examples are the artist’s books she published, from which the following titles stand out: Mapas da Imaginação e da Memória (1973), O Escritor (1975) and A Reinvenção da Leitura (1975). In these works, the artist unveils the written drawing. Several of her earlier drawings were influenced by the study of Eastern calligraphies and philosophies. Through drawing characters and fluently knowing them, she gained awareness and observed her hand become intelligent, as she described in Mapas da Imaginação e da Memória. As a part of the Semana Cultural da Universidade de Coimbra, which has chosen this book as its main theme, these artist’s books and the collections of written drawings with matters referring to Luís de Camões, are now being shown to the public.

The range and versatility of her interests led to her studying cinematography at the London International Film School, where she directed three films, the first being The Thought Fox (1972). When passing over Portugal, Ana Hatherly gets drawn to the social events and transformations caused by the Carnation Revolution. As a result, she directed Revolução in 1975, a fascinating film document and, at the same time, a study of the mural paintings and political signs that invaded the streets of Portuguese cities, particularly Lisbon, and a sound recording of the most iconic voices of the main political protagonists of these events. Thus, becoming clearly aware of the massive visual potential that these kinds of inscriptions held in the public space, Hatherly followed with Diga-me, O Que É A Ciência? I and Diga-me, O Que É A Ciência? II, in 1976. In 1979, she participated in the exhibition Alternativa Zero - Tendências Polémicas na Arte Portuguesa Contemporânea, invited by Ernesto de Sousa, with the installation/performance Poema d’Entro, and would direct Música Negativa and Rotura. This set of political works also includes the series of nine signs titled As Ruas de Lisboa, where she uses a surrealist collage technique of fragments torn from political signs and circus shows, getting an extraordinary polychromatic visual effect out of this unusual type of parcelled out inscriptions and images. As a matter of fact, in 1980, the CAPC welcomed this set of works in an Ana Hatherly solo exhibition, designated then as Descolagens na Cidade.

Another extent of her work is her efforts in promoting avant-garde art in Portugal, from the 1960s to the 1980s, by introducing, in the field of music for example, John Cage concerts, dances by Merce Cunningham in collaboration with Rauschenberg, or music by Jorge Peixinho and Jorge Lima Barreto. Music seems to be a sort of backdrop to all her works. It should also be noted that Hatherly studied Music in Portugal, France, and Germany. However, her promoting activities are divided into collaborating with newspapers, radio (RDP2), and television programs. In 1978 and 1979, she presented Obrigatório não Ver, a series with a provocative title, which was regularly broadcast after midnight on the Portuguese television channel RTP2. It was one of the first Portuguese programs to be sold to several international television stations. To reconstruct the scripts of the series, Hatherly published the book of the same name, Obrigatório não Ver (2009), also gathering in it the collections of texts published in the press, since the public broadcasting station did not save her images in their archives.

It is important to note that in the last works of the collection Neograffiti (2001), Ana Hatherly used the technique of spray painting on paper, appropriating a language native to urban solidary subcultures, and which is usually practiced at night (cf. João Lima Pinharanda in Ana Hatherly: A Mão Inteligente, Lisbon, 2003). In a way, another cycle is completed by returning to the mural writing theme, which she focused on in the 1970s, now in an environment of creative solitude. Through it, Ana Hatherly extends and brings together her formal and linguistic research for that very environment while simultaneously reinventing her poetic and visual work.

Jorge Pais de Sousa