This exhibition continued Carla Filipe’s research into the visual and graphic strategies used in the political narrative, specifically protest banners. The project presents a set of symbols and graphic images taken from the political post-25 April 1974 narrative, while removing all manual plasticity from it. The banner is the shape chosen to materialise her complex, large-scale compositions, where repetitions of and variations on the base elements, taken from the graphic materials gathered from political demonstrations in the country’s recent history, subjugate and contradict their own source and identity.
Filipe uses these images, superficially depoliticised or devoid of any political agency, in order to question the role of the artist in the current socio-political context. Deprived of individual protesting capacity and without the power of a collective body to support her, the artist issues the threat: “Tomorrow there’s no art”, as an attempt to mobilise people to react to the challenges faced by the artistic community.