PEOPLE

What do we talk about when we talk about a PEOPLE? This is the starting point for this exhibition, which proposes a journey through the various meanings of this concept and of the word for it.

PUEBLO, POPPOLO, VOLK, PEUPLE, PEOPLE, POVO, etc.: in all languages, this concept permeates the fields of politics, culture, society, economy. It’s on this basis that power is established and legitimised. And it’s also in the name of the PEOPLE that power is often challenged. The concept is the root upon where narratives and works are built, thus creating, ensuring or questioning tradition and history.

If we unfold the word into its synonyms – population, plebe, proletariat, masses, crowd – we see how its social meaning can be demonstrated. In Portugal, over the past few decades, with political democratisation, mass consumption and new internationalisation processes, we became used to talking about civil society, the middle classes, mass culture, pop culture – and not so much about the will of the people, popular classes or popular culture.

But these are, after all, just different words for PEOPLE. A word that is at once revolutionary, radical, conservative and reactionary, depending on whether its use and appropriation was blessed or cursed, sacred or profane, wanted or feared, affirmed or rejected, defended or betrayed. A word which elicits love and hate, promise and perjury, war and harmony, conflict and alliance, heroism and martyrdom. Men and women, individuals and peoples have lived and died by it. Of all the human words, this is one of the most dreamt of, the most silenced, the most shouted.

This exhibition looks at the history of the PEOPLE from the present day. It looks at its transformation from object to subject, from particular to universal, from subject to sovereign. It includes several media and codes. It’s made of images, ideas, sounds, words, voices, objects, memories, oblivions, wishes, interpretations, answers, questions. It shows the individual and the collective, erudite and mainstream, symbolic and imaginary, body and soul. It gathers traces from great social movements and remnants of small popular struggles, but also the transformation signs of work, leisure, consumerism, culture, communication – life.

It’s an exhibition which is open in space and time. It deals with the past from the present – and, based on both of them, it looks to the future. It considers Portugal from the stance of a global world – and the global world from the stance of Portugal. Our chronology travels from today towards yesterday, from a 21st-century Greece in crisis to the 5th-century BC Greece in its heyday, where the idea of governing the PEOPLE, Democracy, was invented. The exhibition is not finished where it ends. The PEOPLE are a moving target, always trying to escape the image which crystallises it – by which it is  identified, symbolised, celebrated, exposed, processed, explored, classified. It’s a game where reality and its representation meet, diverge, elude, avoid, attract, repel.

This exhibition about the PEOPLE states that the Republic, on its centenary anniversary, cannot forget its loyalty to a word which is inseparable of its own. The PEOPLE exhibited here awaits the PEOPLE which comes to visit it – one is the mirror of the other.

The exhibition is structured into eight subject areas. Each one corresponds to a specific architecture, an identifying sentence and an introductory text, as follows, thus structuring the visit to the exhibition:

1. Let’s go see the PEOPLE (portrait gallery)
2. The PEOPLE are in charge (politics)
3. Tell me who you are (identification and records)
4. You will earn your bread with the sweat from your face (work)
5. PEOPLE’s homes (housing)
6. You want credit? Take it! (consumerism)
7. If this is not the PEOPLE, then where is the PEOPLE?! (sociability)
8. PEOPLE, PEOPLE, I belong to you (global people)