Portugal and history have lost touch with each other on successive occasions throughout the 20th century. The endless dictatorship, with the consequent dragging on of colonialism, marked the country politically, economically and culturally. Going against the grain of Europe beyond the Pyrenees, Portugal lost itself in the twisting paths of the “labyrinth of longing” – as the scholar Eduardo Lourenço defined the Portuguese condition at the end of the seventies – and still today it is looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, with its “fear of existing”, as the philosopher José Gil stated in 2004. Being self-absorbed in formal speculations resulting from post-World War II modernism, after the 25th of April revolution artistic production alienated itself from an analysis of Portuguese reality, whether contemporary or from the recent past. The rarity with which artists deal with pressing issues for society leads to renewed hope whenever a project fits into these premises. This is the case of “Néquim”, by Nuno de Campos, which examines events from 1968, a special year for the western world in general and for Europe and Portugal in particular.

Nuno de Campos took inspiration from the life of Daniel de Sousa Teixeira, known as “Néquim” to his family and close friends. According to the official version by the Portuguese regime, Daniel de Sousa Teixeira died of an attack of bronchial asthma in São José Hospital in Lisbon on the morning of the 24th of October 1968. PIDE, the Portuguese Secret Police, had arrested him two months earlier, after his involvement in the ill-fated armed uprising by the revolutionary organisation LUAR aimed at temporarily taking the city of Covilhã. In Caxias Prison, Daniel de Sousa Teixeira corresponded with his family, writing about his daily life and reflecting on his personal trajectory. Although he was aware of the scrutiny carried out by the censors, in these letters he dealt with, for example, his Roman Catholic background and his vocation for the priesthood, his departure from Portugal and time in Leuven in order to study Psychology, his involvement with a young Belgian woman, his initiation into the LUAR organisation and, between the lines, his condition as a political prisoner at the age of 22.

Nuno de Campos has developed a series of charcoal drawings in a realistic style and inspired by sentences chosen from among these letters. Each image translates a thought through a determined proposition. For example, a view of the Trás-os-Montes region, where PIDE arrested Daniel de Sousa Teixeira, has the caption “In LUAR, I didn’t even have time to think”, thus showing the doubts that haunted his mind. A perspective of a Lisbon street, with the characteristic architecture of the Estado Novo (New State), is linked to the passage “This obviously came into conflict with what I had lived and learned at home, and created in me an enormous desire to build a NEW WORLD”, showing the idealism that defined Daniel de Sousa Teixeira’s personality. However, not all the excerpts chosen reveal an introspective tendency; for example, one expresses a triviality about a gabardine sent to his brothers, that they could wear with no problems as long as they didn’t ruin it.

Other, smaller scale, works are counterpoised to these, carried out in a free style and only titled with dates between September and October 1968. These are simulations of possible sketches made by Daniel de Sousa Teixeira himself whilst held prisoner. In them one may see, for example, weapons like those used by LUAR, the chair that Salazar fell off that summer and the portrait of José de Sousa Teixeira, the omnipresent father figure. This body of work is completed by a set of documents, placed on-line on a site created for this purpose and partially reproduced in the catalogue – among others, these include some press cuttings, Daniel de Sousa Teixeira’s prison register, a request to the Ministry of the Interior written by his father and a note to his father written by Marcello Caetano, the Prime Minister. In appealing to collective memory, but mixing facts with fiction, Nuno de Campos represents the paradoxes of Daniel de Sousa Teixeira’s biography, divided between the sense of patriotism and individual responsibility inherited from his upbringing and the emancipating spirit he embraced abroad.

This exhibition enunciates the ideological contradictions of a special period in Portugal, Europe and the western world. On the one hand were blowing the winds of hope from the protests against the Vietnam War, from the France of May 68 and from the renewal of the New State under the leadership of Marcello Caetano. However, hovering above were also the spectre of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain and Salazarism. The false “Marcellist Spring” shows how, in the Portuguese context, the reigning social system resisted the transformation in mentalities demanded by the intellectual circles, in which an increasingly restless youth was growing up. Daniel de Sousa Teixeira, the son of rare interracial, urban, middle-class marriage used to the poor yet honourable subsistence granted to the people by Salazar, became involved in a mesh of promises, paying for daring to dream with his own life. In bringing together micro-experience with major narrative, Nuno de Campos is proposing an original reading of Portugal at the end of the 1960s seen in the light of today.

Miguel Amado 2008