Paper
Ethnography for a visual representation of April 25
presenters
Aurora Brochado
Nationality: Portugal
Residence: Portugal
Presence:Online
The project consisted of using ethnographic methods, especially collecting stories, essentially from grandparents, under the guidance of the teacher, to create a visual composition. We were interested in understanding how that community viewed the event itself, how they lived through it, how they viewed it before and after the Revolution. What changed? Were customs, traditions or beliefs lost or changed? Which individual memories stand out? The aim was to contribute to a process of building a public memory of the Revolution. So it was through fieldwork with older family members, which lasted a few months, that the students began a process of work. They took notes, exchanged impressions, received guidance and, finally, from a set of raw material, they selected it in order to create a visual representation on fabric, in the form of a 20cm x 20cm square, in which they highlighted what most marked them from all the stories they recorded. The project culminated with the joining of all the squares, giving rise to a unique blanket, an object that is so representative of traditional Portuguese handmade blankets, made from wool by joining squares together. The use of orality was seen as a tool that is rarely used in art education to recover points of departure in order to give rise to a visual language. It was based on the premise of an ethnographic study of the community of Amarantina on the Revolution, where the young students, based on real testimonies and interviews to collect data, could produce a memory that would be future for them. These were not just visual representations, but a representation that translates a symbolic meaning. The aesthetic value attributed by the students was high and representative of the data collected, just as when presented to older generations, it took on a very similar value.
Keywords:
April 25, ethnography, art education