Portugal votes on Sunday for a new government with the polls predicting a strong rise of the extreme right, but for now yesterday the Ministers of Culture of Portugal and Spain, Pedro Adão e Silva and Ernest Urtasun, celebrated the half century of democratic transitions in both countries. Above all, our neighbors on the peninsula celebrate 50 years of democracy next month after the carnation revolution of April 25, 1974.
To commemorate half a century of freedom, in an event held at the residence of Ambassador João Mira-Gomes in Madrid they presented the joint program of Portugal-Spain: 50 years of culture and democracy, an extensive program of cultural activities, from exhibitions to debates and conferences, which will be held in both countries in 2024 and 2025 and which seek to examine the contribution that culture and the arts had to the democratization process and how it transformed them.
Adão e Silva recalled that they presented the program 50 days after the 50 years of April 25 and that the project responded to the decision a year ago at the Spanish-Portuguese summit in Lanzarote to “evoke the joint, shared history of the transition processes for democracy in both countries and to revive the ties that bind Portugal and Spain.” Urtasun, for his part, amidst the works of 14 Portuguese artists from recent decades that the ambassador’s residence is exhibiting these days at the Arco fair, assured that “there is no democracy without culture, and our two countries know that well. A culture free to tell, to create, to share, because culture and democracy are trunks of the same root, as fado says.” “Fifty years have passed since the ‘possible and lucid revolution’, as the philosopher and writer Eduardo Lourenço referred to it, and the lesson that the Portuguese people gave us remains intact.
The commemoration program will feature activities such as the exhibition The power with which we jump together over the next two years. Women artists in Spain and Portugal between dictatorship and democracy, since May at the Valencian IVAM together with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Another exhibition, Portugal and Spain in democratic transitions, will be seen in the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Lisbon and in the Provincial Historical Archive of Salamanca. There will be a series of conferences featuring writers and intellectuals from both countries in collaboration with the National Library of Spain starting in April, the same month that the cycle The Constellation of Carnations will open. Revolutionary imaginaries in Portugal organized by Filmoteca Española with the collaboration of the Cinemateca Portuguesa. In addition, Spain will be a guest country at the DocLisboa festival, and Portugal, at the Eñe Festival in Madrid.
