An ethical and ideological testament

This book is the place of memory where the intellectual life of Pere Portabella is kept. One testament. But is it a memoir? There are many of us who, as writers or editors, insist on this. But Portabella hates psychological realism, narrative linearity and always told us that, in the end, it is the actions that make up his biography. With blows, cuts and concepts. Art as a model from the avant-garde, politics to transform reality, and cinema, which is both the art and the political language par excellence in the 20th century. It is, therefore, an ethical and ideological testament on the practices of someone who is a lyrical subject (artist, film director and politician) of a collective subject that mediates in favor of the norms that have to be challenged. Catalan culture is full of challengers: Gaudí and Verdaguer, replicating their patrons; Sert, Miró and J.V. Foix contesting authorship in favor of the anonymous, being at once one and many; Tàpies and Brossa, where one is none. Carles Santos was missing, breaking the piano and Bohigas replicating Maragall and Pere Portabella with his cinema. The plural subject is diverse, which is why Portabella was a first-person intermediary, from promoter of the Assemblea de Catalunya to senator, and from conceptual artist to member of the gauche divine. The history of this book is the result of a chain of texts from the past that can be read as if they were written in the present.