Fanga

“I wrote this book for you, fangueiros [rural workers] of the Golegã fields. May you one day be able to read it and amend it – because only you will know how to write the novel of your life.” Such is the dedication that Alves Redol set down on the opening pages of Fanga (1943), one of Portuguese Neorealism’s major novels. The Karnart company takes up this “open” book and imprints on it its own reading and “amendments”, interweaving Redol’s tale of violence, exploitation, harassment and poverty with the prints Manuel Ribeiro de Pavia created to illustrate the novel’s 1948 edition. The present show is another Karnart creation that follows the concept of perfinst , a neologism the company invented to describe their multidisciplinary artistic objects that explore an intersection of PERFormance (the performing arts, in the broad sense of the term) and INSTallation (the visual and digital arts).