“Os Sem Nome” (The ones without name) will be the first exhibition of Tráfico, where the invitee is not an artist, but a curator.
Silvia Guerra brings us a different vision of Portugal where words like “forgotten” and “asleep” are part of a list of other adjectives which could classify the so called Contemporary Portugal.

The curatorial project uses the new mediums, like Web social networks, namely Flickr; also opening the discussion to other reflections in the ambit of the contemporary portuguese society.
One of them and which in part is related with the previous is the “Erasmus generation”. This new generation born after Portugal’s adhesion to a wider communitarian space brought a different approach which helped to give a new image regarding the Portuguese, while isolated people and alienated from the rest of the world usually concerned to their surviving life in Europe’s western corner or to emigration stories full of sacrifice and “saudade”.
If on one hand it was given the opportunity of studying and traveling abroad, on the other it transformed itself as a generation in collision with the established local way of life and more demanding.
Their ideas and their way of living began to, though not premeditated, in confront with their own country’s reality forcing it to search better opportunities outside their country.
The barriers of adaptation to the new place, culture and language – that existed in the past within older emigrant generations, was initiated on a previous learning phase, not being problem anymore.
Given this, Portugal lost one good opportunity to rehabilitate itself to the World, through the integration of the majority of these individuals, with more culture and knowledge, in its active population whereas it generated a new emigration phenomenon, which in a long term might cost a high price to the country.

Though, feelings usually identified as unique from other periods, like “saudade”, keep ties between this group and the country.
As in the past, Portugal became the place where family, friends and all the childhood memories inhabit – roots.
Photography began to establish as a language – a standard “de facto”, between several individuals of this generation, which live inside or outside the country.
Throughout this images is possible to identify a different Portugal: the vacation destination, the one of the quotidian life or the one loaded of details that through habit became indifferent.
Gathering several of these individual points of view appears this exhibition, which Silvia Guerra brings to us and which gives us back the country where we live.

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Os Sem Nome – a map of a country without signature
Os Sem Nome

Tags: exhibition, Os Sem Nome, Sílvia Guerra