Sustentabilidade Demográfica: Um Tabú Cultural

de Luís Balula. Entre 1346 e 1353, a Peste Negra dizimou cerca de metade da população da Europa. Desde aí, e apesar das diversas guerras, epidemias e fomes que ocorreram ao longo dos seis séculos seguintes, a população humana continuou sempre a crescer. Durante as três últimas gerações, no entanto, esse crescimento tornou-se exponencial. Sobretudo devido aos avanços da medicina e ao aumento da produtividade agrícola, entre outros factores, a partir de 1950 verificou-se uma aceleração massiva do crescimento populacional. Cerca de metade de todas as nações do mundo quadruplicaram a sua população desde 1950. E este enorme ritmo de crescimento traduziu-se também, inevitavelmente, numa …

“Evil” Victims and “Good Villains”: Political Melodrama in Bernardo Santareno’s The Promise

by Graça P. Corrêa. Portuguese dramatist Bernardo Santareno (1924-1980) has been practically ignored by the English-speaking critics and theatre practitioners, most likely because only two of his nineteen plays have been translated into English. One of these is the author’s first drama, The Promise (A Promessa), written during the year he spent aboard a Portuguese fishing boat along the coast of Newfoundland and Greenland, immediately after having graduated from medical school at the University of Coimbra. The play was published in 1957, in an edition sponsored by the author, and produced in November of that same year by Teatro Experimental …

Landscapes of Dictatorship in Film: Three Aesthetic and Emotional Modes

by Graça P. Corrêa. Drawing on emotion theory and genre studies, this article analyzes and compares three landscapes of dictatorship in film, namely Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Luis Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2005), as expressed by distinct aesthetic and emotional modes. The films under examination reflect upon three interrelated dictatorial rules in disparate geographical locations: the escalation of Nazi power and attendant criminal frame of mind in Germany of the early 1930s (Fritz Lang’s); the persecution of Leftwing sympathizers, accompanied by the murder of powerless human beings, …

Strategic Planning for Socio-Technical Transitions

by Luís Balula. The world is experiencing an unprecedented rate of urbanization. In China alone each year 10 million people migrate from rural to urban areas, a flow predicted to add up to 350 million new residents in urban areas by 2030 (Balula and Bina 2015). Globally, cities already account for 70% of wealth creation, but also for 60% of total energy consumption, 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, and 70% of global waste (UN Habitat 2015). It is a global imperative to develop urban systems that integrate all aspects of sustainability to promote equity and shared prosperity, together with urban …

Social Order and Subconscious Disorder: The Gothic Aesthetic of David Lynch

by Graça P. Corrêa. From its inception the Gothic mode is structurally and thematically associated with the irrational, the ambiguous, the chaotic, the hidden, and the nightmare. Its fiction is populated by monstrous figures, by hybrids (in animal-human and machine-human combinations), and by other imaginary dwellers of the dark side. It is an aesthetic rooted in the intuition of a paranormal and supernatural realm, of a world that transcends human reason and therefore contests anthropocentric reality. It is therefore not surprising to suggest that US director David Lynch’s filmic oeuvre is aesthetically Gothic, as a few critics have already hinted …

The new normal of post-truth

by Luís Balula. A few days after the US presidential election of November 8, 2016, Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as the word of the year, calling the world’s attention to the new concept. However, the concept has been in use for the last twenty five years, first in reference to the media coverage manipulation of the Iran-Contra scandal (Reagan administration) and the first Gulf War (George Bush administration), and later in reference to the misleading statements that led to the invasion of Iraq (George W. Bush administration). The concept has gained particular relevance and became commonplace in the context of …

TEXTOS TEÓRICOS

Através do seu trabalho de investigação na academia, membros da ArtCom têm vindo a produzir diversos artigos teóricos sobre temas de interesse para o projecto interdisciplinar a que a associação se propõe, essencialmente nas áreas da crítica de Filme e de Teatro, Arte Digital e Urbanismo.