According to the curator, Miguel von Hafe Pérez, this exhibition, which is part of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, and will be on display from April 24 to October 20, was a "cry for freedom" that must be continuous. "It is not an exhibition about April 25" with the "iconic representations" associated with the period, nor is it the one, "yet to be made", "about the African artistic movements of colonial protest". It is rather "a unique opportunity to think about this period, which was as rich as it was turbulent, in our art history, where the political manifesto can take on a more pamphleteering aspect, as well as assert itself through works of a more conceptual nature as a discursive and formal support for the freedoms desired and achieved." With works from before and after April, and the "visual declinations" that that time allowed, "we preferred to show how the artists go out into the public space to photograph people, situations and marks of the Revolution", how these situations and marks manifest themselves or not in the gestures and in the bodies themselves and in their representations. "I was very interested in understanding the place of the body as a 'seismograph' that did not exist" during the dictatorship, due to the repression imposed, and how the representations ended up being a confrontation with the regime, "and how this explosion occurs, or not, after April 25", explained the curator, on the sidelines of a press visit. 'Pre/Post - Visual Declinations of April 25' brings together more than 300 works in painting, sculpture, photography, film, engraving, installation, posters and editions of books and magazines by more than 120 artists. And it brings together names as distinct as Alberto Carneiro, Álvaro Lapa and Ana Hatherly, Eduardo Batarda, Fernando Lanhas and João Abel Manta, Julião Sarmento, Júlio Pomar, Lourdes Castro and Malangatana, Mário Cesariny, Mário-Henrique Leiria, Nikias Skapinakis and Noronha da Costa, Paula Rego, Querubim Lapa, René Bertholo and Túlia Saldanha. The works on display, explained Miguel von Hafe Pérez, are in the chronological range from 1970 to 1977: "What interested me was to give a perspective of what Portugal was like in the 1970s to understand the relevance of April 25 between what was a desired freedom and what is a conquered freedom, which is the common thread [of the exhibition]". Miguel Von Hafe Pérez mentioned that the exhibition gives visibility to artists and works that are little known in museological terms, and that "it is an opportunity" to think about that period: "If you do not look at History, if there are no moments like these to understand what art is, in this case in a pre- and post-revolutionary context, if there is no possibility of using this capacity for critical memory, someone will do it for us and will do it badly, because they do not have this capacity for individual examination", he said. From the feminist issues that the post-April 25 period allowed to be discussed - and which "still persist as structural scars" - to the "collectivist intentions" in the creation of some groups of artists, the exhibition allows a glimpse of an era and to assume its perspective: "What future did they envision in the pre-revolutionary context? And what future did they help to build in the post-Revolution?", asks the curator in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. In the text he signs in this volume, Miguel Von Hafe Pérez quotes Álvaro Lapa: "I speak for myself. The difference [for an artist, between before and after April 25] is that before I was younger and the country was older. Then we became the same age." The statement comes from 1994 and "reveals the ambivalent state common to many regarding the years of democratic consolidation", writes the curator. The choice of this time capsule between 1970 and 1977 "aims to focus attention on a process that could obviously extend in its chronology", but which ends in the year in which the collective exhibition "Alternativa Zero", organized by Ernesto de Sousa, in Lisbon, "represents an institutionalization of the avant-garde and, thus, a certain normalization that would henceforth be established as a comparative backdrop." In the text that accompanies the exhibition, Von Hafe Pérez also recalls that "the process of setting up the Serralves Foundation itself can be associated with a movement of artists, writers, journalists and people in the streets of Porto in the immediate aftermath of April 25, namely the famous 'Burial of the Soares dos Reis Museum', which would lead to the creation of the Contemporary Art Centre within the facilities of the museum itself, directed by Fernando Pernes", who would also become the first director of the Serralves Foundation. "When, on March 29, 1974, the 1st Portuguese Song Festival was held at the Coliseu dos Recreios, the strength of the poetic word symbolically overthrew a regime that was dragging itself into an indecent colonial war and the refractory and mean vision of individual freedoms. Singing 'Grândola, Vila Morena' in unison, those thousands of voices anticipated the joy that would be experienced in the streets a little less than a month later", wrote the curator of the exhibition. Therefore, "Pre/Post - Visual Declinations of April 25" is also "a cry for freedom" that "does not need to be strident but that must be continuous", says Von Hafe Pérez. "A cry in the sense that today, in fact, reality can only be built through a critical memory. We are living at a civilizational crossroads where memory is beginning to be built by algorithms and at a certain point these algorithms will realize that they no longer need humans." Also Read: Bordalo II's art on Salazar's grave? "There are other ways to celebrate" (Portuguese version)