JUDITH TEIXEIRA, ANTI-SAUDOSISTA

Abstract

The long unpublished project of the conference About saudade anticipates the About me conference, actually given and published by Judith Teixeira. In it, she targets not only saudade as an individual affect, but the saudosismo as a trend that holds that saudade stands for the essential and singular trait of Portuguese national identity. Judith’s disavowal and refusal of saudade is carried out in the name of the modernist technophilliac spirit according to which the social and cultural change is dinamically fuelled by technoscientific breakthroughs of which take all the advantage the experimental practices of the artistic avantgarde joined by Judith Teixeira. The sickening feeling of saudade is one that paralyses the full fruition of the possibilities that life provides and, therefore, is of no interest to technologically mediated modern art. Both conferences take the form of manifestos and everything points to the fact that what most differentiates them is the fact that the former predates the violent attacks on Judith’s work during the “literature of Sodom” scandal, while the latter stands for an expansion and a radical revision of the first conference, purporting to mount a defence against her detractors and enemies.