Athens, the capital of Greece, is the epicentre of the crisis, and the place where the economical, human and anthropological consequences of this are more visible and obvious: hundreds of people daily line up to receive a free meal from a charity soup kitchen, about one third of the shops located in downtown were forced to close, and the number of homeless people dramatically increased, leading to the tragic outgrowth of other problems, such as the expansion of drug addiction, prostitution and serious diseases like tuberculosis and HIV. So far, the social tension in the city is showing no signs of decreasing, as proved by the more and more raging demonstrations against the Government policies, and the recurrent, cruel, racist attacks. BSC

In May 2011, during a very serious international economic crisis, the Portuguese government signed a memorandum of agreement, for economic and financial policies, with the European Union, the IMF and the European Central Bank. A plan of austerity measures was defined with the purpose of controlling public debt. Three years of deep economic recession and an unrestrained rise of public debt up to 130% of the national GDP was the result of these resolutions. Portugal, which reached an unemployment rate of 17,7% in the first trimester of 2013, is now an even more peripheral European Union country, where two million people are estimated to be at risk of poverty and 25,5% of the population lives in a state of material privation. The lack of social sensitivity, and the economic catastrophe which followed this “internal adjustment”, created an army of “new poor” that puts in danger the democracy and sustainability of the country. BSC

The capeia arraiana is a traditional bullfight show, typical of the area of Ribacoa, a group of villages bordering Spain. Considered ethnographic heritage, it’s a “corrida” (bullfight) with unique characteristics. It’s a tradition with ancestral origins, which was born in Forcalhos or Lageosa da Raia. BSC

On May 17 2014, Portugal abandoned the recovery program solicited to Troika (European Commission, Central European Bank and International Monetary Fund). After a 3-year recession and a fiscal consolidation based on an austerity program, the European legacy of equality, human rights and solidarity was discarded and the problems got worse. A report from the United Nations confirms that foreign aid has had an adverse impact on social, economic and cultural rights, and warned that the country is in a path of underdevelopment: The risk of social exclusion has increased, there are more poor children and who is poor is further away from ceasing to be. Austerity has come to stay. Portugal, from January to August 2014. BSC

The hilly tops of the Gerês mountain range unfold in hazy tones and foggy contours well beyond the horizon. Wind runs in the silence of the empty space and one starts to recognise what is through the physical hale of the solid mass – the mass of the utter beginning, the original creation. It is the perfect place, the ideal home, where the very imperfection of existence is far gone. In this wholesome space, the marks of the thousand year old human presence are gently revealed in the canvas of the landscape – a wall in ruin, the remnant of a footpath. The moment of transmutation occurs – from the sublime to the contingency of our humanness. And the word turns to flesh and now lives in our midst.

From the slight sight of imperfection we look beyond the conception of nature as a differentiated unity – the raw-material from which human life is built henceforth. As in Marx, it is in “metabolic interaction” with Man. Nature produces Man, and Man transforms Nature. People that shape the landscape; the landscape that shapes people. And then, in the silent passing of time, people and landscape become one.

This exchange becomes visible in the descent towards the villages. In the practices of transiency, in the co-existence with animals, in the tillage of the fields, in the use of the home-space and the street. These are ways of life and of inhabiting the living world bound to a declining path on the trail of profound economic and social transformations.

In this way of life, parted from the present times, we can only hold a simulacrum. A memory that can never be an authentic memory, for that past that was will be no more. What is left of it now is what it is this very day, its signs and faded lines. And there lies the act of creation – in the self-willing meeting with the origins, in the intimate and detached relation of one with the others, in the complete immersion into the experience of a present time. To plunge into the Park’s abounding waters – essential to life and to the settlement of Man – and return to the original beginning of all living things.

Bruno Simões Castanheira
April 2017