Escritório 1A
Previous exhibits and installations.
Rua Lourenço Pires de Távora 1A, Almada
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July 2025
Title of Work: Guiana Brasileira C.F. — Ordem e Confusão / Fado e Progresso
Artist: Dilettante X
Medium: printed cotton jerseys, digital heraldry manipulation
In Guiana Brasileira C.F., Dilettante X imagines a football club that exists not to compete, but to remember — and reimagine. Staged as part of an evolving series of fictional interventions into collective identity, the two jerseys presented here at 1A+ fuse sport, history, and postcolonial reflection into something that feels at once playful and deeply grounded.
The first shirt adopts the colours of Brazil’s national team, but reconfigures the familiar motto “Ordem e Progresso” into “Ordem e Confusão” — a gentle provocation that acknowledges the complexity of shared histories. The coat of arms is no longer national; it is hybrid, recalibrated, straddling two continents and countless narratives. It’s not mockery, but remix — a visual language that speaks fluently in contradiction.
The second shirt, inscribed with “Fado e Progresso,” brings a different kind of tension into play. Here, Portugal’s mournful musical tradition meets the open-ended promise of transformation. If fado evokes longing, then progress — when held with care — can offer renewal. Between past and future, the work holds space for unfinished stories and plural inheritances.
On the back of each shirt, these dialogues deepen. One reads ABRIL, number 22 — a nod to April 22, 1500, the date when Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet made landfall in what would be named Brazil. The other, SETEMBRO, number 7 — commemorates September 7, 1822, when Brazil declared independence. These aren't just historical markers. They are coordinates in a shared, if uneasy, constellation.
Rather than propose fixed meanings, Dilettante X invites us into a game without final whistle — one where memory and identity remain in motion. Guiana Brasileira C.F. isn’t a satire of nationalism, but a poetic call for new kinds of belonging. The shirts function as soft monuments — wearable reminders that culture is not inherited, but composed, contested, and always in rehearsal.
Here, football is not escape. It’s dialogue.History is not baggage. It’s material.Confusion, in this context, is not disorder — it’s possibility.
Artist Note (locker room graffiti, unsigned): "In Guiana Brasileira, there’s no final. Just extra time. And space to play."
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May 2025
Title of Work: Cuidado — Cão Perigoso
Artist: Koloman Santo
Medium: mixed media (wood, metal, paper)
Koloman Santo assembles a tension-charged dialogue between found object and photographic backdrop. A salvaged green wooden gate, weathered and splintered, stands guard in front of a glowing red cactus-scape — a nightvision photograph by Lisbon-based photographer @wide.boy, first exhibited at @mercado.amour, hosted by @factory_lisbon.
Affixed to the gate is a small metal sign that reads: Cuidado — Cão Perigoso (Beware of Dog). The warning, absurd and poignant, recontextualizes the prickly cacti behind as potential threat, menace, or perhaps misunderstood guardian. The surreal juxtaposition — sign, gate, and photo — provokes a quiet discomfort. The green of the gate seems to dissolve into the saturated reds of the cactus scene, blurring boundaries between foreground and background, reality and hallucination, menace and metaphor.
The piece hovers between irony and sincerity, inviting us to question what we fence off, what we fear, and what warnings we choose to obey.
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May 2025
Title of Work: CHEGOU — Memory Against Amnesia
Artist: Dilettante X
Medium: A1 poster prints
In CHEGOU, artist and cultural agitator Dilettante X reclaims the visual codes of political propaganda to expose, confront, and satirize the rise of the far right in Portugal. The storefront of 1A+ transforms into a wall of dissent: sixteen bold posters, overlapping in urgency, each naming a force of regression that has “arrived” with the mainstreaming of authoritarian discourse — homophobia, racism, censorship, moral panic, populism, and more.
At the heart of the installation is a reimagined logo: CHEGOU, a biting appropriation of the Chega party’s visual identity, turned into a stamp of shame and resistance. Each slogan is marked by this emblem, insisting that behind every form of hate lies the same ideological machinery.
The work draws on the aesthetics of protest vernacular — bold type, stark messages, visual immediacy — but also embraces irony, intelligence, and poetic resistance. The fragmented layout reflects a social reality equally fractured, where democratic values are under threat from within.
Grounding the piece is a simple civic gesture: “May 18 – Vote for a Portugal free of hate”. In this, CHEGOU becomes more than a critique — it becomes a call. A reminder that art can be a tool for memory, for vigilance, for political tenderness.
CHEGOU is not just a graphic protest. It is a cultural alarm. A visual act of memory against forgetting.
Dilettante X rejects cynicism and instead offers, with visual precision and moral clarity, an interventionist art that stands unapologetically for freedom, dignity, and the memory of the April 25 Revolution.
The Archive has Anxiety.