Paulo Pires do Vale was responsible for creating the National Arts Plan, in 2019, in response to the challenge from the Ministries of Culture and Education.
A structure that was created with the mission of bringing the world of arts and heritage closer to everyone, particularly children and young people.
Matilde Fieschi
What can art do? How do you build a community and active citizenship where culture transforms the lives of citizens and young people?
Does culture continue to be linked to an idea of erudition, like a high, gray, opaque and even distant wall for most people?
Or is change just passing by?
How to create this idea of belonging, proximity and diversity in Culture?
Several of these questions are posed to you.
Matilde Fieschi
As happens with many people, Paulo Pires do Vale has many lives to tell in one life. I mention some, as clues and sparks for our conversation.
This philosopher was born into a Trás-os-Montes family, in Bragança, the grandson of farmers.
At the age of 5, the barracks in Bragança where his father worked as a soldier closed, and the family moved to Lisbon. A city with more possibilities for the future.
Since then, Paulo began to develop a kind of detachment, and to feel like he was “nowhere”, declaring himself “radically non-nostalgic”…
It was important for him that his parents decided to enroll him, along with his sister, at the Linda-a-Velha School of Music and Ballet. Which made him feel like a character from the famous 80s American series “Fame”.
This learning and listening to music would have been the gateway to the universe of aesthetics for Paulo.
First he studied piano. Then guitar. And attended ballet classes.
Matilde Fieschi
Also from a very early age, he began to want to be a priest.
Perhaps “the fruit of the aesthetic amazement of ritual performance, the cult of the word and the desire to save the world”…
Has this desire been the driving force behind many of your choices?
Paulo entered the seminary after the 12th year. And it was during this time that philosophy gained greater importance for him, when he discovered, by chance, in one of those unexpected and transformative encounters, Albert Camus’s book, “The Fall”.
He read it all in one night. “A fire had been set,” he shared. And he immediately began devouring many more works by Camus acquired at the Alfarrabistas in Chiado and many others in the libraries for the seminar course.
Matilde Fieschi
Interestingly, the time he spent researching in libraries was so much and so intense that seminary life no longer made sense to him.
Eventually he realized that what he really wanted “was to continue researching, reading, studying, writing”…
And he no longer felt “neither emotionally, sexually, nor intellectually capable of making the decision to be a priest” for life. “It wasn’t there in one piece anymore.”, he confides.
From those times at the seminary, Paulo Pires do Vale remembers a fundamental meeting with Cardinal José Tolentino Mendonça, at the time Chaplain of the Catholic Church, which also changed his life.
After leaving the Catholic University, where Paulo studied Theology, and which he never finished (despite his excellent grades), he went to do a degree in Philosophy, at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
And then his horizon opened up brilliantly to many other possibilities, between philosophy and art.
Matilde Fieschi
It is important to realize that the theme of ‘desire’ has been a constant throughout his academic study until the last book published, on “Eroticism” – based on the sculpture of a Greco-Roman torso, from the museum of ancient art. Which leads him to assume the issue of sexual desire as central to philosophical reflection.
What hides and reveals desire in art and in life? And what creative force do you carry with you?
At a given moment, his friend Tolentino invited him to be his assistant, at Católica, in the subject of “Christianity and Culture”.
And there he discovered a vocation: being a teacher.
Paulo Pires do Vale claims to be “structurally a teacher”, he really likes teaching – and even his exhibitions are thought of as places where he likes to teach, take guided tours, share with others what excites him…
Matilde Fieschi
That being said, curation is another important side of your life.
Something that began by chance and unexpectedly in 2007 in a coffee conversation he had with a former director of the Arpad Szenes Vieira da Silva Museum.
Paulo Pires do Vale realized that this was opening up a field where philosophical research and teaching could continue, but through other more spatial, sensorial and carnal means. The body as an integral part of philosophical experience. And the idea of an exhibition as a rehearsal.
Paulo has collaborated with many leading institutions and artists such as Lourdes Castro, Ana Vieira, Ana Hatherly, Rui Chafes, Fernanda Fragateiro, Alberto Carneiro, Madalena Vitorino, Vasco Araújo… among many, many others.
“Can anyone look at a shadow in the same way again, after looking closely at the works of Lourdes Castro?” asks Paul.
How did art change Paulo Pires do Vale’s outlook and thoughts about things, the world and himself?
Matilde Fieschi
Paulo says that he needs to be surrounded by beauty and thought-provoking works, and that his own home is also a microcosm of commissioned life, surrounded by many of the artists he admires and can call friends and the objects that give him pleasure.
Still in this conversation, Paulo talks about meeting the artist Marta Wengorovius, a loving passion, “against everything and against everyone and all odds”, even due to the difference in ages (Marta is 10 years old) — a love that led him to discover the world of arts in an intimate way and with whom he had a daughter, Francisca.
Paulo also structurally claims to be a father, a proud and amazed father.
As commissioner of the National Arts Plan, Paulo stirred the waters with the phrase:
“The arts can disrupt school, cut boundaries between disciplines because that’s how the world is, complex and interdisciplinary”
A revolution with several ideas. Which start from one: There is no life without culture. And there is no education without culture.
This revolution is already on the ground, but it takes time to be felt, to grow and to be structured in a big way. What changes and results can we already see on the horizon?
In these dark times, where does your faith in others and the world lie? How can we escape certain ponds and swamps that some people insist on pulling us into?
And how can culture play a role of aggregation and community here?
Matilde Fieschi
The Beauty of Little Things
Also read
This podcast conversation begins by addressing his participation in the performance show “Judgement Pelicot”, by Milo Rau, which took place at the National Pantheon, where the trial of Gisele Pelicot was reconstructed, a woman victim of rape who has become a symbol in the fight to end violence against women. And who forever coined the phrase “Shame has to change sides.”
A show produced by “Boca – Bienal de Arte Contemporânea” that confronts us and shows us how the culture of machismo can be a factory of crimes and horrors. How did Paul feel in this place?
A sacred place of faith, which this time was the stage for many voices that revealed the most perverse and hideous side of the human being. What does this teach us about ourselves and others?
Matilde Fieschi
As you know, the generic is signed by Marcia and has the collaboration of He had taken. The portraits are by Matilde Fieschi. And the sound design of this podcast is João Ribeiro.
The second part of this conversation will be available this Saturday morning.