Honourable Minister for Culture
Honourable Chancellor of the Catholic University, Doctor Manuel Braga da Cruz
Honourable Mayor of Porto, Dr. Rui Rio
Honourable Eng. Ilídio Pinho
Ladies and Gentlemen

I was very pleased to have accepted the invitation to attend the presentation, in Porto, of the ANAMNESIS Project which has been in the process of development during the past four years.

The name chosen for this initiative well expresses its objectives: to return to consciousness what had been condemned to oblivion. It is not just the dissemination of individual works of art; what is being promoted here is the consciousness of what has been done to render the work and talent of artists accessible and attractive.

The objective is to exhibit the art of dissemination, the intrinsic value of each exhibition, so that the exhibition is in itself an art. Here, in ANAMNESIS, what gains a life of its own is each of the events carried out, often deleted from memory as a combined display, to leave only the reference of one or another more relevant picture.

This project is one of the more innovative forms for the promotion of Portuguese culture, combining art, technology and science, areas particularly cherished by the Ilídio Pinho Foundation.

At everybody’s reach we now have an extremely useful tool to perceive the Portuguese artistic production between 1993 and 2003, thus obtaining a vital testimony for the understanding of this decade, which was the stage of an extraordinary development in the field of Painting and Sculpture in Portugal.

ANAMNESIS is not limited to the preparation of an inventory of the main exhibitions which took place in our country. It also permits reaching interesting conclusions amongst which stands out that, from the nineties forward, the presence of Portuguese artists abroad is permanent and regular, thus demystifying the idea that Portuguese art is peripheral or reduced to the national borders.

The fact that this project appears within a private institution proves that Culture and its promotion can and should be assumed with a responsibility pertaining to all and that the joint efforts between institutions, art galleries, cultural operators and artists always yields satisfactory results.

Portugal has a vast cultural and artistic heritage, and possesses a surprising and permanent cultural production. For this reason the State cannot be demanded to provide the necessary support to ensure the material rendering of all the projects that appear annually.

I applaud the whole team involved in this project, and especially Dr. Miguel Von Hafe Perez who was able to combine the sensibilities of all the participants in ANAMNESIS to enable the results which were presented today: a book and a website.

Eça de Queirós once said that “art provides us with the only possibility to materialize the most legitimate of life’s desires – not to be totally rubbed out by death”. ANAMNESIS perfectly complies with this objective. It redeems from the ephemeral the cultural events of a particularly creative and releasing decade, so that they last beyond the narrow limitations of the memory which lived them.

The Ilídio Pinho Foundation is to be congratulated for believing that science, innovation and art are crucial factors for the development and instruction of a more modern Portuguese society.