Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1

And his fellow writer, Pessoa (��:��), writing in ��, had his alter ego, Bernardo Soares, declare: “No empire justifies breaking a child’s doll. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a toy train.” Such insights provided by poets were ignored by the state authorities. �� However, this ignorance has not deterred artists from continuing to engage critically with the colonial wars. Matchbox, Christmas messages, aerograms and diaries—Manuel Botelho’s work One of the artists who has dedicated a huge portion of his work to the memory of the colonial wars and the suffering of the soldiers during these wars is, paradoxically it seems, a person who had, and used, the option not to participate in the wars. Born in ��, Manuel Botelho belongs to the very generation that experienced the colonial wars directly and personally. Botelho, however, was not one of the “men of [his] generation” who, in the artist’s words, “set sail such a long time ago for Angola, Guinea and Mozambique, hidden behind a camouflaged uniform and a G�” and with whom he increasingly wishes “to be identified.” At the time of the �� revolution, Botelho was a last-year student of architecture and thus “didn’t have to endure the experience of being involved in a live war. But I lived through it intensely, in a state of obsessive anticipation that lasted throughout my youth.” Botelho, while “march[ing] through the streets shouting ‘no more soldiers to the colonies,’ began to have guilt feelings about not having shared in this period of abnegation and self-sacrifice” (quoted in Porfírio ��:��–��). He translated these guilt feelings into the role of “an artist– witness,“ gathering “objects and images, memories and fears, both his own and those of others” (Porfírio ��:��). In one installation, maps project the outlines of Portugal’s colonial territories on a European map. The installation titled Matchbox: Portugal is not a small country (��) can be read as an ironic engagement with the empty pomposity and shallow grandiosity of the official rhetoric in terms of portuguesismo— the attempt, by all possible means, to stick to the myth of multicontinental Portugal so as to “to preserve the Salazar regime” (Cann ��:��) which found itself internationally increasingly isolated, and to avoid Portugal’s reduction to a small, and ultimately politically irrelevant, European state. At the same time, the map projection shows the absurd discrepancy as regards size and territory and, with it, the futility of the colonial wars, bound to failure. �� On the power of poetry in the context of international relations, see Bleiker (��). �� See the artist’s website http://manuelbotelho.com/pt/index.php?/work/��--mensagens-de-natal-- matchbox (accessed July ��, ��). 25

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