PAUTAS (2024) | SILVESTRE PESTANA & SUPERNOVA ENSEMBLE

In 1975, Silvestre Pestana was residing in London, after four years of exile in Stockholm. In Portugal, this was the year of the "hot summer", of the extreme instability and governing tensions that followed the fall of a 48-year-old dictatorial regime in result of the 25 April 1974 revolution. The battles were now fought over what to do with (and on behalf of) a conquered freedom.

It was also in 1975 that Pestana created a series of 20 graphic works to which he gave the title of Pautas [Scores]. In each of these Scores, we find a set of elements— mostly intensely chromatic geometric forms, but also some photographic images and phonemes — on a millimeter paper base and, in all of them, in a margin, a chromatic referential system.

Among the several crossing references contributing for the construction of these scores we find: the expressionist or even elementarist spiritual approach to forms and color found in Johannes Itten’s Bauhaus school or in Vasily Kandinsky; the systematization and chromatic research done by scientists like Michel Eugène Chevreul, much in response to the needs of the French textile industry; the luminous decks in London clubs where colorful lights coming from the floor illuminated the dancing bodies; or the concept "more is less" (the maximum information with minimal means) materialized in the chip and maintained by a certain reductionist minimalist movement in art.

The base for the Scores was found in London stationery shops: the graph millimeter paper. At the outset, this base defined two dimensions (x, y) and allowed for an illusion of three-dimensionality and motion played with intensely chromatic graphic forms that were overlaid to it. The concentric millimeter paper pointed towards depth, and the triangular for a directional motion. Some of these graphic forms abounded in the everyday landscape, namely in the identity and propaganda of the new political parties then formed. And, while these forms wondered about the possibility of the signifier freeing itself from meaning, the scattered phonemes pointed to the challenges enrolled in the ideals of a people [“povo”] that had broken the egg [“ovo”] shell to be reborn, driven by the will to embrace a “free” vision.

In 1975, the Scores problematized the reality of a newly conquered "freedom". The irony that crossed this set of scores with no reading instructions was, simultaneously, in the questioning of the possibility of freedom, and in the questioning of the desire that claimed it. Its apparent simplicity comprised great complexities, which today echo with special intensity in times of expansion of Artificial Intelligence, an essentially abstract and "free" intelligence.

A first revisitation of the Scores in a creative sense was proposed in 2022 to Silvestre Pestana and experimented by Pedro Rocha over a week residence and a concert with an informal orchestra of improvised music comprised of students from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts in Villa Arson in Nice: the L'Orchestre Inharmonique de Nice. The possibility of these "scores" being transformed into graphic music scores was explored, simultaneously introducing in the equation another presumed freedom: that theorized by John Cage who defended that graphic scores could free the interpreter.

In 2024, and with the backdrop of the celebrations of April 25th, 1974, revolution’s 50th anniversary, a second revisitation of the Scores is proposed by Pedro Rocha to Silvestre Pestana, this time delivering them to the hands of SuperNova Ensemble, a Portuguese multidisciplinary collective of variable geometry led by musicians João Dias and Jose Alberto Gomes, with the intention of creating a live show to be premiered in Serralves. In this revisitation we have on the one hand the inherent virtue of the reactivation of a work belonging to Serralves Museum’s collection, and on the other the interest of Silvestre Pestana in meeting with creative receptors of his work, with the noise implicated in that process and to be turned into a receiver himself.

In Scores, 2024, the proposal is that of a transdisciplinary approach to the 1975 series of works involving, not only musical creation, but also a dense visual reading through an algorithmic interpretation based on statistical averages, just as we are given by Artificial Intelligence processing. The 1975 standardized layout, closest to the typographic one (and to the musical score), finds new reading technologies. "Seeing to read" meets "reading to see". And the audience is invited to climb on stage and inhabit a place where this crossroads materializes.

Pautas [Scores] are, in 1975 and today, a work about human and technological systems of manipulation.

Silvestre Pestana e Pedro Rocha