With open doors and a full house, Portugal’s socialist party, PS, on Wednesday inaugurated, as part of the party’s 50th anniversary, an exhibition of emblematic posters with the aim of “knowing, recognising, remembering and discovering” the historical path of the socialists.
At the appointed time, hundreds of socialist militants, leaders and sympathisers gathered at the entrance of the PS national headquarters, in Largo do Rato, Lisbon, for the unveiling of the commemorative plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the party, by the prime minister António Costa and party leader Carlos César.
The two socialist leaders then took the lead of a group of socialist militants to discover an exhibition with more than one hundred posters under the slogan “a history for the future”, posters that were distributed between the today inaugurated “April 19th Gallery”, on floor 0 of the national headquarters, and the main hall on floor 1.
During the visit, the secretary-general of the PS, António Costa, kept the conversation with the party’s leader, Carlos César. Between comments about the symbolism and historical time of the posters, António Costa received greetings from several militants for the work in the leadership of the party and in the government. In a parallel path, close to Costa and César were the finance minister Fernando Medina and environment minister Duarte Cordeiro.
The exhibition, curated by José Manuel dos Santos and Pedro Marques Gomes, was held in collaboration with the Mário Soares and Maria Barroso Foundation. The historical archive on display is presented by the information leaflet as an invitation “to discover what one does not know, to reflect on what one sees, to imagine what happened”.
“This exhibition is made with the geometric rigour that each of these posters has and with the freedom that it communicates. Looking at them, we see the images and words that, in each political period, gave face and voice to a project or a programme, a proposal or a protagonist, a protest or a purpose,” reads the information note.
To facilitate the imagination of “what happened”, the space has been divided into six moments, defined along with the major aspects of the life and history of the party: the Socialist Youth, the Socialist Women, the election campaigns, the congresses and general secretaries, the presidents of the republic and the identity, affirmation and intervention.
The first four points of the exhibition are displayed on the entrance floor, the fifth point is on the staircase of the national headquarters, which makes the passage between floors 0 and 1, and the last, the “Identity, Affirmation and Intervention”, monopolizes the space of the main hall on the upper floor.
The “irreverence of the political message” of the Socialist Youth can be seen in the April 19 Gallery, on floor 0, on posters with more current struggles than others, such as the defence of the age of majority at 16 or the campaign for the end of nuclear weapons.
In the space dedicated to socialist women, there are, for example, posters of the International Women’s Movement and references to international women’s days over the years.
The election campaign area is full of well-known faces from the recent and not so recent history of the PS, such as Mário Soares, Jorge Sampaio, António Guterres, José Sócrates or António Costa. And some `slogans’ jump out at the sight like that of the “doer” Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues who has the slogan “Talking is easy. Doing is up to us.”
In the area of the congresses and general secretaries one can see the posters relating to the 23 congresses of the PS, referred to as “the great events of democratic affirmation” of the party and the faces of all the general secretaries, “the great protagonists of the congresses” who “give their name and their image to the successive periods of the Party’s history”.
From the stairs up to the main hall, the highlights are the only two socialist Presidents of the Republic: Mário Soares (1986-1996) and Jorge Sampaio (1996-2006). Besides the former presidential figures, there are also old posters calling for the “democratic power of the workers”, for “socialism against capitalism” and for union “with the MFA for the elections”.
The last point of the exhibition, and also the most extensive, on “Identity, Affirmation and Intervention” showed the ideological, intervening and organisational history of the Socialist Party throughout its 50 years of history.
Many of those present at the exhibition paid special attention to propaganda relating to other anniversaries of the party, fundraisers and national meetings of socialist professionals from various sectors. On the ideological history of the party, one could observe an elaborate poster which contained only three elements: the face of the philosopher Karl Marx, his name and the logo of the party.
In the Great Hall there was also a series of printed posters available on a table for the militants who wanted to take them home. And from the oldest to the youngest, many of those who did not hesitate to take several and keep them under their arms for the rest of the ceremony.
The exhibition is part of the 50 years of the Socialist Party, has free entrance and the posters on display are part of the Historical Archive of the Socialist Party, whose treatment and organisation is the responsibility of the Mário Soares and Maria Barroso Foundation and also counted on the collaboration of the National Library Archive.
