Culture is something that is constantly created, moulded, and redone by the hands of those who live it. It is worked, mutable, transformed and transforming. Consequently, it’s a living thing, and its inconsistency is also the quality of every other thing that is alive.

However, this is not how this field of significance has been understood. On the contrary, all over the country we feel not this connection to the present, but instead a yearning for a return to an idea of what was, to hold and preserve memory as if it is a maximum state of cultural vitality. Here, the imperative is to not let things die.

Facing this tension between life and historical imagery, one might feel tempted to break free; to tear away from the past, to submit to an iconoclastic instinct, to forget; to look only to the future, to feel only the wind of a forward leap. But would such a turn, however, be not just another way of pouring new wine into old bottles? After all, to hold the future is to hold nothing at all – only the vague sense of becoming. With what right do we do it? With whose hands?

There’s a sense in which what is to come does not belong to us. What we do in preparation for others to meet us tomorrow is, also, history in action. Here is the great irony of rejecting the past: since, in succumbing to the will to be set free of the binds of our heritage, we do at the same time make that the heritage that we leave for those that come after.

Entwined in this process, in Alvaredo, culture, a life form, is both play and work. This history is recreated, chewed, and transformed. It lays in these fields of Alvarinho wine, which were once corn, which was once apple trees, and before that corn as well – which is all this movement of shifting grounds. Here, old channels feed new irrigation systems; here lay the river and the mountain; solidity and fluidity meet.

We could call it a play of transitions. Maybe we might find a possible synthesis in this effusive present, that is not done outside of history, but one that moulds it, as a potter turns clay into new forms and new uses. After all, if we do not want the becoming that comes from uncertain heritages, we may take things now, in the present, with our hands, and breed the future with the tools of the past.

Who Are We Here today and after is an exhibit built from photographs kindly handed by the local inhabitants of the Alvaredo parish. Drawing from these domestic collections, there was a curatorship focused on drawing changing lines between the past and the present, seeking to bring forth plots and moulds of transformation, struck by the present of absent people, of changing territory, and of traces of historical inertia one can detect in images.

Daniel Maciel