LE CRÉDAC

Curatorship: Claire Le Restif

‘Mano Manca’ has its origins in the research carried out by the Portuguese artist Pedro Barateiro into the Baroque composer Vicente Lusitano. The first composer of mixed heritage to be published in Europe in the 16th^e century, posterity has erased his identity and his contribution to the European musical tradition.

‘Mano Manca’ means ‘left hand’ in Italian. It is a term that Pedro Barateiro came across in the book published by Lusitano in Rome in 1553, the introduction to which features a ‘Guidonian hand’ – an illustration of a left hand used as a musical score. ‘Mano Manca’ is also the hand that is ‘lacking’. Like the left hand, which was considered impure for centuries. Hands are a recurring motif in Pedro Barateiro’s work.

Here, they serve as the starting point for the exhibition, which brings together various series and reassembles bodies of work produced over several years. It reveals the diversity of the artist’s practice: animated films, installations, videos, performances, sculptures and drawings. Pedro Barateiro appropriates stories and images drawn from both popular culture and the arts, drawing on documents and literature. He interweaves and transforms these materials to examine Western thought and its individual and collective imaginaries. His works are addresses, calls for critical thinking and for artistic expression to become an act of questioning Western societies and their narratives.

The exhibition is supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – French Delegation and the Filomena Soares Gallery.

As part of his exhibition, Pedro Barateiro will present two performances on Saturday 21 November, at 4.00 pm and 5.30 pm. Renseignements.