“Monday: Attention to the Right! premiered in Germany in February 2016. In October 2015, Portuguese voters - the majority of them - had rejected at the ballot box the austerity program carried out by the government over the previous four years. This piece does not celebrate that exception, despite the coincidence in time. In Europe, the asymmetry between northern and southern economies remained. Around the world, the neoliberal creed had more and more believers. This work is about the fight against exploitation, about moral and physical resistance to oppression, about the ability to respond, the need to ask questions and the will to continue. The setting was a ring where a man and a woman were fighting Thai boxing. A bell signaled the end and beginning of each round. Above each side of the ring were screens on which questions were projected by a kind of referee. These questions could be painted on the walls of Lisbon or on posters at a demonstration in any city in the world. They could also be part of an action from the theater of agitation and propaganda in the early years of the Soviet revolution or during the failed German revolution. The first work in the cycle, Monday put on stage the urgency of action and the patience of thought in times of self-censorship, setting the tone for the Seven Years Seven Pieces project. Through references to the so-called fight of the century, the boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Georges Foreman in Kinshasa, another great collective fight of all centuries against servitude was being played out.”

Jorge Louraço Figueira