Photography exhibition

Fatalities: 10 years

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4 MAY > 2 JUNE

The visual archive of FATAL (Annual Academic Theatre Festival of Lisbon) is composed by thousands of stage photographs stemming from the workshops promoted by FATAL and directed by the photographers Luís Rocha and Tânia Araújo from MEF - Movimento de Expressão Fotográfica (Photographic Expression Movement).

For this exhibition, and with the celebration of the 10 years of ULisboa in mind, we selected 10 photographs - each one corresponding to one edition - with the purpose of celebrating the partnership with MEF and the amateur and professional photographers that, through their participation in the workshops, have been preserving the memory and tangible legacy of FATAL.

The set of photographs selected is a tiny sample of the artistic quality and diversity present in FATAL, from the creations of the theatre groups and the photographers. The stage photoghraphs allow to register and preserve the work developed by stage directors, actors and the framework that keep academic theatre alive and, simultaneously, are exemplars with potential to distance themselves from their initial connection to theatre. These photographs are, ultimately, artistic works with intrinsic value which, cumulatively, can tells us somethingabout their referent.

Its possible to identify, right away, heterogeneous photographic characteristics, which start by being conditioned by the spacial position occupied by the photographer in the moment in which they take the photo and by subsequent image editing. The valorization of light, the body of the actors or the stage space; the signaling of the dichotomy movement-immobility, the image within the image; the games between planes - all of this are identifiable qualities that are only possible because they are the result of the thought about what the stage images are and what they can be.

The conception and creation of these images are not a result from a merely ilustrative desire, their exclusively documental value is not a fatality.