White Walls was developed for the collective exhibition Portugal Year Zero: photography books of the revolution (2024), at Oliva Art Center, in São João da Madeira, curated by José Neves, Luís Pinto Nunes and Susana Lourenço Marques.

 

This artwork is based on a theater play that was written and staged by a group of children at the Centro Popular de Castro Verde, in Alentejo. The rehearsal of this play was captured by BBC when they were making a documentary piece entitled A White Wall in Alentejo (1977) about the aftermath of the revolution in Portugal. To present this excerpt with the duration of 4'05'' in the aforementioned documentary, the Getty Foundation, which is the current manager of the BBC archive, proposed the transfer of reproduction rights at a value of 1000 pounds per minute. White Walls starts from the impossibility of covering this sum and the irony behind this situation which ended up mirroring one of the central issues addressed by the documentary, such as the privatization of culture and the difficulties of its access.

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The BBC documentary A White Wall in Alentejo closes with the performance of an amateur painter painting a portrait of Che Guevara on the white wall of a house in Alentejo. The narrator is heard saying: “The white wall in Alentejo was painted. The symbol will remain. Unless the owner of the land and everything he represents returns.”​​​​