Para mim, eu meto o telescópio ao contrário, é olhar para dentro: o experimentalismo etnográfico de António Aragão

The influence of the ideas imported by António Aragão in the genesis of PO.EX is undeniable. Indeed, from the contact with the Italian neo-vanguardists, Aragão began, in Portugal, a process of desacralization of art, as a field of possibilities, in semiotic and symbiotic relationships with technology and society. Notwithstanding its apparent centripetal logic, the movement carried out by Aragão is another, that of an entropic spiral,eventually more compatible with the idea of “a telescope turned upside down”, an expression Aragão used in a documentary produced by RTP (1994). In this videographic record, Aragão refers to an “inward look”, while literally pointing to his inwards: his own genes. That is, the roots that carry the land where he was born. In this sense, other bridges can be established between the research work and a work of etnography based art that resulted in the publication of several studies dedicated to the history and heritage of the island of Madeira, but also in a series of drawings and
watercolors perhaps less known in the scope of his artistic experimental career. Going further, and considering his vast literary and poemographic work, it is possible to find traces of “intervention and movement” between his interest in etnography his experimental practice in the literary/artistic field. In this text, we seek to identify and relate some of these signs of ethnographic experimentalism in the theoretical, literary and artistic work of António Aragão.