António Cunha Telles: Continuar a Viver (1975)
João Dias: As Operações SAAL (2007)

This evening’s event is part of the exhibition Into the Unknown on view at Ludlow 38 through April 11. The films by António Cunha Telles and João Dias we are introducing tonight portray the “Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local” (SAAL, Mobile Service for Local Support), a radical experiment in participatory architecture in Portugal from the time after the carnation revolution of April 1974.

“Launched by a sector of the state in several urban areas of the country, it involved architects, engineers, lawyers and other specific intellectuals, students, and above all, urban dwellers from impoverished or run-down neighborhoods, who organized themselves in local neighborhood committees in an effort to define and enact new rights and new conditions or urban life centered on housing and on what some of the core actors of the process called the ‘right to place’.” (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, João Arriscado Nunes: Reinventing Democracy: Grassroots Movements in Portugal)

João Dias is a Portuguese filmmaker and the director of As Operações SAAL (2007), which won the MIDAS prize at DocLisboa 2008. He is the author of documentaries and a short fiction film for the Dance Company Clara Andermatt and is currently preparing a documentary on tourism in the south of Portugal.

António Cunha Telles is a Portuguese filmmaker and producer of a large number of works since the early 1960s.

Joaquim Moreno is a Portuguese architect born 1973 in Luanda, Angola. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto and has a Masters degree from the Barcelona Technical School of Architecture. He is a doctoral candidate in the Architecture Department at Princeton University and is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University. Beyond his architecture practice, currently suspended for his research program, Moreno was one of the editors of the Portuguese journal InSi(s)tu and the curator, with the philosopher Jose Gil, of the Portuguese representation at the 2008 Venice Biennial. Joaquim Moreno lives and works in New York.

6pm

Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street

Screening with an introduction by Joaquim Moreno