News

This installation is one of the results of the Project Orfeu [1956-1983]: The Politics and aesthetics of popular music production and consumption in modern PortugalThe Politics and aesthetics of popular music production and consumption in modern Portugal developed in partnership by the Instituto de Etnomusicologia [NOVA FCSH] and esad-idea [ESAD].

The installation explores the possibilities of the archive as a research and project method, building a narrative where the phonographic catalog of the Orfeu record label is being seen from an attention to its cultural and political context, to the forms of edition, dissemination and consumption of popular music in Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century.

Founded in 1956 by Arnaldo Trindade, Orfeu was active until the early 1980s. It is a unique case in the context of national and international record production, and its period of activity was intersected by important moments in the country's history, especially in the path of political and social democratization.

Revisiting Orfeu, the diversity of its catalog and the period of time that its years of activity go through also offers a possibility of critical revisitation of contemporary Portuguese history, of continuities and ruptures, of real changes and of what remains, resistingly, unchanged.