The Carnation Revolution, erupting in Portugal on April 25, 1974, wasn't just your run-of-the-mill political shake-up; it was a cocktail of flower power and military muscle, a nonviolent blitzkrieg that shoved the Estado Novo regime off the throne it had occupied for a solid five decades. Picture soldiers swapping bullets for blooms, sticking carnations into the barrels of their rifles like they'd just stumbled out of some bizarre hippie parade.

 

 But this upheaval wasn't confined to Portuguese soil; it sent shockwaves through the country's colonial holdings in Africa, where folks had been enduring the bitter fruits of colonial oppression for far too long. Suddenly, it was Independence Day for Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe, as Lisbon's newfound rulers, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), decided it was high time to cut the colonial cord. 

 

For the Portuguese settlers and bigwigs in the colonies, it was a mad scramble back to the motherland, clutching their belongings and their guilty consciences as they fled the spectre of retribution. But for the indigenous populations, the end of colonial rule was both a cause for celebration and a call to arms, unleashing a torrent of civil strife in Angola and Mozambique that would stain the newborn nations with blood for years to come. 

 

The Carnation Revolution wasn't just about swapping despots for daisies; it was a reckoning with Portugal's colonial sins, a harrowing trip down memory lane that forced the nation to confront its own shadowy past and the demons it had spawned across the seas. In the end, it was a revolution that rocked the boat, both at home and abroad, leaving behind a legacy as thorny as the flowers that sparked it.

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Adilson’s conceptual points of departure are keenly aware of the present. To begin with he dares to acknowledge the existence of the internet in a market that thrives on anachronism. Anachronism isn’t bad in and of itself, and in fact Adilson's signature is sampling of historical images and working them into art work that can metabolize history in Collage form, but anachronism is ill considered when history has not made contact with the present- when it remains a piece of ornamentation to create the right kind palatable and familiar affect. 

 

For instance, one of the recurring images that has made its way into his body of work is William Pope L’s famous or infamous- depending on your politics- crawl across New York. 

Episodically from 2001- 2009 William Pope L crawled across New York in a Superman suit and a skateboard on his back. The performance was turned into a video montage called The Great White Way. The work makes cultural provocations on many levels by foremostly it challenges hegemonic modalities. Cities wittingly or unwittingly create a set of acceptable ways of existing within it. “Urban life has become commodity” the preeminent urbanist David Harvey asserts  in his essay "Right to the City" in which he argues that increasingly urban citizenship is contingent on participation in the neoliberal economy. The result is a kind of urban atomisation where the citizenry’s concern with their own property, objects, lifestyles, commodities makes collective modes of existence much less likely- or as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin puts it, ‘pacification by cappuccino’. To crawl is to question this framework of power and to demonstrate ,albeit through basic haptic choreography, that there are alternatives to the neoliberal Great White Way. 

 

De Oliveira samples Pope L’s crawl to cushion a different set of concerns in a way of movement and questioning that should be universal. Crawling then is a tool for the commons and not a trademark of Pope L’s. In De Oliveiras depictions of men and women crawling in superman suits across an anonymous urban landscape they are all tending to or carrying red carnations smoking hyperbolically long cigarettes. Carnations are the symbol of resistance against Antonio Salazar's fascist creation,  Estado Novo whose violent influence was felt as far as its furthest African colony- Mozambique. The peaceful coup that led to the fall of the Estado Novo came to be known as the Carnation revolution. 

 

Adilson is of Portuguese descent and his work often makes inroads to this fact. One of the many consequences of the Carnation revolution was the creation of Portuguese diaspora across the continent thanks to the severed connection between the colonial ambitions of the Estado novo and the satellites it had established in its former colonies. Those populations now had to reckon with - either through wholesale rejection, slow assimilation or something in between- a new African identity. 

 

When I was learning about the Adilson's family history he sent me voice notes of his mother explaining to him what the political and social ambience of the outbreak of the revolution was like in Maputo or Lorenzo Marks, as it was formerly known. She describes Slow waves of information reaching the De Oliveira's through telegrams as radio signals were disrupted. Contained in these communications was news of forced removals, which lead to ten of thousands of people making their way to Johannesburg's park station. She then candidly relays the stories of many of the Johannesburg Portuguese community, including her family, having to wait on consecutive days at park station for family and friends to arrive. In their own home in La Rochelle they housed up to 14 other people. What happened to those 14 people was emblematic of how Portuguese immigrants either embraced by the portuguese community and integrated into Johannesburg largely through menial work- or of how, as soon as they could, they got onto planes back to portugal as “they didn't want to be in africa any longer”. It became evident that to live in South Africa would mean that rapid downward-social mobility would be a reality that necessitates new ways of living.  

 

This series then depicts the crawl of this lusophonic population in a new Mozambique and South Africa, both countries who in 1974 , when the coronation revolution happened, were still maintaining oppressive systems of rule that blunted the optimism of the Portuguese revolution. 

This Crawling, as an attitude, would reveal itself in the quiet domesticities of a people remaking homes and in the confrontation of navigating a spatial apartheid and finding themselves as aliens in an arbitrary racial hierarchy.   

 

De Oliveira mainly depicts avós e vovôs ( grandmas and grandpas) prone and wearing super suits, or what he calls “the crawling porrahs". These images literally come from the Portuguese christian tradition of crawling tens of kilometers on the Camino de Fatimah pilgrimage as a way to receive blessings for ailing loved ones among other things. But on the formal level one reading of crawling is as an infantile right of passage which is an obvious juxtapositional tactic on De Oliveira's behalf, but alternatively the crawl, especially in the abrasive urban fabric, connotes resilience from those who've been uprooted and have had to go on living. 

 

The costumes, as pope L describes, “ are a way to project yourself into the world and at the same time conceal yourself”, they are a way to present a desirable exterior condition and protect the unfamiliar vulnerabilities, they lend pathos to heroism and sympathy to the strong. This kind of figurativism places us in the present while borrowing older aesthetics without leaning on a moral purity that is easy to celebrate.  After all, the Portuguese were a malignant presence in Mozambique to put it mildly, but this isn't about atoning- it's about the lives that still have to go on in the shadow of Big-man Politics, it's about symbols of contemporaneity and globalization such as Superman that have to be integrated into indigenous belief systems- Its about how locality can be relocated, and its about the city not as a domain of urban speculation or extreme individuality but of solidarity with those who don’t move in the dominant mode. 

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Let's consider  how this series was made and how the tactics and media he selects brings about complexity.

 

AI, in an art-world as obsessed with bourgeois aesthetics as South Africa's is, is a hard medium to make the case for. I mean it's barely been codified as a fine art medium, and many people are quick to dismiss it as merely a technology or a tool in the same way photography once was. Adilson, however, is bullish about AI and I can see given his usual arsenal of image making techniques such a collage and image sampling why image generating software would be a sensible addition to his practice. 

 

I’ve always thought that Adilson’s practice has massive parallels to Hip-Hop , which as you know is the preeminent genre- that uses sampling. And like hip-hops origins Adilson's practice is rooted in a social aesthetic that functions on historical narrativization and ambience. His practice also digests canonical art history as it occasionally and respectfully imitates moments and gestures in Art history so as to imbue them with new meaning. It nearly always talks in a political register, but in the same way that hip-hop has changed from being a genre born out of social necessity and activism and is now sustained by images of opulence and extravagance, Adilson’s images can be somewhat indulgent. The sheer richness of the image is a double edged sword because the kind of sampling he does is encyclopaedic. With his images you immediately get the impression that this is a composite image- an image made of other images that are worked into the greater image with various digital or analog printmaking techniques and this is exciting. He will use old propaganda posters and literal original colonial manuscripts and work them into the image, but this is at risk of becoming too self referential and too opaque for those who aren't extremely versed in lusophonic history. And of course, the obvious rebuttal is that art should challenge and encourage literacy, but it need not spell it out quite so literally with manuscripts torn and worked into the image so obscurely that to the viewer it still remains abstract and has no effect of elucidation. 

 

Despite that his works are valuable, and not just because they have valuable documentation embedded within them but because they spell out political struggle without relying on historical tropes. It's also somewhat of a novelty seeing this brand of subdued/subtle protest art finding new visual vocabularies with digital tools and aesthetics that are unafraid to be seen as digital tools.  

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An excerpt from Twist Magazine, written by Mangaliso Ngcobo (2024).