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Francisco Vidal lives and works in Berlin.
Francisco Vidal, 68 plus 6, 2006. Acrylic on fabric, 200 x 400 cm. Courtesy of Galeria 111, Lisbon.I’ve been working as an artist for the past two years. Before that I was popping around from school to school in Portugal. At that time I could say that I had passed through almost every art school in the country! I was very bored with the experience.
So I decided that it was time for me to start work for real, so I just started to look around to see where in the Lisbon art scene I could fit in. It was not difficult to find a gallery, curators that I could work with, and fellow artists that I could talk with.
The most difficult thing was that in a year, I did almost everything that I proposed to myself to do in Portugal. So it was time to go! The Lisbon art scene is just too small—two streets and a corner. So I started to travel: the first city was Manchester, then Madrid. I was traveling with my girlfriend, and we would always come back to Lisbon between trips. We went to Brazil, New York, Malmoe, Sweden, Cidade da Praia, and Mindelo in Cape Verde. And finally we came to Berlin, where we are now. We are not coming back to Lisbon any time soon. It’s a cool city to live in, but it’s hard to work there, and Berlin ain’t cold any more, so I’ll try to do something here.
The big question for me nowadays is if there really is a different art scene in different cities. Of course there are differences among cultures, but there is not a whole different way of working from city to city.
The thing that I know is that there is no real art scene in Lisbon. Musicologists and academics that study music like to put different African music under the concept of “world music,” and that is just too narrow a place for all those musicians. Similarly, I have to think that all art scene behavior is global. And that is very cool.
