Martim Avillez

"I started Lusitania out of guilt, a newsletter, mostly for the circle of people around my friend, the intellectual Antonio Alçada Batista, founder of the journal 'O Tempo e o Modo', owner of the Morais bookstore and who just passed away.

My idea was not to report about New York, as if New York, by the end of the 20th Century was some 'rive gauche', a caldron where some new, revolutionary ideas and sensibilities were germinating, as it happened in Paris and Moscow; a century before.

I also didn't know any other Portuguese artists, but soon started to bump into anti-fascists from all over the world. There were Latin-Americans like Leandro Katz, people from Asia like Catherine Liu and Kwang Park, who had read their Freud and Marx......

The production was made possible by grants from the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Luso-Americana Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts.

So Artaud and Bataille already dwelled with living with contradictions, but I am not ready to face the courts of Evora."

Lisbon, 5-01-2009

Martim Avillez