The exhibition revisits the experimental artistic project conceived and created by Elvira Leite along with the community of Largo de Pena Ventosa, in Bairro da Sé, one of Porto’s historic neighbourhoods. The project unfolded from 1976 to 1977, after the local housing support program (SAAL), launched after the Portuguese political revolution in 1974, was unexpectedly shut down. For more than a year, the street became a place for discussing ideas, planning activities, demonstrating techniques and also a workshop space where children of all ages implemented a plan, built on dialogue, which integrated their interests and proposals. Coming to terms with feelings of powerlessness and anger of a community, faced with the failure of the promise of better housing conditions, were the impetus for Elvira Leite's action.
Achieved at the beginning of her professional career, the Pena Ventosa project explains what would become an idea and an action, a pedagogy, nourished by sensitivity and intelligence and anchored in research and training, that she sought on her own initiative in a process that Elvira Leite characterizes as self-taught. A normative pedagogy, open to the unforeseen and guided towards the realization of individual and collective projects.
Organized by clusters of photographs taken by Elvira Leite to document the different phases of the project that disclose the idea that sustained it and attest the field work of a methodology that Elvira Leite consolidates throughout a lifetime dedicated to promoting the values of democracy and freedom through a practice aimed at stimulating creative expression. Recalling Helen Levitt's conviction that beauty is extracted from reality, what stands out in these photographs is not the nostalgic vision of the past, but rather the discovery of its connections and transformations in the present, along alongside with the currentness of its dissemination, when street seems a less relevant place for playful invention and political claim.
