Polido

Background studies for music I'm working on and for a research project in collaboration with the filmmaker Louis Henderson on the remnants of identitarian/nationalist ideas from the dictatorship regime in the development, production and documentation of musical traditions in contemporary Portugal. A shared time-space of popular music including classical/modernist and avant-garde composers, to kuduro, to broksa, to folk and workers’ songs, to creole rap, and a few other edits/reworks/songs along the way. The title of "mild manners and goodwill" are both terms that I'm somewhat jaded by - how kindness and good intentions is assumed sometimes at the expense of the simplification of an issue, and a more complex reason or history is postponed or simply washed away. "Brandos costumes" is a term coined by Salazar and propaganda for his and Marcelo Caetano's fascist regime. It became an expression that doubles as a defense mechanism when the conversation nears Portugal's own violent history, and converts an event and its consequences into something quantifiable and instrumentalized for comparison with other histories of violence from other countries. A distraction device that appeases some, to further ignore other contexts inaccessible to them and the urgency of the present they're living in because, supposedly,"here it's not that bad"