This project is dedicated to honour all the gay man that have died victims of
Suburban Lisbon in the 80s, growing up as a closeted gay-kid was extremely difficult, but even harder facing the arrival of AIDS. From my youthful experience, the act of coming out was extremely challenging within the political, social and religious structure.The hetero-normative resolution was the only socially established and accepted.
Other forms of culture identity or sexual representation were mostly wrong viewed, rejected, discriminated and occulted. With some luck one could find them hidden in a corner of a progressive bookshop or on the back of a pile of playboys magazines at the local magazine shop.
works around those magazines and its political context. We may look to this magazines as just pornographic content, but DAD design wants to challenge that into a more meaningful and insightful perspective.
"...Heroes or Eros, Legends or Icons that kept fighting for Freedom..."
For us designers, those magazines were/are the sexual guidance that was not given to many within the Gay community. Magazines that helped to fight the breaking of a taboo, remaining as a bright light in the tunnel, granting a sense of comfort, that ones existence was not alone, shamefully waiting to die in a ultra-conservative reality.
At DAD our work is mostly to honour those man in those magazines. When we talk about those man, we are not just referring the models, we include the machinery or the apparatus behind them, such as visual artists, scenographers, directors, photographers, designers, editors, story-tellers and its actors. For us many of those magazines are full of creative plurality and most important, they are charged with audacity considering when they were produced and published.
In our artistic approach with the archival material, we departure mostly from an attempt to portrait Heroes or Eros, Legends or Icons. Its this way for us because, thats our community History, its our sub-culture, and just like any of many, our Heroes also kept fighting for Freedom and for a space of acceptance and recognition...
...Inspiring following generations, to keep its integrity and identity visible and sacred in times were social abandonment, public humiliation, fines, imprisonment and forced psycological treatments were common practices of an establishment facing the community, and death more unpredictable then ever experienced before on a western society till date.
DAD's Team
Berlin 4th August 2021. Deutschland.
