Manuel Mendes Madeira
Manuel Mendes Madeira was born in Caldas da Rainha. In 1968, he started the Licentiate Degree (pre-Bologna) in Electrical Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon), having later taken a postgraduate course in “Semiconductors and Microprocessors” as a Philips scholarship holder at the Research Center of Eindhoven (Netherlands) of that Company.
From October 1974 to July 1978 he earned a PhD in “Data Transmission and Computer Networks” at London CBI University as a fellow of that organization and in 1995 completed the Advanced Management in Administration (MBA) at Harvard University.
In 2019, he completed a degree in Art History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, having started that same year his master’s degree in Contemporary Art, and is currently awaiting the defense of his thesis on “The Power of Image as a Political Tool: from the New State to PREC ”.
At the same time, he is completing a degree in Musical Sciences at the same University.
From a professional point of view, he was University Professor of Digital Systems at Instituto Superior Técnico (Technical University of Lisbon) and President of several Telecommunications Companies, namely TMN and Marconi SA. He is the author of dozens of publications and communications in national and international magazines and congresses.
- “Social aspects of Lisbon in the Nineteenth Century from iconographic representations of life of fadista Maria Severa (1901,1931, 2019)”
- “Towards a jazz-band musical iconography in the 20’s in Portugal, via some racist “novelas” and a political discourse (António Ferro)”
- “Data Transmission and Computer Networks” (PhD thesis)
- Fibres Optiques et Telecommunications, Seminário Internacional no Instituto Franco-Português, 1990;
- A reestruturação do sector empresarial do Estado nas vésperas do Mercado Único Europeu – Perspectivas e Estratégias para as Telecomunicações, Congresso do Centro de Estudos de Economia Pública e Social, 1990;
- Estado da Arte dos Serviços Avançados de Telecomunicações, Congresso de Serviços Avançados de Telecomunicações, 1989;
- Redes e Serviços Públicos de Telecomunicações – Estado de Arte, 1989;
- Reflexões sobre uma estratégia para o posicionamento empresarial das Telecomunicações – CTT, 1989;
- Telepac – The Portuguese Data Network: Development and Perspectives in a Telematic Context, Telecommunications Review, 1988;
- Serviços Avançados de Telecomunicações, 1988;
- Portuguese Telecommunications Global Strategy, Congresso da OCDE em Istambul, 1987;
- Evolution of Telematica Services in Portugal, I Congresso Ibero Americano, Madrid, 1987;
- Transdata – Uma Organização para Telemática, 1986;
Analyze how the various imagery tools (posters, films, pins, buildings, etc.) were used by the current political regimes, as a way to convey and reinforce a specific ideology, building a coherent whole in which the various communication components are they reinforced each other, appealing to awareness, which sometimes unconsciously led the masses to adhere to the ideology and principles they wanted to convey.
The study will essentially focus on the PREC period, namely from September 1974 to November 1975, as a very important milestone in Portuguese political life. We will resort to achievements from the beginning of the Estado Novo, namely as pieces from António Ferro’s Politics of the Spirit, to compare them with the processes of communication and propaganda most common in the PREC period.
Although there were many image tools used in both periods, the focus will be on posters (with emphasis on the murals from the time of PREC) and their respective slogans, trying to understand if the “poster/slogan” image behaved as a mutual reinforcement or, on the contrary, they would have equal strength with isolated existence.
The role of the 5th Division of the General Staff of the Armed Forces will be analyzed in depth, which, having been created on the day the second constitutional government took office, proposed to take the revolution throughout the country, promoting clarification sessions in Portugal and abroad, allowing the conceptual framing of the political proposals of the new power, making them known to people who were often distant from this discussion.
While in the Estado Novo there was some divorce between the artists and the current communication policy, with some exceptions such as Almada Negreiros (in the initial phase of the regime), on the 25th of April the participation and contribution of the artists was total, and it can be said that “art went out into the street” in an explosion of visualism (Eugénio Melo e Castro, 1977). In this context, we highlight the June 10th Panel (1974), held in the presence of the public, with the theme of freedom, which with its gigantic dimension of 4.5m * 24m, was organized by the Democratic Movement of Plastic Artists, in National Gallery of Modern Art. This panel had the collaboration of forty-eight artists from the most varied political tendencies, but all obviously opposed to the previous regime, such as Júlio Pomar, João Abel Manta, João Vieira, Angelo de Sousa, Helena Almeida, Manuel Pires, among many others .