BIRTHDAY PARTY AT THE FACTORY OF THE SILVER ARM
Friday, June 17th, to celebrate 15 years of (r)existence
Whenever we approach the date of yet another anniversary, we are assaulted by the same sensation of vertigo that marked the day of our inauguration. Will we be able to leap over the abyss? Will we be able to guarantee the existence of the Factory for another year? Will we be able to continue hosting around 40 concerts a month by paying the musicians only with the box office result at the end of each night? And are there even more than 50 plastic artists who, throughout the year, want to present their work in our rooms without being guaranteed to sell a single work? Will Lisbon City Council continue to protect this adventure by accepting that we inhabit this former administration building of the War Material Factory? Will Marvila's real estate renovation tolerate the survival of this desecration of all market laws, even in the center of 21st century Lisbon?
And, as on the first day, June 14, 2007, there is a force much greater than us that pushes us forward, into the unknown. Today we know that this strength does not come from behind. It's not what we've already managed to do that inspires us. And we've already done what would seem impossible - such as, over these 15 years, spending more than 2 million euros from the pockets of the people who pay admission to attend the 4 or 5 concerts each night to the pockets of the more than 3,000 musicians who ever played here. We hosted more than 1,000 exhibitions, where works worth approximately 200,000 euros were sold. We set up a huge circus tent where concerts for over 3,000 people could fit. We made our walls the first graffiti gallery in the country. And all of it almost evaporated, all of it seemed suddenly unreal. In fact, in recent years, the Factory has been condemned to be a shadow of itself with the arrival, first, of the Troika and its looting of what would be our sovereign debts, then, with the hell of the virus and endless confinements . What inspires us today is everything that has become possible to do again. We are pushed by that which does not yet exist and which has the form of the essential.
To celebrate this rebirth of the Factory, we want to make the day we celebrate 15 years of (r)existence a party until dawn. We'll start at 7 pm with Baque Mulher, a percussion group residing at the Factory. Then, at 21:00, there will be a show by the Théâtre Jaleo (France) installed in the Campervans car park. At 9.30 pm, Júlio Resende, the musician who founded the Jazz na Fábrica sonorities, takes up the oldest tradition on our agenda - concerts for well-tempered piano, drums and double bass by _cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b -136bad5cf58d_Fridays. At 10.30 pm, in the Prado Coelho room, the Bela Ensemble will present the most recent tradition of the Factory, the Fado Fatal cycle, also on Fridays, with Ana Margarida. At 23:00, João Ventura (piano and voice) and Rogério Pitomba (drums) bring all the immense heritage of Brazilian music to the Foucault room. Nicole Eitner, another of the monuments that have crossed our 15 years of life, prolonga at the piano and in her voice the flame of Júlio Resende left in the Nietzsche Room. In the Visconti room, from 10 pm onwards, the percussion of the Baque Mulher group resumes as an invitation to dance until dawn with more music and with our video projections of loose memories of the Factory. Also at this party, Fábrica inaugurates the exhibition of Francisco Biguino in the Kandinsky room, along with the already visible exhibitions of Inês Pargana in the Deleuze room, Carolina Marques in the Duras room and the exhibition of Joaquim Leal in the Eduardo Prado Coelho room, a room where a reading/performance of the text Cassandra de Balaclava by the resident theater company Anthropos, along with two poetry sessions in the bookstore by Mati, a stand by the Tektonika collective in the Rilke room and to finish off a book fair where we can find new and hand-picked editions between the 1 and the 10€.
