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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Ana Hatherly

Ana_Hatherly_2003 (Maria José Palla Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0).png
Anna Hatherly, 2003 (Photo: Maria José Palla via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ana Hatherly (1929-2015) was born in Porto, but moved to Lisbon at an early age. Following formal musical studies in Portugal, France and Germany, she took a degree in Germanic Philology at the Universidade Clássica, Lisbon. Her intense and varied academic career took her to London (1971-74) to pursue studies at the London International Film School, and to the University of California, Berkeley, where she was awarded a doctorate in Hispanic Literature of the Golden Age. Between 1975 and 1976 she lectured at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (AR.CO), Lisbon, and from 1976 to 1978 at the Escola Superior de Cinema do Conservatório Nacional, Lisbon.  In 1984, she joined the Portuguese Department at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she established the Institute of Portuguese Studies in 1994. Over the years she undertook multiple roles in literary associations, magazines and other literature-related institutions: she was a member of the Associação Portuguesa de Escritores (APE) and one of the co-founders of the PEN Club Português, over which she presided from 1992 to1994 and which awarded her a prize in 1999 for her book Rilkeana. 

Spanning artworks, films, poems, novels, essays, translations, Hatherly’s production is deeply multidimensional and defies labels and boundaries. Her work is not only transdisciplinary (Pinharanda in Hatherly, 2003: 11), ranging from literature (within which she dedicated herself to fiction, poetry and translation) to visual art and cinema, but it is also frequently interdisciplinary and thus contributes to some of the most important trends and avant-garde movements of the 20th century. A visible thread in her œuvre is the relationship between word and image, drawing and writing, often shaping the creation of a meta-referential literary space in which writing exhibits plastic and gestural dimensions. On the occasion of a retrospective of her work at the Centro de Arte Moderna, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, in 1992, Hatherly wittily commented: ‘My work begins with writing: I am a writer who evolves with the visual arts by experimenting with the word […]; my work also begins with painting – I am a painter who evolves to literature by a process of awareness of the ties that unite all arts, particularly in our society’ (Note 1); neither purely literary nor artistic, her œuvre embraces a dialogic aesthetic of both/and.

Hatherly’s experimental and highly original approach to visual and literary representations is linked to her research on concrete, experimental poetry, which begins in 1959, and she soon becomes one of the leading figures in the Portuguese Experimental Poetry group (Po.Ex), collaborating with writers such as E.M. de Melo e Castro, António Aragão and Alberto Pimenta and co-writing some of the movement’s programmatic texts (compiled in Po.Ex: Textos Teóricos e Documentos da Poesia Experimental Portuguesa). The experimental vein visible in both her writing practice and its theoretical articulation guided Hatherly through her exploration of the possibilities of poetic language and was very much influenced by her interest in and research of baroque visual poetry, as well as by structuralist and semiotic approaches to language, Chinese calligraphy and the Japanese haiku (very much incorporated into Hatherly’s Tisanas: mini prose poems published regularly since 1969) and techniques imported from musical composition (namely the idea of a theme and its variations, most successfully explored in the poetry volume Eros Frenético [1968]). As a result, she often subverts the lyrical canon through a ludic game where the poet is also an alchemist (Hatherly, 2001: 11). Nevertheless, there are reverberations of the poetic tradition in her work, visible in the influence of poets such as Pessoa and Camões, and in more recent works, such as Rilkeana (1999) and O Pavão Negro (2003; awarded the Prémio Consagração by the Associação Portuguesa de Críticos Literários), the experimental dimension is subsumed under the emergence of a discrete lyrical voice (Manuel Portela in Publico, 5.8.2015). 

Hatherly’s artistic voice was always socially committed as well as distinctly feminine, in what is a clear contrast to the gender divide characteristic of the social, cultural and literary milieu into which she was born. Hence her experimental processes were deeply subversive and consequently inherently revolutionary, constituting a threat to the conventions of the established order and the conformity pervasive in a dictatorial society. Indeed, in a cultural and social atmosphere smothered and restrained by the totalitarian, isolationist principles defended by Estado Novo, her practice revealed a disruptive openness to the world and a feeling of freedom that only became socially materialised in 1974 with the Carnation Revolution; in fact, Hatherly was one of the first artists to explore the plastic dimension of this decisive moment through the film Revolução (1976) and her series of collages Ruas de Lisboa (1977), in which colourful political and circus posters are juxtaposed. Her subversive spirit is often permeated by a Carnivalesque principle, through which humour (recognised by all who knew her well), transgression, perpetual movement and regeneration are successfully evoked as in the notorious Anagramático, (1970) or in the reworking of the prose-poem in the Tisanas. These Tisanas also illustrate the meandering, labyrinthine nature of Hatherly’s aesthetic production in their articulation of poetry, micro-narrative and the essay.

Traversed by that radical, experimental spirit, Hatherly’s artwork cannot be separated from her activity as a writer. Her questioning of the creative act merges with specific aspects of her visual exploration of the text and develops into the creation of the visual poem, in which writing engenders images. Through these visual-literary objects she researches the manual process of writing and the visual possibilities of words, calligraphy, and textual collages. An ‘intelligent hand’ (Hatherly, 2003) repeats words, creates the contours of shapes and volumetric forms and expresses thought and gesture, message and image, drawing and writing. As a result, it shatters the traditional boundaries separating poetry, drawing and painting, celebrating experimentation, re-contextualization, re-construction and re-signification. These are processes that traverse her entire œuvre, from the appropriation of the posters the artist found in post-revolutionary Lisbon to the more recent experiments in graffiti, reworking this urban subculture (Pinharanda in Hatherly, 2003).

First exhibiting in 1969, in the Galeria Quadrante, Lisbon, Hatherly was a pioneer and a crucial artist in the introduction of innovative and radical art forms in the Portuguese art scene. She was associated with some of the most radical literary and artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century (she exchanged letters, for example, with Dick Higgins, one of the early exponents of the Fluxus movement) and regularly contributed to avant-garde journals, edited collections and group exhibitions. Her visual experimentation led her to create performances and site-specific artworks, practices that share permeable borders and through which she successfully explored her inventiveness and offered conceptual and sensorial experiences. In 1977 she participated in the exhibition ‘Alternativa Zero’ with her installation Poema D’Entro: both are landmarks in the Portuguese cultural panorama of the period, opening it up to new and radical aesthetic media. That same year she presented her performance Rotura at the Galeria Quadrum. As in Poema D’Entro, Rotura encouraged participation by the audience (no longer a passive interlocutor), whilst the artist literally embodied and en-acted the recurrent themes of her work.

In 1976 Hatherly presented the film Revolução at the Venice Biennale.  In this short film she registers the excitement and spirit of freedom experienced on the streets of Lisbon after the Carnation Revolution, offering a plastic, sensorial and emotionally charged experience of this important moment in Portuguese history through the representation of streets, murals and graffiti. She developed other cinematic experiences throughout the 1970s, some of them documentary whilst others used animation, in which she again consistently collapses the boundaries between message and gesture, figuration and abstraction, as well as exhibiting a spirit of transgression and rupture (‘rupture’ being the title also given to the film that documents her performance at Galeria Quadrum, in 1977).

Hatherly also developed an intense scholarly production, researching oriental writing and calligraphic poetry, and in particular baroque poetry and the history of visual poetry, which further expanded her erudition and fuelled her interest in ludic and intellectual games, ultimately feeding into her literary and visual work. She was an acknowledged academic in this field, having published several books on the subject (for example, A Experiência do Prodígio: Bases Teóricas e Antologia de Textos-Visuais Portugueses dos Séculos XVII e XVIII, in 1983, and O Ladrão Cristalino, in 1997, for which she was awarded the Grande Prémio do Ensaio Literário by APE). In 1988 she founded the journal Claro-Escuro, dedicated to the study of baroque literature, and in 1991 the journal Incidências. In parallel, she also dedicated herself to translation, having translated the work of authors as diverse as Nicolau Berdiaeff, Cesare Pavese and Malcolm Lowry, as well as to the promotion of avant-garde art forms in newspapers, radio and TV programmes (such as Obrigatório Não Ver, broadcast by RTP between 1978 and 1979).

Part of Ana Hatherly’s estate is currently held at the Arquivo de Cultura Portuguesa Contemporânea, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, the Fundação de Serralves, Porto. The Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, Lisbon, also holds relevant collections. Some of her works are available online at the Po.Ex website: 
https://www.po-ex.net/taxonomia/transtextualidades/metatextualidades-alografas/ana-hatherly-biografia

Note 1:  ‘O meu trabalho começa com a escrita - sou um escritor que deriva para as artes visuais através da experimentação com a palavra [...]; O meu trabalho também começa com a pintura - sou um pintor que deriva para a literatura através de um processo de consciencialização dos laços que unem todas as artes, particularmente na nossa sociedade.’ (Obra Visual 1960-1990, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1992, my translation).

Compiled by Maria Luísa Coelho (Oxford)