"In its structure, this book may not initially appear to be what it sets out to be: a history of the ACARTE service from its inception in 1984 to 1989.

But that is precisely what this book is. Simply put, a history of ACARTE raises a series of questions that go far beyond the creation of a service, its institutional framework, the people who contributed to its existence, or the works and authors that gave it public projection.

Through a narrative with multiple paths, Ana Bigotte Vieira weaves a broad panorama where various artistic areas—the theoretical debates that fill them and the cultural manifestations they give rise to—evolve chronologically until converging, as in a meeting point of multiple dynamics, in ACARTE.

The service, as a space that contains all other spaces—like the Aleph—thus gains a narrative dimension that allows us to reconstruct the plural, discontinuous, and sometimes contradictory forms through which culture related to modernization in the 20th century. Or rather, with the historical perception through which, in the last century, many in people in Portugal imagined living the experience of modernity, particularly through the way the body constituted an expressive terrain of that experience."

Luís Trindade