Revista de Humanidades (Oct 2021)
Aesthetics, cultural identity and mass media: Portugal in the Eurovision Song Contest and the ‘Lisbon 2018’ design
Abstract
As a ‘nation’ competition represented by ‘songs’, The Eurovision Song Contest establishes continuous contaminations between both terms, which expose the complexities of the production of cultural identity through the spectacle. Due to its longevity and international audience, we will analyse it from an interdisciplinary frame (Aesthetics, Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Ethnomusicology) to value the image and design of the Contest as an identity machinery, focusing on one of the participating countries, Portugal. Its unsuccessful but long trajectory (50 years of participation, since 1964) and its overwhelming victory in 2017 illustrate the history of the country through its songs in a narrative that exposes the maxims of this spectacular society of prospective and messianic roots: that of perseverance and final reward. We will conclude with an analysis of the consequent celebration of the contest in Lisbon in 2018 unravelling its aesthetic, cultural and medial dimensions.
