ANDThis is one of two books that Júlia Barata, a Portuguese illustrator residing in Argentina since 2013, has in progress and for which she has already applied for support in Portugal without success, she said in an interview with the Lusa agency.
The starting point for the conversation with the author was a debate table that Júlia Barata shared with fellow illustrator and comic book author Filipe Abranches, at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, which is taking place in the Argentine capital, with the city of Lisbon as guest of honor.
In that session, the two authors, who dedicate themselves especially to comics, complained about the lack of support and the difficulty of publishing in Portugal, if not through large publishing groups.
According to Júlia Barata, it is easier to publish in Argentina, where the publishing market dedicated to this genre is much larger and where there was more support, until the current president, Javier Milei, took office.
“I would really like to have some support. Now I am in a particularly serious moment, because in terms of support, everything has died. The National Fund for the Arts, which supported me twice, was one of the entities that [Milei] dismantled, 15 days after taking office”, he said.
Júlia Barata has been applying for funds in Portugal for three years, with two projects, and has never been successful.
One of them is the adaptation to a graphic novel, which he is doing together with the writer Isabela Figueiredo, of the novel “Caderno de Memórias Coloniais”, centered on Mozambique in the 1960s and which “requires a lot of documentation and a lot of work”.
The book’s author is adapting the text and Júlia Barata is illustrating, but they have no support.
“We competed with DGLAB [Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas], but the project was failed. He continues to work on it blindly, in the early hours of the morning, with a son and 20 other jobs. Isabela also continues to work and has no allowance for that”, he revealed.
The author’s other project is based on a series of interviews with people with pasts of historical and political conflicts, such as a Chilean refugee from the Pinochet dictatorship, a Spanish woman who has a great uncle who died in the civil war, a woman from Taiwan , one from Mozambique, one from Argentina or one from Israel.
They are “very different backgrounds, which require a lot of documentation. In general, in cinema this involves a whole team, in this case, it’s all about me, and I also paint and edit. It’s delirious”, he stated, specifying that this soap opera has been in production for three years, at an intermittent pace, because “it requires a lot of concentration, blocks of hours, continuity, like a doctoral thesis, but in support”.
With this soap opera, Júlia Barata ran twice for the General Directorate of Arts, the second time last year, with a producer, within the scope of a specific line for the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April, about memory and democracy.
“I was perfectly inserted there. I had a childhood in Mozambique and grew up after decolonization. What connects the interviews is a kind of alter ego of mine who will talk about this process of post-decolonization and civil war”, crossing all the other stories from different countries at different times in the 20th century, but all with pasts of migration, conflicts, dictatorships and wars”.
Júlia Barata does not understand how, in this context and with a soap opera all about memory and History, she could not get support, not even when she competed with a producer, which had associated activities, such as street actions to record people’s memories about the 25th of April.
“Here [na Argentina] I had much more support from other governments. I won a scholarship, a course at the cultural center for memory and human rights, they gave me money. In Portugal I can’t get anything”, he lamented.
The two novels are entirely in watercolor, one painting per page, he described, considering that this is another “interesting” concept of the graphic novel: “when you make a painting, you sell a painting. We here work with 300 paintings, if the novel has 300 pages, and I don’t earn anything, and I won’t win and I won’t sell them. It’s a shot in the foot, it’s desperate”.
Despite this, Júlia Barata, an architect by training, but who currently teaches drawing and illustrates as a means of subsistence, says that she will not give up, because comics is her great passion and her dream was to be able to make a living from it.
“I’m going to continue, but it’s a tractor action. I’ve been continuing for 10 years, but there’s a moment when it’s ‘please give me two pennies, I have to pay rent, I have a son, I want to do this and I really believe in this'”.
Júlia Barata published “Pregnancy”, which has also been published in Portugal by Tigre de Papel, and launched another graphic novel about a year and a half ago, entitled “Família”, which is scheduled to be published in Portugal later this year.
Filipe Abranches has a past much more linked to illustration, with works published since 1979, in Portugal and other countries, and with the creation of short films, having won an award in the best director category with the six-minute film “Birds”. , at the IndieLisboa festival.
Still, he has the same complaints, namely in a “strong project” he is developing, a “story set between Poland and Portugal, about the Warsaw ghetto”, for which he has not yet found funding.
“I tried to get support, but it’s not enough for everyone. I’m going to look for other ways to publish the book. It’s very difficult to work on ‘comics’ without other support,” he told Lusa.
Filipe Abranches, whose current sources of income are animated shorts and work he is doing for a more ‘mainstream’ album for a Levoir collection about Portuguese figures, laments the difficulty of comics as a profession.
“It’s difficult because if you don’t have a grant to do a project for a graphic novel, you have to do many things at the same time. You can always knock on the doors of big publishers, but even the advances they make, you can’t make a living from that “.
Regarding the project proposed for scholarship and which was unable to obtain financing, he says that he will look for another way, publishers, partners, financing and is “very focused on ‘crowdfunding'” or something he would really like “which was to convert this project into a format publication in newspapers, in series, but newspapers are not accepting proposals of this scope because they say they do not have financial resources”.
The story is about a character who does “trench tourism”, makes visits across Europe to places where major battles took place, and takes place between Portugal and Poland”.
The author says that he was collecting information on the Jewish question and the Warsaw ghetto, when he came across “a strong and harsh scenario and geography”.
“My travels to the south of Poland also took me to incredible places in the middle of the forest, where there are ‘bunkers’, remnants of the war, border areas that were never very clear, and it occurred to me to gather all the notes I had to make a story about memories, unresolved issues in history, and I wanted to do something historical, journalistic work, in comics, documentary”.
Another complaint from the illustrator concerns the publishing market, an issue about which, “sooner or later there will have to be discussion”.
Filipe Abranches refers to “comic book publishers that started to bring together many small publishers and become heavily allocated to festivals, which could be, in some way, harming diversity.”
Read Also: Beja Comics Festival announces this year’s program
Download our free App.
Eighth consecutive year Consumer Choice for Online Press and elected product of the year 2024.
* Study by e Netsonda, Nov. and ten. 2023 product of the year – pt.com
Download our free App.
Eighth consecutive year Consumer Choice for Online Press and elected product of the year 2024.
* Study by e Netsonda, Nov. and ten. 2023 product of the year – pt.com
