Spam Cartoon – Rage and Laughter

GALERIA MUNICIPAL ARTUR BUAL

Créditos

André Carrilho

In the mid-2000s, in Portugal, five creators came together as a multidisciplinary team to try to answer a question few people were asking at the time: how could the editorial cartoon evolve alongside new times, new technologies and new audiences? If print — and later television — were gradually ceasing to be the load-bearing media of public communication, how could the cartoon adapt to the reality then coming into view?

The result was a project with no equivalent anywhere else: over the past two decades it became a laboratory for experimentation, bringing together the distinct talents of João Paulo Cotrim, André Carrilho, Cristina Sampaio, João Fazenda and José Condeixa, later joined by Tiago Albuquerque and Philippe Lenzini.

As a field of journalistic creation, the cartoon has a historic part in the practice of free expression and a free press — a space for graphic opinion that works through humour and exposure. Until it was suspended in 2025, Spam Cartoon was a response to a world in flux and increasingly polarised, one that preserved the creative independence of its authors within an ever more fragmented media landscape.

In a reality where outrage has become an instrument for keeping us tethered to the flow of information, humour is the other side of the same coin. It holds our attention too — but the attacks the cartoon comes under in the media show it has kept its power to unsettle those who hate freedom of thought.

It is hard to laugh at a world on the verge of collapse. Yet we need, at all costs, to hold on to a lucid gaze. Every Spam Cartoon was drawn in defence of laughter, so that screens full of rage would not leave us blind.