Exhibition on the African diaspora in Portugal aims to contradict official archives

An exhibition that brings together photographs of the self-representation of the African diaspora in Portugal since 1975, aims to “counter the weight of official archives and the narrative of the colonial period” and will open on Saturday, at Padrão dos Descobrimentos, in Lisbon.

The space was not chosen by chance, said the two curators of the “Family Albums” exhibition. Photographs of the African diaspora in Greater Lisbon (1975-today)”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inocência Mata, who during a visit to journalists highlighted the importance of this initiative to “give a voice to the African community” in Portugal.

“Our objective is to make visible people from this segment of Portuguese society, always seen as foreigners and immigrants, but most of whom were born in Portugal or have lived here for more than 50 years, and are part of the Portuguese nation”, highlighted the researcher Innocência Mata in statements to the Lusa agency.

The temporary exhibition brings together “family albums” with the images that Portuguese people of African descent and resident Africans have recorded of themselves and their communities since 1975, the date of the independence of the African countries under Portuguese colonization.

The curators considered that “it would be a way of making visible these faces that have contributed to creating Portugal since the 25th of April, without also neglecting the past”, said the professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon in the area of ​​Literature, Arts and Cultures, PhD in Postcolonial Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.

Two reasons were very strong for creating this exhibition, he said: “We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April and this is the last year of the International Decade for People of African Descent [2015-2024], established by the United Nations to promote the ideas of recognition, justice and development. However, few initiatives in this area have been carried out in Portugal, so there has been little visibility”, lamented the researcher.

For the exhibition, the curators challenged nine Afro-descendant and African artists with family and professional relationships with Portugal to work on the idea of ​​“Family Albums”, including singers, visual artists, writers and photographers, and also asked for the collaboration of anonymous people to contribute. with your personal photos.

“At the heart of the exhibition are photographs of unknown people, the result of the idea that we all have personal stories that intersect with national and international history. The people we want to see represented here are also part of this narrative from 50 years ago and now”, curator Filipa Lowndes Vicente, researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, told Lusa.

The researcher indicated that, over a year of preparation, they both thought of the exhibition as a space to give voice, through photography, to ordinary people from the African community in Greater Lisbon.

“We always imagined this exhibition as a way of countering and deconstructing the Portuguese colonial archive, which is extremely powerful. The official public archives, and the private archives of many Portuguese people, are full of photographs of black people in colonial situations, often violent and unequal”, pointed out Filipa Lowndes Vicente.

He recalled that the invention of photography coincided with modern colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, “so this archive [de fotografia documental e pessoal] It’s gigantic, and it’s very present.”

“With this exhibition we wanted to show the other side, show people who have a name and a voice, which does not happen with other photographs from the colonial period, in which no one is identified”, observed the editor of the work “O Império da Visão: photography in the Portuguese colonial context (1860-1960)”, launched in 2014.

Filipa Lowndes Vicente also said that putting together the content of the “Family Albums” exhibition “involved a lot of collaborative work with people who generously lent their original personal photographs, and told stories linked to these images”.

Along the way, the visitor will find works by artists such as Mónica de Miranda, one of the curators of Portugal’s representation at the Venice Art Biennale, which opened on Saturday, photographer Adão Marcelino, as well as António Pedro, owner of the photography studio-shop , created in 1960, in Damaia, and which for decades photographed Afro-descendants and Africans from the local resident community.

Portraits of women, men and children of African or African descent, families, friends hanging out at nightclubs in Lisbon cover the walls of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos exhibition room, a monument that was erected for the first time in 1940, in an ephemeral form, integrated into the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, promoted by the Estado Novo dictatorship.

It was in Lisbon and the neighboring areas of the capital that the vast majority of Africans who came to Portugal in recent decades settled and where the majority of the African diaspora lives today, coming from countries that were Portuguese colonies, namely Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau , Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe.

The curators recalled that, since 1975, when most of the independence of Portuguese colonies in Africa took place, the flow of people who came from Africa to Portugal has been more or less continuous: “A large part of Afro-descendants in Portugal were born here, and it is Portuguese”.

The African Union considers the diaspora as its sixth region, and it predominates in Atlantic countries and regions that were colonial powers and agents in the slave trade – Portugal, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, United States of America, Caribbean , Brazil – being “inseparable from a historical past of centuries of slavery and colonialism”, they also mentioned.