An exhibition that brings together photographs of the African diaspora’s self-representation in Portugal since 1975 aims to “counter the weight of the official archives and the narrative of the colonial period” and will be inaugurated on Saturday at the Padrão dos Descobrimentos in Lisbon.
The venue was not chosen by chance, said the two curators of the exhibition “Álbuns de Família. Photographs of the African diaspora in Greater Lisbon (1975-today)”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inocência Mata, who during a visit to journalists stressed the importance of this initiative to “give a voice to the African community” in Portugal.
“Our aim is to make visible the 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 over 50 years, and are part of the Portuguese nation,” said researcher Inocência Mata, speaking to Lusa news agency.
The temporary exhibition brings together “family albums” with the images that Portuguese Afro-descendants and resident Africans have recorded of themselves and their communities since 1975, the date of the independence of the African countries colonized by Portugal.
The curators considered that “it would be a way of making visible these faces that have contributed to creating Portugal since April 25, while not neglecting the past”, said the professor of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in the area of Literatures, Arts and Cultures, with a PhD in Postcolonial Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.
There were two very strong reasons for creating this exhibition, she said: “It’s the 50th anniversary of April 25 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, there have been few initiatives in this area in Portugal, so it has had little visibility,” the researcher lamented.
For the exhibition, the curators challenged nine Afro-descendant and African artists with family and professional ties to Portugal to work on the idea of “Family Albums”, including singers, visual artists, writers and photographers, and also asked anonymous people to contribute their personal photographs.
“At the heart of the exhibition are the 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 that narrative from 50 years ago and the present,” curator Filipa Lowndes Vicente, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, told Lusa.
The researcher said that, over the course of a year of preparation, they both thought of the exhibition as a space to give a voice, through photography, to ordinary people from the African community in Greater Lisbon.
“We always imagined this exhibition as a way of being able to counter and deconstruct the Portuguese colonial archive, which is extremely powerful. The official public archives, and the private archives of many Portuguese, are full of photographs of black people in colonial situations, often violent, unequal,” said Filipa Lowndes Vicente.
He recalled that the invention of photography coincided with modern colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, “so this archive [of documentary and personal photography] is gigantic, and it’s very present”.
“With this exhibition we wanted to show the other side, to show people who have a name and a voice, which is not the case with other photographs from the colonial period, in which no one is identified,” said the editor of the book “O Império da Visão: fotografia no contexto colonial português (1860-1960)” (The Empire of Vision: 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 those images”.
Along the way, visitors 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 photographic studio-shop, which was set up in 1960 in Damaia and for decades photographed Afro-descendants and Africans from the local resident community.
Portraits of women, men and children of African descent, families and friends socializing in Lisbon nightclubs cover the walls of the exhibition hall of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, a monument that was first erected in 1940 as part of the Portuguese World Exhibition, promoted by the Estado Novo dictatorship.
It was in Lisbon and the areas surrounding the capital that the vast majority of Africans who came to Portugal in recent decades settled and where the majority of the African diaspora now resides, 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 Portuguese colonies in Africa gained their independence, the flow of people from Africa to Portugal has been more or less continuous: “A large proportion of people of African descent in Portugal were born here, and are Portuguese”.
The African Union considers the diaspora to be its sixth region, and it predominates in Atlantic countries and regions or those that were colonial powers and agents in the slave trade – Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the United States of America, the Caribbean, Brazil – being “inseparable from a historical past of centuries of slavery and colonialism”, they added.
