Abstract
This visual essay comprises a selection of works made by artists from several generations and geographies, who contribute to an epistemic decolonization in, and of, the present by means of archival research. With works by Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, 1979), Filipa César (Portugal, 1975), Olavo Amado (São Tomé and Príncipe, 1979), Ângela Ferreira (Mozambique, 1958), Eurídice Kala aka Zaituna Kala (Mozambique, 1987), Délio Jasse (Angola, 1980), Daniel Barroca (Portugal, 1976), Filipe Branquinho (Mozambique, 1977), and Mónica de Miranda (Portugal/Angola, 1976), I propose a possible reading of the various ways in which contemporary artists have been working critically with colonial archives, not only public, but also private and familial, in view of a decolonizing memorialization of Portuguese colonialism and an understanding of its profound and multifarious impact in contemporary societies – notably regarding structural and institutional racism in Portugal, and enduring patterns of coloniality and neo-colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Highlights
In Lisbon, artists such as Kia Henda, Ângela Ferreira (Mozambique, 1958) and others have looked at the ways in which the violent histories and memories of slavery and colonialism continue to be denied by the grand narrative of the so-called discoveries
Ferreira’s video and sculptural installation Messy Colonialism, Wild Decolonization (2015) reflects on the way in which the site of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos symbolically marked both the beginning of the Portuguese colonial enterprise as envisioned by the Estado Novo from the late thirties; and its collapse in the midseventies, after thirteen years of war waged against the Angolan, Mozambican and Guinean liberation movements (1961-1974)
WSYDT is based on her own experiences of moving between Maputo and Johannesburg; on inter-generational, family memories, such as her grandfather’s recollections of having built crates for the departing Portuguese in 1975; and on Mozambican pre, colonial and post-colonial collective history, marked as it is by the circulation of people, commodities and ideas across the Indian and Atlantic oceans
Summary
In Lisbon, artists such as Kia Henda, Ângela Ferreira (Mozambique, 1958) and others have looked at the ways in which the violent histories and memories of slavery and colonialism continue to be denied by the grand narrative of the so-called discoveries.
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