Scars in the soil

Abstract

The city of Lisbon has scar tissue, a reminder of pain and trauma that administrations often gloss over as urbanization. The demolition of dozens of neighbourhoods has been documented in cinema, both documentaries and feature-length conventional films. Even more stark is the footage from grassroots archivists, who have accompanied since the beginning the raw despair of displacement, an internal uprooting after a generation or more of Luso-African migrants making place in the Lisbon area, especially in the adjacent municipality of Amadora. Over a decade ago, I followed a few of the displaced former residents of Fontaínhas to Casal da Boba, a social neighbourhood, to inquire and record memories about such scars. In late 2020, I reconnected with these interlocutors and discovered more storytellers who have a curious relationship with the former improvised neighbourhood of Bairro de Santo Filomena. This article is a piece of ethnographic fiction based on those experiences.