L’Internationale

Europe is said to be currently facing the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. In the media, images of people escaping from their home countries devastated by war and misery and arriving to Europe are recurrent. As these pictures spread and instigate different reactions – some of them highly racist and xenophobic – another picture came to my mind: a picture of Lisbon in 1975 by Alfredo Cunha, shortly after the arrival of 6000 people from the Portuguese ex-colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe and Cape Verde.
in”Decolonizing Museums”, L’Internacionale.

The text focuses on three operations – OPENING, REMOVAL and RESTITUTION – having Ana Hatherly’s work “As Ruas de Lisboa”, Isabel Brison and Nuno Rodrigues de Sousa’s “O Monumento da Rotunda das Águas Livres”, and Ana Bigotte Vieira’s “No Aleph – Notes about a research on Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation ACARTE Service (1984-1989)” as main sources. It is important to note that this text is being written in 2015, at a time when the brutal presence of a succession of absences in Portuguese recent history is felt more than ever. In fact, the current austerity policies point to the removal of a series of I would call ‘openings’ directly related to the Revolution on 25 April 1974 that overthrew António de Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano’s forty-eight year dictatorship and ended thirteen years of colonial wars. in”Decolonizing Museums”, L’Internacionale