Parse Journal (Aug 2021)
Turned into Stone: The Portuguese Colonial Exhibitions Today
Abstract
Portugal’s two colonial exhibitions took place in 1934 and 1940, the first in Porto and the second in Lisbon. Both exhibitions were set up by the fascist regime of António Salazar, as powerful tools of propaganda that asserted an idea of empire and invited the population to colonize Portugal’s ultramarine domains and civilize indigenes populations. Both exhibitions created a “Square of the Empire,” punctuated by a monument erected in perishable materials, as temporary instalment. In Porto, celebrating the Portuguese colonial effort and, in Lisbon, the Portuguese discoveries. While these monuments were demolished after the exhibitions ended, replicas of each were later re-erected in stone and brought to “Squares of the Empire,” in Lisbon—1960—and Porto—1984. I frame these monuments historically, attending to the contexts of their making, their recreation/relocation and presence in public space. Studying how these monuments—and squares—move the ideas promoted by the exhibition into public space. I engage a diverse body of literature to reflect about how these exhibitions still linger and haunt the urban landscape and collective memory. Telling about Portugal’s difficulties in dealing with its past, due to how the regime succeeded in communicating a sense of Portuguese identity construed on idealized versions of history, that in their persisting memorialization, render invisible other versions, and the people affected to them, in a country with enduring and widespread racism, and inequality. I look at artists engaging critically with the monuments at both Squares—Ângela Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Interstruct Collective—and present my own research practice where I study different inhabitations/views of a monument to research how the ideas they air can be seen as a spectre haunting the present, engaging with Spectrality Studies, and “ghost” and “haunting” as operative concepts when analysing cultural situations where there is an erasure, an invisibility, or latency.
