History

The memory and history inscribed in the genetic technologies of fighting crime

The mission of the EXCHANGE project (2015-2020) (2) is to reflect critically on the perpetuation of the “European dream” of a community of solidarity in which national, linguistic and cultural differences are overcome to produce a space in which citizens can move freely and safely. The surveillance technologies that the project studies have a shared feature: they are genetic machineries that seek to identify individuals for the purposes of criminal prosecution.

Games Without Borders

07.09.2019 | by Sheila Khan and Helena Machado

Black, between painting and history

The authors were confronted with the lack of information on the representation of black men and women in European painting, which led them to very direct and immediate questions: who were the people represented? What were the motivations for representing them? And why did black people in European painting rarely have individualized identities?

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10.07.2019 | by Ana Paula Rebelo Correia

Lost Lover: what would we say if we could tell the story

The exhibition Lost Lover speaks about the political, historical and geographical conditions through which knowledge is produced and controlled. The screening program assembled by Lara Koseff was originally presented in Rio de Janeiro, in the courtyard of Lanchonete, now in Rampa, Porto. In the front room, 11 single-channel video pieces are projected in a loop. The authors, who are mostly from South Africa, confront us with the abandon of fear, thus calling to action topics that are often and strategically silenced.

I'll visit

12.06.2019 | by Eduarda Neves

The gulf between truth and memory

When history and duties to memory are ignored, truth can easily be thought of as a personal choice. Once accommodated in powerful discourse, these “truths” assume impunity: often disregarded and rarely condemned, even though they represent hate speech. Hatred has been normalized and has propelled a radicalism in which “good” struggles against “evil.” In this dichotomy, evil is once again the ‘other’. A discourse that does not humanize the ‘other’ authorizes barbarism – as we have seen in the post-election reactions

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05.11.2018 | by Fernanda Vilar

Liberty / Diaspora a universal chronology of the history of decolonization

The societies in which we live at different latitudes are legacies of colonialism and constituted by imperial ruins. Depending on our skin colour, social class, academic background and where we live, we can inherit privilege – by benefitting directly or indirectly from the wealth European exploration accumulated – or we can inherit, even accumulate, the oppression of institutional racism and be exposed to inequality and racist colonial violence.

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04.11.2018 | by Bruno Sena Martins

The Fallacy of “Reverse Racism”

But we can't reverse History, even with the several attempts to naturalize it, to deny it and to manipulate it. Hence the importance of paying attention to the reluctant times we are now living in, which repeatedly insist on following the same old paradigms and refuse to make structural changes.

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22.09.2018 | by Joacine Katar Moreira

Which "legacies" are we taking about?

Which colonial or imperial history are we talking about? What do we know about this past, whether distant or recent? What do we really know about such fundamental questions as occupational or income structures in former colonial societies, or patterns of consumption, degrees of literacy, cultural practices, ideological possibilities, levels of political education and participation, or citizenship and land policies, in the city, countryside or in between?

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02.06.2018 | by Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo

"We are all postcolonial"

Our duty, as creative people, to paraphrase the late Nina Simone, should always be to reflect the times we live in. We do this also by challenging constructions of history that have and continue to favour the powerful as we fight for the future we want to see and experience in the world, beyond our own physical existences.