memory

Anarchy / Autonomy / Utopia

There is a present-day tendency to retreat into the realms of dystopia, of catastrophe and disaster, of failed states and fascism, of environmental collapse and economic apocalypse. This tendency is neither wrong nor mistaken. Yet it is often suffocating, only adding to the pressurized dread of the era, offering no antidote to the plague of cynicism, the chokehold of hopelessness, the drift, or, perhaps, the plunge, into a miasma of pessimism and hopelessness. Of course, there are other tendencies, other possibilities, other ways forward. Here, we briefly mention five recent books, loosely grouped under the banners of anarchism, autonomy, and utopia, that propose better worlds to come – as better must come.

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18.03.2021 | by The Public Archive

Strengthening the foundations: against the erasing of memory

The events of the past six years have sharpened Gilroy's observations. At the same time, they have made it increasingly clear that, despite the real progress achieved, attempts to maintain privileges based on structural and systemic inequality, whether in terms of class, gender or race, have become even more obstinate. Attempts that go hand in hand with the futile but devastating efforts to deny history and impose the erasure of memory.

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18.02.2021 | by Paulo de Medeiros

Works of art in the post memory condition (Conclusion)

In the face of this new narrative that acknowledges artistic production and an appreciation of it by African communities, how do secular cultural traditions of African countries interact today with artistic training and production, in the case of Afrodescendant artists, who were born and raised in European countries? How do events in the history of Africa and Africans combine with the artistic languages of the "European schools" and, in particular, with contemporary themes?

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28.12.2020 | by António Pinto Ribeiro

Memory as an interculturality booster in Maputo, through the preservation of the colonial statuary

AbstractSince this is a matter that is not yet resolved, where the strength of ideologies and re-uses may change deeply or even reverse the ways it is evoked, the colonial past may become a problem (Vecchi, 2018a). This is the case of Portuguese colonialism which is frequently invoked to stress resentments: whether from the country that was colonised or the colonising country (Ferro, 2009). As soon as the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April 1974 took place, Mozambique promoted the elimination of colonialism symbols. This predictable attitude, aiming to show that the colonisation had ended, was later amended by the future Governments, with the colonial stat-ues (at least, the ones that remained) being relocated to a place where they may be observed and contextualised. This action aimed to preserve the memory, which may enable the development of intercultural dynamics, softening the mentioned resentment: promoting questioning, in order to understand certain logics and, at the same time, filling gaps in the forgotten memory and in the Mozambican identity (Khan, Falconi & Krakowska, 2016). This paper refers to the cases related to the new life of two colonial statues in Maputo – Mouzinho de Albuquerque and Salazar –, during the post-colonial period and the permanence, until today, of the first monumental trace of Estado Novo [Second Republic] (Monumento aos Mortos da Primeira Guerra Mundial [World War I monument]), showing the importance that the preservation of memory has in a country or a na-tion’s life, even when it is associated with the former coloniser. This sort of mental decolonisation (Mbembe, 2017; Thiong’o, 1986), aims the questioning of the way the colonial past weighs on the current intercultural relations, in Mozambique, when the country establishes a relation with the former coloniser, allowing its inhabitants to look at the past as a way to build future dynamics.

City

13.12.2020 | by Vítor de Sousa

Writing with bodies: installing a new history of Mozambique from Maputo Fortress

According to a government decision of the same year, Independence squares were to be set up in all provincial capitals and to receive identical but smaller statues produced in North Korea by Mansudae Art Studio: the statue erected in the capital is 9 meters high, while those implanted in other cities are 2.9 meters high.

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11.06.2020 | by Roberto Conduru

The “war of statues” and the colour of memory

It would be a supreme fantasy to think, naively, that we can fully recognize the black blood that lies beneath the foundations of nation-empires and post-empires if we also leave in place the very stones that sustain and adorn the idea of the nation.

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28.01.2020 | by Bruno Sena Martins

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

Another day of life: the journalist memorialized, Angola forgotten

Em Mais um Dia de Vida, encontramos uma estética hollywoodesca, de construção e celebração do herói Kapuscinski. Terá a mais valia de dar a conhecer a outros públicos (em particular ao mais jovem, pelo estilo de filme de ação) o xadrez político regional e internacional que se jogava em Angola. Porém, ao centrar a narrativa de forma tão redutora na figura do ‘herói jornalista’, o filme não responde à evocação de Carlota, ficando suspenso num jogo dúbio de uso (e abuso) da memória e do esquecimento.

Afroscreen

21.01.2019 | by Hélia Santos

The (re)uses of the past

This reusing of the past requires us to reflect on how traumatic histories are collectively absorbed, and on how histories can be revised, even distorted, when they are reread. When the past is reused, its image is reinscribed through the prism of a particular, usually other, ideology with the intention of evoking a particular past and creating its counter image. This manoeuvre often has hegemonic ambitions, and aims to impact public opinion.

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02.01.2019 | by Roberto Vecchi

Lisbon and the Memory of the Empire: Patrimony, Museums and Public Space

Its purpose is to analyse the several examples by which “images” related to the imperial history of Portugal are built and copied, thus being understood as a fundamental and articulating axis of the Portuguese national identity. The focus is therefore on a “image-memory” or a memory-representation, authorized by the State, by its corporation and by institutions of public culture and not so much on a memory-routine, passed on in the realm of daily social interactions, or a memory-remembrance, passed on verbally.

City

20.11.2018 | by Elsa Peralta

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

Nova Lisboa

Taking these portraits as a starting point, what segregation does is to create contradictory sentiments between the delectable nostalgia of a privileged minority and the disavowal of a brutally exploited majority. All of history can be interpreted in multiple ways, like a work of art, and in Jasse’s work the myriad readings available to the observer are left open in an approach that is utterly unpretentious.

I'll visit

14.09.2018 | by Kiluanji Kia Henda

Declaration of war 1

I said to one of them, who was very injured, “The troops can’t do anything for you, what do you want before you die?” He asked for water, I told the soldier to fetch water but gave him a signal not to go, that it wouldn’t be necessary. I picked up an FBP submachine gun, which wasn’t reliable, and fired a shot to kill him, but he stepped to the side.