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Resistência Visual Generalizada, Livros de Fotografia e Movimentos de Libertação: Angola, Moçambique, Guiné-Bissau e Cabo-Verde, Anos 1960-80

Linen, cotton, jute, and sisal. Ropes, wood, men, and ships. Conquest, bravery, desperation, and invasion. Death, domination, exploitation, and colony. Overseas, war, independence, and life.

What is the point of exhibiting photos in an old rope factory?

To clarify this question, we need to define some items and align in a single entendre the string of words laid out above.

At the end of the 18th century, after the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon, there were many remodelling and building works in the city. Under the command of the Marquis of Pombal, the inhabitants of the mainland witnessed the emergence of new establishments that would develop the structural conditions of the ever-expanding Portuguese empire.

The infrastructure necessary to support this growth could not depend on imported goods from England. This stimulated the internal reshaping of the secondary sector, with a strong incentive for industrial development, financed by the accumulation of wealth originating in the overseas colonies. In this period, new developments flourished in the capital, including the Royal Rope Making Factory, built because it was necessary to meet the growing demand of the Portuguese Squadron with the Navy’s increase and reorganisation.

Surprisingly completed on schedule, something “unusual in major works”[1] at the time, the Rope Making Factory building became a hallmark of the ruling power. Time passed and new stories took place. The need to produce the main commodity diminished, as did its importance in the decaying empire. Over the years, the building housed a college for juvenile delinquents, a hospital, endured two compromising fires and was still the headquarters of the Depot of Overseas Troops and the Naval War College. In 1996, the building was classified as a National Monument, and permanently deactivated as a factory in 1998. Since the early 2000s, its longitudinal corridors have hosted several exhibitions. The East Tower, one of the parts of the building complex, is now part of the Municipal Galleries, where the retrospective exhibitions of Sofia Areal, José Pedro Croft, as well as Sebastião Salgado’s celebrated Génesis and Ai Weiwei’s great Rapture last year, have already been shown, becoming a mainstay in Portugal’s exhibition circuit.

Until November 27, the East Tower Gallery presents the exhibition Resistência Visual Generalizada, Livros de Fotografia e Movimentos de Libertação: Angola, Moçambique, Guiné-Bissau e Cabo-Verde, Anos 1960-80. Since 2019, Catarina Boieiro and Raquel Schefer have been undertaking intensive research into the political potential of the image, during the emergence of liberation and decolonisation movements in the former Portuguese-speaking African colonies. The exhibition is composed by books that establish “an unpublished and detailed corpus to analyse the history of these long independence struggles[2].

This is the second time that Resistência Visual Generalizada is exhibited. Last year, in 2021, it was at the National Institute for Art History, Paris. On that occasion, Raquel Schefer explained in an interview with RFI:

One of the exhibition’s purposes is to establish a cartography of visual forms based on an overlap between political resistance and aesthetic resistance because, at the time, decolonisation had a broad meaning. It was a political and economic process, but also a cultural, aesthetic, and cognitive one. According to the vision of that period, a cultural, cognitive, pedagogical decolonization was necessary.”[3]

The MPLA, FRELIMO and PAIGC were political and social liberation movements in the decolonisation of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde between the 60s and 80s. During this period, crucial anti-colonial photo books and documents were published as part of the resistance struggle. These are exhibited alongside productions by foreign photographers, journalists, and filmmakers, in confrontation with works and political struggles of our present, with the artists Daniel Barroca, Welket Bungué, Silvestre Pestana, Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges.

The newspaper, the magazine, the books, and the images can be seen as instruments for mobilising and supporting the population. According to Amílcar Cabral, the PAIGC founder, the party responsible for launching the struggle for Cape Verde’s independence, liberation is in itself a “cultural fact” and “a factor of culture”.

Resistência Visual Generalizada, Livros de Fotografia e Movimentos de Libertação: Angola, Moçambique, Guiné-Bissau e Cabo-Verde, Anos 1960-80 wants to define similarities between the productions of images and their responsibility to liberate. Based on the past, still present in the several independence processes that we currently experience and live.

The images produced by the inhabitants of the territories now known as Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cape Verde, Brazil, Macau, and Portugal share inextricable factors. There are several narrative lines that meet in the Lusophone problematic: colonialism.

In these contexts, the signifier of a sign exhibition is never detached from the past, just as a rope factory can never be just any manufacture. These are complex images, often gruesome and haunting, that take advantage of coincidences of fate and generate new conversations about this great cat’s-bed of connections.

This is not yet another photo exhibition in an old rope factory. This is the exhibition of the image of decolonisation at the site where the product that enabled the overseas reach was manufactured.

The meaning of Resistência Visual Generalizada is to point to the future while untying the knots of colonialism.

 

 

 

[1] José Pedro Ferraz Gramoza, Sucessos de Portugal— Memórias históricas, políticas e civis, apud Manuel Jacinto Pereira, Subsídios para a História da FNC— Proposta para a construção da Fábrica Nacional de Cordoaria, nº 13, January 1972.

[2] Resistência Visual Generalizada – Livros de fotografia e movimentos de libertação: Angola, Moçambique, Guiné-Bissau e Cabo-Verde, anos 1960-80 – Temporada Portugal-França 2022. (s.d.). Temporada Portugal-França 2022. Resistência Visual Generalizada – Livros de fotografia e movimentos de libertação: Angola, Moçambique, Guiné-Bissau e Cabo-Verde, anos 1960-80 – Temporada Portugal-França 2022

[3] Branco, C. (2021, November 24). Em directo da redacção – Paris expõe “resistências visuais” das lutas de libertação. RFI. https://www.rfi.fr/pt/programas/em-directo-da-redacção/20211124-paris-expõe-as-resistências-das-lutas-de-libertação

Maria Eduarda Wendhausen (Rio de Janeiro, 2000). She graduated in Art and Heritage Sciences from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and is a student of the Masters in Criticism, Curatorship and Theories of Art from the same institution. She also studied at Sotheby's Institute of Art on the Writing for the Art World, From Idea to Submission course. She works as a writer and curator in Lisbon, Portugal. She collaborated with Manicómio in the Pavilhão31 exhibition space and with Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa. Her last performance as a curator, took place at ARCOLisboa2022 with the exhibition CRACK THE EGG of the Millennium bcp Youth Art Prize, in 2022. In 2023, she started collaborating with CentralC as content manager. She writes regularly for scientific and specialized magazines as a freelancer in the field of art criticism, as well as features and academic essays, with the aim of disseminating and promoting to the general public, the multiple facets of art studies and their unfolding in everyday life.

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