At Galeria Avenida da Índia, Uriel Orlow’s exhibition Memória Colateral unfolds like a sensory mapping of historical violence and of how memory is inscribed – or erased – within Western structures. Through video, photography, drawing and installation, Orlow constructs an archaeology of absence, in which restitution becomes an ethic of responsibility and respect, a continual practice of listening and reintegration of what the Western world has silenced.

The title evokes the idea of “collateral damage,” a term so often employed to justify the destruction of bodies, cultures and knowledge in the name of a centre that decides which subjects deserve remembrance. In Orlow’s work, that margin becomes the very field of inquiry: his pieces do not aim to monumentalise what has been forgotten, but rather to restore agency to the people within it, revealing the systems that have condemned them to oblivion, and inviting new ways of engaging with the past.

Among the various sections of the exhibition, Reading Wood (Backwards) stands out as a precise investigation of colonial vestiges embedded in scientific practices and Western knowledge systems. Taking the Xylotheque of Lisbon’s former colonial garden as a starting point – this archive is a collection of woods brought from territories occupied by the Portuguese -, Orlow looks back at the material, reconnecting the archived samples to the trees they came from. In doing so, he not only questions the colonial gesture of cataloguing, but also the concept of restitution itself: how can we return to the world what has been converted into data, index and object of study? And what arises when we approach the archive not as a neutral deposit of information, but as a locus of violence?

The theme of restitution – and its absence – runs through other pieces as well. The Benin Project (2007) directly addresses the theft of the Benin Bronzes (seized by the British in 1897), challenging museum narratives that uphold colonial logic under the guise of conservation. The work A Very Fine Cast (119 Years), included in the project, brings the archive to the foreground, tracing how the Benin Bronzes have been described in European and American institutions over time. Meanwhile, Lost Wax features videos of artisans in Benin City (Nigeria) who produce unique sculptures using the lost-wax technique.

The notion that violence does not vanish in a single moment but reverberates, branches out and infiltrates the present resonates in works such as 1942 (Poznan), in which Orlow revisits an old synagogue in Poland that was turned into a swimming pool under the Nazi regime. He films the interior of the building, revealing a place full of absences, where architecture becomes a vessel charged with memory. The Memory of Trees likewise shows photographs of trees as silent witnesses that imprint historical violence on their very growth. Among them, one poplar guided people fleeing apartheid in South Africa, while another is known as the “Old Slave Tree of Woodstock,” where enslavers traded and tortured human beings.

Memória Colateral does more than chart destruction; it also suggests acts of recovery that attempt to reverse processes of erasure. In What Plants Were Called Before They Had a Name, the artist confronts the suppression of Indigenous knowledge in Guatemala. The installation consists of overhead projectors and a video in which Maya spiritual guides rewrite the names of medicinal plants in their own language in a publication that had recorded them in Spanish. Mangoes of Goan Origin (Na Archive) recovers different mango varieties in Goa, rescuing forgotten diversity and highlighting the intricate network of exchanges, appropriations and redefinitions that shaped this region’s history during Portuguese colonial rule. Both works propose a shift towards re-inscription and restoration of voice.

What Memória Colateral offers is a different approach to attentive listening, a way of relating to the past that goes beyond nostalgia or denunciation, assuming memory as a workspace for continuous intervention. By rejecting passive museum-like observation and insisting on the importance of critical engagement, Uriel Orlow prompts us to reflect on our own positions. Which responsibilities do we shoulder regarding what has been erased? How do we either sustain or disrupt those absences? And what sort of future might emerge from confronting such awareness? Memória Colateral opens the door to these questions, encouraging us to carry them forward, to let them seep into our ways of seeing, inhabiting, and shaping time.

The exhibition is at Galeria Avenida da Índia until April 27.