This paper begins with some observations on photographs taken in Lisbon on April 25, 1974, and in the days that followed, to explain how many of these images continue to engage the viewer nearly 50 years later. These images carry a meaning that points beyond the mere recorded event and suggest a complex succession or spectrum of feelings and experiences associated with the captured moment. Based on an analysis of two portraits of Captain Salgueiro Maia taken by photographer Alfredo Cunha on April 25, 1974, I discuss how these photographs have continued to circulate over the years, sometimes appearing in quite unexpected places and spaces; thus, through processes of remediation and intermediation, they may reveal some important aspects of the transition of memories of April 25, 1974, from a time/space of collective memory to that of cultural memory.
This study takes a comparative look at the representations of women in the work of American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) and Portuguese journalist Maria Lamas (1893-1983). Set in different contexts, the Great Depression and the New Deal, on the one hand, and the Estado Novo on the other, it is assumed that both revealed a similar sensitivity regarding the place of women in society. By photographing women specifically, and directly or indirectly implying labor in the representations, not only is the possibility of transformation of the social order suggested, but we also witness a recognition of the female body in its experiences and interactions with the environment, and associated with specific subjectivities. Based on an analysis of both documentary and neorealist aesthetics in tandem with current theories of visual culture, the study invites a reading of bodies as social texts that register both established and potential power relations, offering counter-visualities of the conditions of women in the era in which they were published.
This article advances a critical reflection on the murals produced in Lisbon as part of the commemorations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 25 April Revolution, with particular emphasis on the initiative “5 Décadas, 5 Artistas, 5 Murais” and the reinterpretation of the Salgueiro Maia mural at the School of Social and Human Sciences, NOVA University of Lisbon. It argues that these interventions function as urban palimpsests, layering memories of the Revolution with colonial silences and forms of symbolic resistance. Although embedded within processes of institutionalisation and the commodification of public space, they nonetheless reveal tensions between celebration and critique, particularly in the articulation – or omission – of April’s anticolonial dimension. By intersecting art, memory and politics, the article interrogates the ways in which the city reinscribes, or silences, marginalised subjects and narratives, thereby foregrounding the ambivalence of mural art as a gesture that is at once aesthetic and political.
This paper proposes an inquiry into the Cabinet of Curiosities: An interpretation inaugurated at the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra in May 2022. Given the colonial and imperial context in which these exhibition rooms first appeared, this essay seeks to analyze how this installation has been discursively presented, advertised and curated by exploring the strategies of representation that frame the objects within. The recycling of a colonial paradigm of thought that emerges consequently deems it imperative to examine how Portugal’s hegemonic narrativization of its colonial past continues to endorse an adherence to and perpetuation of several modes of coloniality in a twenty-first century context. Ultimately, this essay seeks to argue for the need to foster an anti-colonial and anti-imperial consciousness in academic and scientific spaces of knowledge.
