Images and (counter-) imagery of Portugal’s colonial past in Mozambique – I part

With: Elisa Alberani (University of Milan La Statale), Rebecca Saldanha Pereira (University of Bologna), Vincenzo Russo (University of Milan La Statale), Roberto Vecchi (University of Bologna). Moderated by Ilaria Ferretti (Fondazione Home Movies)

The first event will take us inside the Saldanha family story thanks to the considerations of Rebecca Saldanha, a researcher who has focused her studies on the transmission of memory between different generations in Portuguese-speaking territories. The Luís Saldanha collection takes its name from the amateur filmmaker as well as the main subject portrayed, i.e., a child, the only son of a typical Portuguese family living in the capital of the African colony until 1976. The collection also features a number of objects, including two photo albums depicting landscapes, everyday scenes, and safaris; a movie camera; a painting of an African woman by Luís Saldanha himself; a lion’s claw; a hippopotamus tooth; and a stuffed monkey, a childhood companion named Chico. These diverse objects, which survived the end of the colonial era, the retorno, experienced as a painful exile from the colonial home and a privileged lifestyle, are ‘memorabilia’ of an idealised Africa. The image of Mozambique presented is  sugarcoated, conceiving violence, and resembles the miniature paradise depicted in postcards for future tourist memories. In addition to necessary contextualisation, viewing this fragmented material requires a certain critical attention capable of discerning, in the intimate and familiar testimonies, a problematic (though sometimes unconscious) concealment of violence, in line with the official propaganda of the Estado Novo, showing a possible dialogue between the private and public dimensions.

In collaboration with Biblioteca Amilcar Cabral.