The missing archive is the section of the festival curated in collaboration with the Amilcar Cabral Library in Bologna, conceived to draw attention to archives that are experiencing difficult times. Such difficulties include elimination, poor preservation, targeted destruction, or the fact that they were founded by activists to collect testimonies; and other factors that are unknown or that we are unwilling to define, leaving open possibilities. These are missing archives, scattered archives, archives to be recovered, mainly from a postcolonial and decolonial perspective.
Images and (counter-) imagery of Portugal’s colonial past in Mozambique
Curated by Ilaria Ferretti in collaboration with Biblioteca Amilcar Cabral.
This year, the section The Archive That Isn’t There/The missing archive is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Mozambique from Portuguese colonialism. Two events will explore the intricate interplay between the historical past of colonialism, its end, and the precarious and provisional meanings attributed to the memory of the colonial experience, which inextricably connects Mozambique to Portugal. The history of Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony which gained independence on 25 June 1975, is problematically linked to the independence of colonial Portugal, freed from Salazar’s dictatorship on 25 April 1974. Half a century has passed since these two pivotal and interconnected events, and scientific studies and public debates are now acknowledging the testimonies that are gradually emerging over time. Nonetheless, a ‘(post)colonial’ archive capable of accounting for historical perspectives, geographical and symbolic trajectories, and private memories is still a work in progress, amorphous and fraught with tensions and contradictions. The problem does not regard only the content. It concerns also the possibility of restoring an image of the past capable of reflecting the complexity of a traumatic phenomenon such as Portuguese colonialism in Africa and its end, given the outcomes of the struggles and liberation paths, both in an anti-dictatorial sense (for Portugal) and an anti-colonial sense (for Mozambique).
Given this interdependence between Mozambique and Portugal, the attempt to critically reflect on the collective memory “in the Portuguese language” takes into account the colonial past as a problematic common point that shapes present identities. Using images as a privileged and complex means of accessing a shared past, the section of the Festival entitled ‘The Missing Archive’ presents visually separate, aesthetically diverse traces related to the (post)colonial Mozambican framework. These images come from different backgrounds: on one side, family archives showing fragments of daily life during the colonial time, witnessing an intimate reality set in a violent historical context; on the other, official documentation, though with a militant spirit, witnessing the network of humanitarian aid and institutional support that was sent from a small Italian town to support the Mozambican Revolution. The exhibition shows not only the composite interaction of different images linked by a “colonial” time and context, but also the strenuous and key process of investigating the past through images to interpret the present. The screening of images and the debate aim to show how cultural memory, both main director and product of a historically concluded colonial experience, still is a space of political conflict and a legacy of meanings projected into the present. A legacy of private and public imagery that links Portugal and Mozambique, colonialism and its resistance, and which challenges us. A past which is behind us but still remains right before our eyes.
Texts curated by Ilaria Ferretti and Rebecca Saldanha.
In collaboration with the Department of Modern Languages, Literature, and Cultures of the University of Bologna, Panizzi Library, Zapruder StorieInMovimento.