Afonso Dias Ramos
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, IHA - Instituto de História da Arte, Department Member
- Forum Transregionale Studien, Wissenschaft Kolleg zu Berlin, Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices, Post-DocFreie Universität Berlin, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Department MemberUniversity College London, History of Art, Graduate Studentadd
- Afonso Dias Ramos é Investigador no Instituto de História da Arte (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Editor Associado da "Revista... moreAfonso Dias Ramos é Investigador no Instituto de História da Arte (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Editor Associado da "Revista de História da Arte", e Professor Auxiliar Convidado na NOVA FCSH e na Universidade de Coimbra. Foi Investigador Convidado no Museu Calouste Gulbenkian (2020) e Art Histories Fellow no Forum Transregionale Studien em Berlim, afiliado na Freie Universität Berlin (2018-19). Tem um mestrado e doutoramento em História da Arte pelo University College London. Trabalhou no Museu Calouste Gulbenkian em Lisboa e estudou História da Arte na Universidade Nova de Lisboa e Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). Foi recentemente co-editor dos livros "Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: uma criação consciente de situações, uma situação consciente de criações" (IHA, 2023), "Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) e "Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art" (The MIT Press, 2023), e editor de "O Castelo Surrealista de Mário Cesariny" (Documenta, 2024) e "Hoje Soube-me a Pouco" (Tinta-da-China, 2024).
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Afonso Dias Ramos is a Researcher at the Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Associate Editor of "Revista de História da Arte", and Guest Lecturer at NOVA FCSH and at Universidade de Coimbra. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2020). He was an Art Histories Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin (2018-19), affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin. He holds an MA and received his PhD in the History of Art from University College London. He previously worked at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and studied History of Art at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). He recently co-edited the books "Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: uma criação consciente de situações, uma situação consciente de criações" (IHA, 2023), "Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and "Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art" (The MIT Press, 2023), and edited "The Surrealist Castle of Mário Cesariny" (Documenta, 2024) and "Hoje Soube-me a Pouco" (Tinta-da-China, 2024).
Email: afonsoramos@fcsh.unl.ptedit
NOVAS TEMÁTICAS E IMAGINÁRIOS ARTÍSTICOS NO PERÍODO POSTERIOR À REVOLUÇÃO DOS CRAVOS Acompanhando a exposição Hoje soube‑me a pouco. Introversões e utopias artísticas no pós‑25 de Abril, no MAAT — Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e... more
NOVAS TEMÁTICAS E IMAGINÁRIOS ARTÍSTICOS NO PERÍODO POSTERIOR À REVOLUÇÃO DOS CRAVOS
Acompanhando a exposição Hoje soube‑me a pouco. Introversões e utopias artísticas no pós‑25 de Abril, no MAAT — Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia, este volume reúne uma colecção de ensaios livres escritos por investigadores de diferentes áreas e gerações, por ocasião dos cinquenta anos da Revolução dos Cravos. Sem a tentação de uma panorâmica geral ou a veleidade de um balanço final, privilegiaram‑se momentos soltos e evocativos das vicissitudes do último meio século em Portugal, entrecruzando filosofia e literatura, artes e moda, arquitectura e património, feminismo e ecologia, a partir da particularidade de uma imagem, um objecto, um conceito ou um episódio.
Ensaios de Afonso Dias Ramos, Alexandre Melo, Filomena Silvano, Golgona Anghel, João Pinharanda e Sérgio Mah, José Miranda Justo, Manuel Bogalheiro, Pedro Levi Bismarck, Teresa Castro
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
Acompanhando a exposição Hoje soube‑me a pouco. Introversões e utopias artísticas no pós‑25 de Abril, no MAAT — Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia, este volume reúne uma colecção de ensaios livres escritos por investigadores de diferentes áreas e gerações, por ocasião dos cinquenta anos da Revolução dos Cravos. Sem a tentação de uma panorâmica geral ou a veleidade de um balanço final, privilegiaram‑se momentos soltos e evocativos das vicissitudes do último meio século em Portugal, entrecruzando filosofia e literatura, artes e moda, arquitectura e património, feminismo e ecologia, a partir da particularidade de uma imagem, um objecto, um conceito ou um episódio.
Ensaios de Afonso Dias Ramos, Alexandre Melo, Filomena Silvano, Golgona Anghel, João Pinharanda e Sérgio Mah, José Miranda Justo, Manuel Bogalheiro, Pedro Levi Bismarck, Teresa Castro
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos and Tom Snow (eds.), Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: The MIT Press / Whitechapel Gallery, 2023. An edited collection that addresses the vital intersection of contemporary art and activism in this... more
Afonso Dias Ramos and Tom Snow (eds.), Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: The MIT Press / Whitechapel Gallery, 2023.
An edited collection that addresses the vital intersection of contemporary art and activism in this watershed cultural moment.
Activism is a critical point of contention for institutions and genealogies of contemporary art around the world. Yet artists have consistently engaged in activist discourse, lending their skills to social movements, and regularly participating in civil and social rights campaigns while also boycotting cultural institutions and exerting significant pressure on them. This timely volume, edited by Tom Snow and Afonso Ramos, addresses an extraordinary moment in debates over the institutional frameworks and networks of art including large-scale direct actions, as well as a radical rethinking of art venues and urban spaces according to racial, class, or gender-based disparities, including demonstrations against the extractive and exploitative practices of neoliberal accumulation and climate catastrophe.
From ACT UP and its affiliate groups since the dawn of the AIDS crisis to the counter-spectacle and street theatrics of the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy, to ongoing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and Decolonize This Place, activist aesthetics has proven increasingly difficult to define under traditional classifications. Resurgent campaigns for decolonial reckoning, ecological justice, gender equality, indigenous rights and antiracist pedagogies indicate that the role of activism in contemporary art practice urges a critical reassessment. One pressing question is whether contemporary art's most radical politics now takes place outside, against, or in spite of, conventional sites of display such as museums, biennials, and galleries.
Artists include:
ACT UP//Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme//Allora & Calzadilla//Tania Bruguera//Black Audio Film Collective//Andrea Fraser//Nan Goldin//Gulf Labor Coalition//Amar Kanwar//Liberate Tate//Sethembile Msezane//Zanele Muholi//Jan Nikolai Nelles and Nora Al-Badri//Decolonize This Place//Michael Rakowitz
Writers include:
Dave Beech//Judith Butler//Amílcar Cabral//Elias Canetti//Douglas Crimp//Jodi Dean//Chto Delat?//Gilles Deleuze//T.J. Demos//Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber//Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood//Félix Guattari//Brian Holmes//Carrie Lambert-Beatty//Lucy Lippard//Yates McKee//MTL Collective//Gregory Sholette//Françoise Vergès//Peter Weiss//Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller
For more information, see:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546560/activism/
An edited collection that addresses the vital intersection of contemporary art and activism in this watershed cultural moment.
Activism is a critical point of contention for institutions and genealogies of contemporary art around the world. Yet artists have consistently engaged in activist discourse, lending their skills to social movements, and regularly participating in civil and social rights campaigns while also boycotting cultural institutions and exerting significant pressure on them. This timely volume, edited by Tom Snow and Afonso Ramos, addresses an extraordinary moment in debates over the institutional frameworks and networks of art including large-scale direct actions, as well as a radical rethinking of art venues and urban spaces according to racial, class, or gender-based disparities, including demonstrations against the extractive and exploitative practices of neoliberal accumulation and climate catastrophe.
From ACT UP and its affiliate groups since the dawn of the AIDS crisis to the counter-spectacle and street theatrics of the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy, to ongoing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and Decolonize This Place, activist aesthetics has proven increasingly difficult to define under traditional classifications. Resurgent campaigns for decolonial reckoning, ecological justice, gender equality, indigenous rights and antiracist pedagogies indicate that the role of activism in contemporary art practice urges a critical reassessment. One pressing question is whether contemporary art's most radical politics now takes place outside, against, or in spite of, conventional sites of display such as museums, biennials, and galleries.
Artists include:
ACT UP//Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme//Allora & Calzadilla//Tania Bruguera//Black Audio Film Collective//Andrea Fraser//Nan Goldin//Gulf Labor Coalition//Amar Kanwar//Liberate Tate//Sethembile Msezane//Zanele Muholi//Jan Nikolai Nelles and Nora Al-Badri//Decolonize This Place//Michael Rakowitz
Writers include:
Dave Beech//Judith Butler//Amílcar Cabral//Elias Canetti//Douglas Crimp//Jodi Dean//Chto Delat?//Gilles Deleuze//T.J. Demos//Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber//Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood//Félix Guattari//Brian Holmes//Carrie Lambert-Beatty//Lucy Lippard//Yates McKee//MTL Collective//Gregory Sholette//Françoise Vergès//Peter Weiss//Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller
For more information, see:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546560/activism/
Research Interests:
Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975, London: Palgrave / Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, 2023. With essays by António Carmo Gouveia; Rui Assubuji;... more
Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975, London: Palgrave / Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, 2023.
With essays by António Carmo Gouveia; Rui Assubuji; Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus; Inês Ponte; Patrícia Ferraz de Matos; Bárbara Direito; Nuno Domingos; Nadia Vargaftig; Inês Vieira Gomes; Filipa Lowndes Vicente; Afonso Dias Ramos; Catarina Laranjeiro; Maria José Lobo Antunes; Nuno Porto; Patricia Hayes.
This edited collection presents the first critical and historical overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa to an English-speaking audience. Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 brings together sixteen scholars from interdisciplinary fields as varied as history, anthropology, art history, visual culture and museum studies, to consider some of the key aspects in the visual representation of the longest-lasting European colonial empire in the African continent. The chapters span over two centuries and cover five formerly colonial territories - Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe - deploying a range of methodologies to explore the multiple meanings and the contested uses of the photographic image across the realms of politics, science, culture and war. This book responds to a marked surge of international interest in the relationship between photography and colonialism, which has hitherto largely overlooked the Portuguese imperial context, by delivering the most recent scholarly findings to a broad readership.
For more information see:
https://link.springer.com/book/9783031277948
With essays by António Carmo Gouveia; Rui Assubuji; Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus; Inês Ponte; Patrícia Ferraz de Matos; Bárbara Direito; Nuno Domingos; Nadia Vargaftig; Inês Vieira Gomes; Filipa Lowndes Vicente; Afonso Dias Ramos; Catarina Laranjeiro; Maria José Lobo Antunes; Nuno Porto; Patricia Hayes.
This edited collection presents the first critical and historical overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa to an English-speaking audience. Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 brings together sixteen scholars from interdisciplinary fields as varied as history, anthropology, art history, visual culture and museum studies, to consider some of the key aspects in the visual representation of the longest-lasting European colonial empire in the African continent. The chapters span over two centuries and cover five formerly colonial territories - Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe - deploying a range of methodologies to explore the multiple meanings and the contested uses of the photographic image across the realms of politics, science, culture and war. This book responds to a marked surge of international interest in the relationship between photography and colonialism, which has hitherto largely overlooked the Portuguese imperial context, by delivering the most recent scholarly findings to a broad readership.
For more information see:
https://link.springer.com/book/9783031277948
Research Interests:
Mariana Pinto dos Santos e Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: uma criação consciente de situações / uma situação consciente de criações, Lisboa: IHA/NOVA FCSH, 2023. Resumo: A 18 de abril de 2021 cumpriu-se o... more
Mariana Pinto dos Santos e Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: uma criação consciente de situações / uma situação consciente de criações, Lisboa: IHA/NOVA FCSH, 2023.
Resumo:
A 18 de abril de 2021 cumpriu-se o centenário do nascimento de Ernesto de Sousa, que desde os anos quarenta do século XX até ao seu falecimento, a 6 de outubro de 1988, teve um papel fundamental nas artes em Portugal e marcou as gerações de artistas que vieram a trabalhar depois do 25 de abril. Para assinalar o centenário, a Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian organizou com o Instituto de História da Arte da NOVA FCSH o Colóquio Centenário de Ernesto de Sousa no dia 2 de junho de 2021. O livro Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: Uma criação consciente de situações / Uma situação consciente de criações resulta desse encontro, incluindo seis novos estudos sobre Ernesto de Sousa que foram submetidos a revisão por pares, testemunhos e revisitações de vários autores, a transcrição de uma mesa-redonda com artistas e curadores sobre o seu papel nas artes visuais portuguesas, contributos de artistas especificamente concebidos para o livro, e ainda um texto inédito de Ernesto de Sousa. Escrito em três línguas, português, castelhano e inglês, este livro cruza artistas, críticos, curadores e investigadores, numa discussão a várias vozes sobre Ernesto de Sousa. O livro é disponibilizado em acesso aberto e, com apoio da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, será impressa uma edição limitada de 150 exemplares.
Abstract:
The centenary of Ernesto de Sousa’s birth was marked on 18 April 2021. From the 1940s until his death on 6 October 1988, he played a fundamental role in the arts in Portugal and impacted generations of artists working after the 25th April Revolution of 1974. To commemorate this centenary, the Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Art History Institute of NOVA FCSH organized the Centenary Colloquium of Ernesto de Sousa on 2 June 2021. The book Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: A conscious creation of situations / A conscious situation of creations follows on from that encounter, featuring six new peer-reviewed studies about Ernesto de Sousa, statements and revisitations from several authors, the transcript of a round-table with artists and curators on his role in the Portuguese visual arts, contributions from artists conceived specifically for this book, as well as a previously unreleased text by Ernesto de Sousa. Written in three languages, Portuguese, Spanish and English, this book brings together artists, critics, curators and researchers, in a polyphonic discussion about Ernesto de Sousa. This book is available on open access and, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a limited edition of 150 copies will also be printed.
ISBN (Print): 978-989-54405-8-0
ISBN (Electronic): 978-989-54405-7-3
Available at:
https://institutodehistoriadaarte.com/publications/e-books/ernesto-de-sousa-1921-2021-uma-criacao-consciente-de-situacoes-uma-situacao-consciente-de-criacoes/?frame-nonce=31be312ec8
Resumo:
A 18 de abril de 2021 cumpriu-se o centenário do nascimento de Ernesto de Sousa, que desde os anos quarenta do século XX até ao seu falecimento, a 6 de outubro de 1988, teve um papel fundamental nas artes em Portugal e marcou as gerações de artistas que vieram a trabalhar depois do 25 de abril. Para assinalar o centenário, a Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian organizou com o Instituto de História da Arte da NOVA FCSH o Colóquio Centenário de Ernesto de Sousa no dia 2 de junho de 2021. O livro Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: Uma criação consciente de situações / Uma situação consciente de criações resulta desse encontro, incluindo seis novos estudos sobre Ernesto de Sousa que foram submetidos a revisão por pares, testemunhos e revisitações de vários autores, a transcrição de uma mesa-redonda com artistas e curadores sobre o seu papel nas artes visuais portuguesas, contributos de artistas especificamente concebidos para o livro, e ainda um texto inédito de Ernesto de Sousa. Escrito em três línguas, português, castelhano e inglês, este livro cruza artistas, críticos, curadores e investigadores, numa discussão a várias vozes sobre Ernesto de Sousa. O livro é disponibilizado em acesso aberto e, com apoio da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, será impressa uma edição limitada de 150 exemplares.
Abstract:
The centenary of Ernesto de Sousa’s birth was marked on 18 April 2021. From the 1940s until his death on 6 October 1988, he played a fundamental role in the arts in Portugal and impacted generations of artists working after the 25th April Revolution of 1974. To commemorate this centenary, the Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Art History Institute of NOVA FCSH organized the Centenary Colloquium of Ernesto de Sousa on 2 June 2021. The book Ernesto de Sousa 1921-2021: A conscious creation of situations / A conscious situation of creations follows on from that encounter, featuring six new peer-reviewed studies about Ernesto de Sousa, statements and revisitations from several authors, the transcript of a round-table with artists and curators on his role in the Portuguese visual arts, contributions from artists conceived specifically for this book, as well as a previously unreleased text by Ernesto de Sousa. Written in three languages, Portuguese, Spanish and English, this book brings together artists, critics, curators and researchers, in a polyphonic discussion about Ernesto de Sousa. This book is available on open access and, with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a limited edition of 150 copies will also be printed.
ISBN (Print): 978-989-54405-8-0
ISBN (Electronic): 978-989-54405-7-3
Available at:
https://institutodehistoriadaarte.com/publications/e-books/ernesto-de-sousa-1921-2021-uma-criacao-consciente-de-situacoes-uma-situacao-consciente-de-criacoes/?frame-nonce=31be312ec8
Research Interests:
Guest edited by Basia Sliwinska and Afonso Dias Ramos, RHA, N.º 16, December 2023: "Re-turns: On Future Art Histories". Available here: https://rha.fcsh.unl.pt/index.php/rha/issue/view/ReturnsOnFutureArtHistories Contributions: Basia... more
Guest edited by Basia Sliwinska and Afonso Dias Ramos, RHA, N.º 16, December 2023: "Re-turns: On Future Art Histories".
Available here: https://rha.fcsh.unl.pt/index.php/rha/issue/view/ReturnsOnFutureArtHistories
Contributions:
Basia Sliwinska, Afonso Dias Ramos, "Re-turns: On Future Art Histories", pp. 5-8.
Camilla Salvaneschi, "Afterlives: On the Art Periodical’s Return through Anthologies and Special Issues", pp. 10-37.
Beatriz Madaleno Alves, "Beyond the Material: A Case Study of the Yaawo Beaded Hair Combs for Repatriating Agency", pp. 38-63.
Hagar Ophir, "Final(?) DISPOSITION (Restless Objects ) A Ride from the Storage to the Palace", pp. 64-76.
Marcella Marer, "The Bird’s Eye From Up Above or From Down Below: Changing Perspectives on Aerial Photography of Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon", pp. 76-101.
Martim Ramos, "a darker, better place", pp. 102-115.
Zofia Reznik, "The Vulnerable Body in the Archive: Matriculating Oral Herstories of Art with (Self-)care", pp. 116-141.
Marija Griniuk, "Curating as Care in Performance and Live Art: A case study of Lithuanian and Sámi art", pp. 142-168.
Available here: https://rha.fcsh.unl.pt/index.php/rha/issue/view/ReturnsOnFutureArtHistories
Contributions:
Basia Sliwinska, Afonso Dias Ramos, "Re-turns: On Future Art Histories", pp. 5-8.
Camilla Salvaneschi, "Afterlives: On the Art Periodical’s Return through Anthologies and Special Issues", pp. 10-37.
Beatriz Madaleno Alves, "Beyond the Material: A Case Study of the Yaawo Beaded Hair Combs for Repatriating Agency", pp. 38-63.
Hagar Ophir, "Final(?) DISPOSITION (Restless Objects ) A Ride from the Storage to the Palace", pp. 64-76.
Marcella Marer, "The Bird’s Eye From Up Above or From Down Below: Changing Perspectives on Aerial Photography of Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon", pp. 76-101.
Martim Ramos, "a darker, better place", pp. 102-115.
Zofia Reznik, "The Vulnerable Body in the Archive: Matriculating Oral Herstories of Art with (Self-)care", pp. 116-141.
Marija Griniuk, "Curating as Care in Performance and Live Art: A case study of Lithuanian and Sámi art", pp. 142-168.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos (ed.), Jorge Molder: Rei Capitão Soldado Ladrão / Jorge Molder: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, Lisboa: Documenta / Fundação EDP, 2013. With texts by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, Jean-Luc Nancy, João Pinharanda,... more
Afonso Dias Ramos (ed.), Jorge Molder: Rei Capitão Soldado Ladrão / Jorge Molder: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, Lisboa: Documenta / Fundação EDP, 2013.
With texts by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, Jean-Luc Nancy, João Pinharanda, José Manuel dos Santos, and Juan Barja.
With texts by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, Jean-Luc Nancy, João Pinharanda, José Manuel dos Santos, and Juan Barja.
Research Interests:
Ramos, A. (catalogue editor), Secção Portuguesa da AICA: História / Portuguese Section of the AICA: History, Lisboa: AICA, Portuguese Ministry of Culture, 2010.
Research Interests:
Ramos, A. (Catalogue editor) (2010), Secção Portuguesa da AICA: Arquitectura / Portuguese Section of the AICA: Architecture, Lisboa: AICA, Portuguese Ministry of Culture.
Research Interests:
Ramos, A. (catalogue editor) (2010), Secção Portuguesa da AICA: Artes visuais/ Portuguese Section of the AICA: Visual arts, Lisboa: AICA, Portuguese Ministry of Culture.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos and Patrícia Rosas (eds.), 100 Works from the CAM Collection, Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian / Almedina, 2010.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos e Patrícia Rosas (eds.), 100 Obras da Colecção do CAM, Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian / Almedina, 2010.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "A Linguagem Muda", Afonso Dias Ramos (ed.), Hoje Soube-me a Pouco: introversões e utopias artísticas no pós-25 de Abril, Lisboa: Tinta-da-China, 2024, pp. 126-136.... more
Afonso Dias Ramos, "A Linguagem Muda", Afonso Dias Ramos (ed.), Hoje Soube-me a Pouco: introversões e utopias artísticas no pós-25 de Abril, Lisboa: Tinta-da-China, 2024, pp. 126-136.
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
https://tintadachina.pt/produto/hoje-soube-me-a-pouco/
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "João Penalva. A efémera linguagem da rua / The ephemeral language of the streets", Electra 25, 2024, pp. 89-99.
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-25/joao-penalva-efemera-linguagem-da-rua
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-25/joao-penalva-efemera-linguagem-da-rua
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Michael Hardt: Nothing takes longer to solve than a false problem", Electra 24, 2024.
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/electra-24/michael-hardt-nothing-takes-longer-solve-false-problem
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/electra-24/michael-hardt-nothing-takes-longer-solve-false-problem
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Images That Kill: Counterinsurgency and Photography in Angola Circa 1961”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial... more
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Images That Kill: Counterinsurgency and Photography in Angola Circa 1961”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies), Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 325-368.
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_12
This chapter explores the drastically overlooked nexus between atrocity photography and mass insurgency during the endgame of European colonial empires across Africa. Specifically, it addresses the most widely reproduced and most consequential set of photographs in the Portuguese empire, graphically depicting and exposing the bloody incidents behind the outbreak of the decolonization war in Angola in 1961. The largest campaign of atrocity photography in the world and the largest military effort of any Western nation in the last half of the twentieth century were then intimately bound. Unaddressed and unchallenged for decades, and yet still customarily used to frame the narrative or to shut down any discussion on the colonial past, this chapter attempts to reconstruct the trajectory of those hundreds of readily available, shocking black-and-white photographs in terms of their production and circulation, teasing out some of the crucial political, moral, and historiographic questions that they continue to raise.
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_12
This chapter explores the drastically overlooked nexus between atrocity photography and mass insurgency during the endgame of European colonial empires across Africa. Specifically, it addresses the most widely reproduced and most consequential set of photographs in the Portuguese empire, graphically depicting and exposing the bloody incidents behind the outbreak of the decolonization war in Angola in 1961. The largest campaign of atrocity photography in the world and the largest military effort of any Western nation in the last half of the twentieth century were then intimately bound. Unaddressed and unchallenged for decades, and yet still customarily used to frame the narrative or to shut down any discussion on the colonial past, this chapter attempts to reconstruct the trajectory of those hundreds of readily available, shocking black-and-white photographs in terms of their production and circulation, teasing out some of the crucial political, moral, and historiographic questions that they continue to raise.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos and Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Caught on Camera: An Introduction to Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975... more
Afonso Dias Ramos and Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Caught on Camera: An Introduction to Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Afonso Dias Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies), Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 1-64.
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_1
This chapter provides the state of the art and an introduction to some of the central theoretical and historiographic questions structuring the scholarship on photography within the African territories formerly under Portuguese colonial rule. It seeks to map out the existent sources and the different approaches to this topic, tracing the new directions within the critical literature as well as its most uncharted subjects. Organised as an overview, all the case studies under discussion comprise new research into archival material, and raise a host of questions for the future of this field of studies.
Available online at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_1
This chapter provides the state of the art and an introduction to some of the central theoretical and historiographic questions structuring the scholarship on photography within the African territories formerly under Portuguese colonial rule. It seeks to map out the existent sources and the different approaches to this topic, tracing the new directions within the critical literature as well as its most uncharted subjects. Organised as an overview, all the case studies under discussion comprise new research into archival material, and raise a host of questions for the future of this field of studies.
Research Interests:
From the alter-globalisation protests at the turn of the century, to the 2011 mass uprisings across the Arabic-speaking world, global Occupy demonstrations, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall campaigns, social... more
From the alter-globalisation protests at the turn of the century, to the 2011 mass uprisings across the Arabic-speaking world, global Occupy demonstrations, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall campaigns, social movements in recent decades have reshaped the way artists work politically across the world. Far from simply supplying protest groups with a visual identity or taking shelter in art institutions to articulate a critique, artists have contributed to and taken part in campaigns for social justice by developing and sharing strategies for collective organisation, creative and radical pedagogy, agitational street theatrics and mediatised counter-spectacles. At the same time, artists have turned their attention to interrogating endemic injustices within the representative politics of cultural institutions, increasingly challenging their historical ties to colonial regimes and current affiliations with corporate oligarchy, linked to economic precarity and urban gentrification. Given the relentless dismantling of public funding, and the wider expediency of culture and corporate whitewashing of neoliberal institutions globally, it seems appropriate, if not imperative, to ask whether institutions have ever adequately assimilated the multiple concerns of activist politics and the wider aesthetics of political art. By reconsidering the changing meaning of activism at this juncture, the overarching question that frames this anthology is whether contemporary art’s most radical politics takes place outside, against, or in spite of conventional sites of display, such as museums, biennials, and galleries. Activism as defined throughout this book is, therefore, not simply reliant on staging interventions in the way narratives are presented and framed to the public, which is the aim of many critical art practices. Rather, it is also defined by the kind of collective proposals and egalitarian demands that seek expression through the forms that it takes, the alliances it makes and the media it mobilises. As such, this volume retraces ways that art’s political stakes are being reconfigured from the outside, foregrounding the collective endeavour to reinvent a politics of aesthetics and likewise to reassess and trouble the hegemonic paradigms of art’s mainstream and institutional life.
Research Interests:
Espectografia para o projecto GHOST — Espectralidade: Literatura e Artes (Portugal e Brasil). Para mais: https://www.ghostprojecto.com/espectrografias/afonso-dias-ramos-este-mundo-e-o-outro
Research Interests:
Os dias estivais levaram a palco, em Londres, um conjunto inédito de exposições ambiciosas e monumentais sobre vídeo e fotografia em contextos africanos e afro-diaspóricos. É um momento particularmente significativo, enquanto culminar de... more
Os dias estivais levaram a palco, em Londres, um conjunto inédito de exposições ambiciosas e monumentais sobre vídeo e fotografia em contextos africanos e afro-diaspóricos. É um momento particularmente significativo, enquanto culminar de um crescendo de interesse global nestes temas nas últimas três décadas, e como ponto de viragem que permite entrever no horizonte novas exigências de pensamento sobre o futuro da identidade e da representação. A Tate Modern acolhe, até Janeiro de 2024, no edifício Blavatnik, uma visão panorâmica intitulada A World in Common: African Contemporary Photography, reunindo mais de uma centena de obras de 36 artistas africanos e afro-descendentes à volta de temas comuns, de um modo geograficamente abrangente, e incluindo, para além do suporte fotográfico, vídeo e instalação. Do outro lado do rio Tamisa, a Tate Britain consagrou (até meados de Agosto) a maior retrospectiva de sempre ao artista e cineasta inglês Isaac Julien, satisfazendo um desígnio há muito por cumprir, meses depois de se tornar o terceiro e último artista negro a receber a mais alta condecoração da rainha. What Freedom is to me revisita quatro décadas de trabalho desde o seu filme de culto, ainda como membro do colectivo Sankofa, Looking for Langston (1989), uma invocação do poeta Langston Hughes que lançou o chamado “novo cinema queer”, até às recentes meditações poéticas em instalações monumentais com múltiplos ecrãs.
Versão completa em:
https://www.publico.pt/2023/09/10/culturaipsilon/noticia/triunfo-arte-diaspora-africanas-londres-2062440
Versão completa em:
https://www.publico.pt/2023/09/10/culturaipsilon/noticia/triunfo-arte-diaspora-africanas-londres-2062440
Research Interests:
Claire Bishop is a British art historian and critic, professor of Art History at the City University of New York, and contributing editor of Artforum. She has authored several groundbreaking works such as Installation Art: A Critical... more
Claire Bishop is a British art historian and critic, professor of Art History at the City University of New York, and contributing editor of Artforum. She has authored several groundbreaking works such as Installation Art: A Critical History (2005); Participation (2006); and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012). She has been working on two publications: a study about Merce Cunningham’s Events, and a collection of essays about attention and contemporary art since the 1990s, entitled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance (2024). This book identifies a number of trends within contemporary art practice – research – based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture – and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. In this conversation with Electra, Claire Bishop has charted a critical path throughout the last three decades, pinpointing how spectatorship and visual literacy have been radically evolving under the pressures of digital technology.
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS The constant focus in your work around the idea of participation in art has recently given way to the issue of audience attention. What has prompted this shift in focus?
CLAIRE BISHOP I wouldn’t say that participation has been a ‘constant focus’ of my work! It was a topic of my research 2004 to 2012. My first book was on installation art. I’ve also written about museums. What is a constant throughline in my research, going back to my dissertation, is spectatorship, the viewing subject. Secondary to this is an interest in historicising and theorising artistic strategies: installation, participation, and in the new book Disordered Attention three more: research-based art, performance exhibitions, and interventions. Why work on attention? One of the biggest changes in our culture and society over the last thirty years – a period that coincidentally coincides with what we call ‘contemporary art’ – has been digital technology. The speed and degree of change has been unimaginable; it affects how we communicate, how we think, how we research, how we write. Because it changes our experience of time, it also affects how we see. All this, I think, makes it a rich consideration for anyone dealing with art and spectatorship. In this book, I want to look at a thirty-year period of contemporary art historically, tracking changes over three decades, but through the lens of technological change. Any book on attention has to wrangle with two related discourses that have emerged since the 1990s. The first is the attention economy. None of us with a smartphone or computer is immune to its tentacles; every glance and click can be monetised. The other discourse is around ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). ADHD medication has become a central to maintaining performance in the university and neoliberal workplace; almost 10% of US schoolchildren are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medication. ADHD discourse brings together questions of pedagogy, literacy, neurobiology and neoliberalism, and pathologises distraction in ways that unexpectedly inform considerations of visual art and performance.
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS The constant focus in your work around the idea of participation in art has recently given way to the issue of audience attention. What has prompted this shift in focus?
CLAIRE BISHOP I wouldn’t say that participation has been a ‘constant focus’ of my work! It was a topic of my research 2004 to 2012. My first book was on installation art. I’ve also written about museums. What is a constant throughline in my research, going back to my dissertation, is spectatorship, the viewing subject. Secondary to this is an interest in historicising and theorising artistic strategies: installation, participation, and in the new book Disordered Attention three more: research-based art, performance exhibitions, and interventions. Why work on attention? One of the biggest changes in our culture and society over the last thirty years – a period that coincidentally coincides with what we call ‘contemporary art’ – has been digital technology. The speed and degree of change has been unimaginable; it affects how we communicate, how we think, how we research, how we write. Because it changes our experience of time, it also affects how we see. All this, I think, makes it a rich consideration for anyone dealing with art and spectatorship. In this book, I want to look at a thirty-year period of contemporary art historically, tracking changes over three decades, but through the lens of technological change. Any book on attention has to wrangle with two related discourses that have emerged since the 1990s. The first is the attention economy. None of us with a smartphone or computer is immune to its tentacles; every glance and click can be monetised. The other discourse is around ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). ADHD medication has become a central to maintaining performance in the university and neoliberal workplace; almost 10% of US schoolchildren are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed medication. ADHD discourse brings together questions of pedagogy, literacy, neurobiology and neoliberalism, and pathologises distraction in ways that unexpectedly inform considerations of visual art and performance.
Research Interests:
Few names have been as eminent and dominant in the writing and thinking of art as Svetlana Alpers, a professor emerita of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and visiting scholar at New York University. The daughter... more
Few names have been as eminent and dominant in the writing and thinking of art as Svetlana Alpers, a professor emerita of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and visiting scholar at New York University. The daughter of Wassily Leontief, a Nobel laureate in economics, and the poet Estelle Marks, Svetlana Alpers received a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1957 and a doctorate in Art History from Harvard University in 1965. She was one of the first women to hold a chair of art history at Berkeley, where she taught from 1962 to 1994. Combining technical, aesthetic and iconographic studies, her pioneering works on Flemish and Dutch art, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Tiepolo, and Rubens remain authoritative references. Svetlana Alpers co-founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations in 1983, and her many books include The Art of Describing (1983); Rembrandt’s Enterprise (1988); Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (with Michael Baxandall, 1994); The Making of Rubens (1995) and The Vexations of Art (2005), as well as an anti-memoir, Roof Life (2013). She has recently left painting behind and shifted her attention towards photography, with the acclaimed monograph Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch (2020). The celebrated art historian talks to Electra about spending a lifetime looking at art, and writing about looking as a form of knowledge and a way of being in the world.
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS You grew up in an academic household. Was art a major element while growing up?
SVETLANA ALPERS No, it was just a part of it. We had art around the house and my parents also had artist friends. Mark Rothko was a close friend and he summered where we summered in Vermont. So, we knew our artists. But art was not primary. That was the academy. It was Harvard University.
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS You grew up in an academic household. Was art a major element while growing up?
SVETLANA ALPERS No, it was just a part of it. We had art around the house and my parents also had artist friends. Mark Rothko was a close friend and he summered where we summered in Vermont. So, we knew our artists. But art was not primary. That was the academy. It was Harvard University.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Wolfgang Tillmans. Wandering Bodies, Travelling Images", Electra 22, 2023, pp. 32-44.
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-22/wolfgang-tillmans-wandering-bodies-travelling-images
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-22/wolfgang-tillmans-wandering-bodies-travelling-images
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Hal Foster: The History of the Present", Electra 22, 2023, pp. 60-74.
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-22/hal-foster-history-present
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-22/hal-foster-history-present
Research Interests:
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-20/jonathan-crary-practices-radical-refusal
Research Interests:
"António Carneiro: O poeta com pincéis", Matosinhos: Museu Quinta de Santiago, Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos, 2022, pp. 8-19.
Research Interests:
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS Tell us a bit about your background. What has shaped your understanding of architecture as political work? How did you come to focus on the interaction of violence with the built environment? EYAL WEIZMAN I had two... more
AFONSO DIAS RAMOS Tell us a bit about your background. What has shaped your understanding of architecture as political work? How did you come to focus on the interaction of violence with the built environment?
EYAL WEIZMAN I had two competing interests as a young person. One was shaped by a certain interest in theory, particularly political theory, through the reading groups I was part of in Haifa, run by the Communist Party that had a headquarters there. This group of Palestinian, Israeli and Jewish intellectuals was trying to build a common understanding of the material realities of settler colonialism. Haifa is an interesting place in this sense, because the city still has a surviving Palestinian population. While most other major cities in Palestine were ethnically cleansed in 1948, in Haifa, some of the population survived in the urban culture of what became the Israeli state, rather than in the rural cultures that are wrongly associated with the expulsions of the Nakba.
Available at: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-18/eyal-weizman-aesthetics-and-human-rights
EYAL WEIZMAN I had two competing interests as a young person. One was shaped by a certain interest in theory, particularly political theory, through the reading groups I was part of in Haifa, run by the Communist Party that had a headquarters there. This group of Palestinian, Israeli and Jewish intellectuals was trying to build a common understanding of the material realities of settler colonialism. Haifa is an interesting place in this sense, because the city still has a surviving Palestinian population. While most other major cities in Palestine were ethnically cleansed in 1948, in Haifa, some of the population survived in the urban culture of what became the Israeli state, rather than in the rural cultures that are wrongly associated with the expulsions of the Nakba.
Available at: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-18/eyal-weizman-aesthetics-and-human-rights
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Olhar Direito por Linhas Tortas: Fotografias da Coleção Marin Gaspar, Alvito: Inter.meada, 2022. Essay on contemporary Portuguese photography. Artists surveyed: Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe; António... more
Olhar Direito por Linhas Tortas: Fotografias da Coleção Marin Gaspar, Alvito: Inter.meada, 2022.
Essay on contemporary Portuguese photography. Artists surveyed:
Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe; António Júlio Duarte; Dalila Gonçalves; Duarte Amaral Netto; Edgar Martins; José Pedro Cortes; Martim Ramos; Nuno Cera; Paulo Catrica; Paulo Mendes; Rita Magalhães; Tito Mouraz and Tatiana Macedo.
Essay on contemporary Portuguese photography. Artists surveyed:
Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe; António Júlio Duarte; Dalila Gonçalves; Duarte Amaral Netto; Edgar Martins; José Pedro Cortes; Martim Ramos; Nuno Cera; Paulo Catrica; Paulo Mendes; Rita Magalhães; Tito Mouraz and Tatiana Macedo.
Research Interests:
Olhar Direito por Linhas Tortas: Fotografias da Coleção Marin Gaspar, Alvito: Inter.meada, 2022. Ensaio sobre fotografia portuguesa contemporânea. Artistas incluídos: Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe;... more
Olhar Direito por Linhas Tortas: Fotografias da Coleção Marin Gaspar, Alvito: Inter.meada, 2022.
Ensaio sobre fotografia portuguesa contemporânea. Artistas incluídos:
Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe; António Júlio Duarte; Dalila Gonçalves; Duarte Amaral Netto; Edgar Martins; José Pedro Cortes; Martim Ramos; Nuno Cera; Paulo Catrica; Paulo Mendes; Rita Magalhães; Tito Mouraz e Tatiana Macedo.
Ensaio sobre fotografia portuguesa contemporânea. Artistas incluídos:
Albano Silva Pereira; Ana Linhares; André Cepeda; André Príncipe; António Júlio Duarte; Dalila Gonçalves; Duarte Amaral Netto; Edgar Martins; José Pedro Cortes; Martim Ramos; Nuno Cera; Paulo Catrica; Paulo Mendes; Rita Magalhães; Tito Mouraz e Tatiana Macedo.
Research Interests:
As colonial visual culture now fully integrates the mainstream of historical research and artistic practice at a global level, one subset of imagery still remains woefully unaddressed: the atrocity photograph. This essay provides a brief... more
As colonial visual culture now fully integrates the mainstream of historical research and artistic practice at a global level, one subset of imagery still remains woefully unaddressed: the atrocity photograph. This essay provides a brief historical contextualization of the role of photography in decolonization wars and the concurrent emergence of critical theorizing on violent images, and why it still remains exceedingly difficult to analyse graphic pictures in the colonial context; then, honing in on the case of the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa (1961-1975), it examines the rare appropriation of a shocking photograph in Daniel Barroca’s work Circular Body (2015).
Research Interests:
This chapter presents a transnational analysis of the two most controversial decolonial protests in contemporary visual culture: the demand to remove public memorials celebrating imperialism and slavery outside the museum and the dispute... more
This chapter presents a transnational analysis of the two most controversial decolonial protests in contemporary visual culture: the demand to remove public memorials celebrating imperialism and slavery outside the museum and the dispute over the right to show historical images exposing the bodily violence of racial terrorism and white supremacy in the museum. Considering these divisive debates over colonial history side-by-side, it investigates the transformative role of visual and aesthetic practices in these campaigns. Based on the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign movement born at the University of Cape Town (2015) and the display of Dana Schutz’s painting "Open Casket" at the Whitney Biennial in New York (2017), this essay examines what implications they hold for reframing postcolonial studies today.
Keywords: Cecil Rhodes / Emmett Till / Iconoclasm / Monuments / Statues / RhodesMustFall / Critical Race Studies
Keywords: Cecil Rhodes / Emmett Till / Iconoclasm / Monuments / Statues / RhodesMustFall / Critical Race Studies
Research Interests:
"What are those blue remembered hills […] That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, (1896) John Divola’s latest book,... more
"What are those blue remembered hills
[…] That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, (1896)
John Divola’s latest book, Terminus (2021), brings together a series of black-and-white photographs taken since 2015 inside George Air Force Base – a closed military installation in California seventy miles from Los Angeles on the southwestern edges of the Mojave Desert. While the project was initially given official permission to photograph the outside areas, most of it was the result of the artist’s clandestine explorations of the interiors of 600 housing units that had been abandoned after the military base was closed down in 1992. The artistic intervention in these derelict buildings, with the subsequent records of modified scenes, is part of a revisitation of Divola’s work – and by extension, of the history of photography and contemporary art. He picked up on his earlier approaches after half a century of work in Los Angeles, and went on to explore different practices, maintaining a sharp contrast between projects, from the series on isolated houses to sequences of dogs chasing his car through the desert; and from the use of robotic cameras for landscape shots to the use of timers to create self-portraits on the run. A rarity in the artistic panorama of our times, this dialogue with his earlier work was not intended to rehash old formulas, but rather to emulate the experimental impetus that had set him apart as one of the first conceptual artists to question the limits of photography, refusing the then dominant patterns of neutrality, and using colour exuberantly at a time when black-and-white was still considered the most serious form of art. Dating back to the 1970s, this procedure found new possibilities in the derelict air base, with work that, just as before, now fundamentally rested on the negation of a distinction between witness and participant, document and intervention, and the intersection of photographic practice with other visual arts as part of an exploration of perception, space, and surface. Such time travel, however, is no accident. According to documentary tradition, this extensive fieldwork in the military installation took place in parallel with a return to his private studio archives. John Divola turned back to old negatives because of the book Chroma (2018), developing new experiences with the saturated and artificial pigments of obsolete Cibachromes; and he refamiliarised himself with his own legendary series in which he intervened in abandoned houses, Vandalism (1974-75) and Zuma (1977-78), as these underwent a process of digitalisation and republication. [...]"
Afonso Dias Ramos, "The Sublime Iconoclasm of John Divola", Electra 15, 2022, pp. 110-123.
For more, see:
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-15/john-divola-blue-exceptions
[…] That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, (1896)
John Divola’s latest book, Terminus (2021), brings together a series of black-and-white photographs taken since 2015 inside George Air Force Base – a closed military installation in California seventy miles from Los Angeles on the southwestern edges of the Mojave Desert. While the project was initially given official permission to photograph the outside areas, most of it was the result of the artist’s clandestine explorations of the interiors of 600 housing units that had been abandoned after the military base was closed down in 1992. The artistic intervention in these derelict buildings, with the subsequent records of modified scenes, is part of a revisitation of Divola’s work – and by extension, of the history of photography and contemporary art. He picked up on his earlier approaches after half a century of work in Los Angeles, and went on to explore different practices, maintaining a sharp contrast between projects, from the series on isolated houses to sequences of dogs chasing his car through the desert; and from the use of robotic cameras for landscape shots to the use of timers to create self-portraits on the run. A rarity in the artistic panorama of our times, this dialogue with his earlier work was not intended to rehash old formulas, but rather to emulate the experimental impetus that had set him apart as one of the first conceptual artists to question the limits of photography, refusing the then dominant patterns of neutrality, and using colour exuberantly at a time when black-and-white was still considered the most serious form of art. Dating back to the 1970s, this procedure found new possibilities in the derelict air base, with work that, just as before, now fundamentally rested on the negation of a distinction between witness and participant, document and intervention, and the intersection of photographic practice with other visual arts as part of an exploration of perception, space, and surface. Such time travel, however, is no accident. According to documentary tradition, this extensive fieldwork in the military installation took place in parallel with a return to his private studio archives. John Divola turned back to old negatives because of the book Chroma (2018), developing new experiences with the saturated and artificial pigments of obsolete Cibachromes; and he refamiliarised himself with his own legendary series in which he intervened in abandoned houses, Vandalism (1974-75) and Zuma (1977-78), as these underwent a process of digitalisation and republication. [...]"
Afonso Dias Ramos, "The Sublime Iconoclasm of John Divola", Electra 15, 2022, pp. 110-123.
For more, see:
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-15/john-divola-blue-exceptions
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
One of the most prominent philosophers of the twenty-first century and arguably the one most engaged with the issue of change in the world today, Catherine Malabou has covered the most disparate topics in contemporary critical thought,... more
One of the most prominent philosophers of the twenty-first century and arguably the one most engaged with the issue of change in the world today, Catherine Malabou has covered the most disparate topics in contemporary critical thought, from neuroscience to feminism, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetic trauma to sexual pleasure. In conversation with Afonso Dias Ramos, Catherine Malabou recalls the journey that culminated in her new book on the political idea of anarchism, the latest variation on the concept that brings together her entire work: plasticity.
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Catherine Malabou is a prominent figure within contemporary European philosophy and is widely regarded as one of the most exciting names of the so-called ‘New French Philosophy’. A specialist in contemporary French and German philosophy, Malabou is praised for some of the most original readings of canonical thinkers such as Hegel, Heidegger and Kant, and is increasingly acclaimed for pioneering the dialogue between the traditional social sciences and the hard sciences, probing the unexplored relationship between neuroscience, philosophy and psychoanalysis. The rare case of a philosopher engaging with life sciences, Malabou has undertaken a radical reading of figures from Freud to Spinoza or Kafka from the viewpoint of contemporary neurology and maintains that we have yet to assimilate the revolutionary discoveries made in biology over the last half a century. A prolific author since the late 1990s, Malabou’s work continues to take unexpected directions, from exploring the concepts of essence and difference within feminism to questioning the place of the feminine in philosophy, from creating a new theory of trauma to calling for a redefinition of the subject, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetics to anarchism. This entire work is essentially a long and consistent attempt to reconsider ideas of mutation, metamorphosis and transformation, rendering Malabou one of the preeminent thinkers of change today. The central concept in her work is plasticity, a term initially taken from continental philosophy but developed over the last two decades in proximity with neuroscientific studies of the brain. Plasticity refers to the coexisting power to give, receive, explode or regenerate form, the ability of any form to be transformed and to transform itself. Such a concept is flourishing within contemporary social, economic and political discourses, mobilised repeatedly for rethinking politics, literature, art, law, and justice. At a time when corporations and governments insist on the mantra of flexibility, this philosopher calls us to develop new forms of sociality and modes of being, reinvesting in the constitutive plasticity of the human being as a ‘principle of internal disobedience.
Catherine Malabou is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy at both Kingston University (UK) and the European Graduate School (Switzerland), and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine (US), a position previously held by Jacques Derrida, her former supervisor and interlocutor, with whom she co-authored Counter-Path (1999). Among her most important books are Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2004), What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2004), The New Wounded (2007), Changing Differences (2009), Ontology of the Accident (2009), with Judith Butler, You Be My Body For Me (2012), with Adrian Johnston, Self and Emotional Life (2013), Before Tomorrow (2014) and Morphing Intelligence (2017). In her previous, polemical book, Erased Pleasure (2019), Malabou focused on the clitoris as a pleasure island systematically obliterated by patriarchal societies, not only as the sexuality of the female body but also in psychoanalysis and philosophy. It was but a prelude to a newly released book, Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (2022), which calls for a totally new philosophical elaboration of the idea of anarchy, as something that is more politically urgent than ever. Catherine Malabou talks to Electra about some of the new challenges and directions in her own thinking.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Catherine Malabou: Anarchy and pleasure, scenes of a plastic life”, Electra 16, 2022.
Interview available at: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-16/catherine-malabou-anarchy-and-pleasure-scenes-plastic-life
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Catherine Malabou is a prominent figure within contemporary European philosophy and is widely regarded as one of the most exciting names of the so-called ‘New French Philosophy’. A specialist in contemporary French and German philosophy, Malabou is praised for some of the most original readings of canonical thinkers such as Hegel, Heidegger and Kant, and is increasingly acclaimed for pioneering the dialogue between the traditional social sciences and the hard sciences, probing the unexplored relationship between neuroscience, philosophy and psychoanalysis. The rare case of a philosopher engaging with life sciences, Malabou has undertaken a radical reading of figures from Freud to Spinoza or Kafka from the viewpoint of contemporary neurology and maintains that we have yet to assimilate the revolutionary discoveries made in biology over the last half a century. A prolific author since the late 1990s, Malabou’s work continues to take unexpected directions, from exploring the concepts of essence and difference within feminism to questioning the place of the feminine in philosophy, from creating a new theory of trauma to calling for a redefinition of the subject, from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency, from epigenetics to anarchism. This entire work is essentially a long and consistent attempt to reconsider ideas of mutation, metamorphosis and transformation, rendering Malabou one of the preeminent thinkers of change today. The central concept in her work is plasticity, a term initially taken from continental philosophy but developed over the last two decades in proximity with neuroscientific studies of the brain. Plasticity refers to the coexisting power to give, receive, explode or regenerate form, the ability of any form to be transformed and to transform itself. Such a concept is flourishing within contemporary social, economic and political discourses, mobilised repeatedly for rethinking politics, literature, art, law, and justice. At a time when corporations and governments insist on the mantra of flexibility, this philosopher calls us to develop new forms of sociality and modes of being, reinvesting in the constitutive plasticity of the human being as a ‘principle of internal disobedience.
Catherine Malabou is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy at both Kingston University (UK) and the European Graduate School (Switzerland), and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine (US), a position previously held by Jacques Derrida, her former supervisor and interlocutor, with whom she co-authored Counter-Path (1999). Among her most important books are Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2004), What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2004), The New Wounded (2007), Changing Differences (2009), Ontology of the Accident (2009), with Judith Butler, You Be My Body For Me (2012), with Adrian Johnston, Self and Emotional Life (2013), Before Tomorrow (2014) and Morphing Intelligence (2017). In her previous, polemical book, Erased Pleasure (2019), Malabou focused on the clitoris as a pleasure island systematically obliterated by patriarchal societies, not only as the sexuality of the female body but also in psychoanalysis and philosophy. It was but a prelude to a newly released book, Au voleur! Anarchisme et philosophie (2022), which calls for a totally new philosophical elaboration of the idea of anarchy, as something that is more politically urgent than ever. Catherine Malabou talks to Electra about some of the new challenges and directions in her own thinking.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Catherine Malabou: Anarchy and pleasure, scenes of a plastic life”, Electra 16, 2022.
Interview available at: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-16/catherine-malabou-anarchy-and-pleasure-scenes-plastic-life
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Horácio Caio, Angola: Os Dias do Desespero (1961)", Filomena Serra (ed.), Fotografia impressa e propaganda em Portugal no Estado Novo / Printed Photography and Propaganda in the Portuguese Estado Novo, Gijón: Muga,... more
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Horácio Caio, Angola: Os Dias do Desespero (1961)", Filomena Serra (ed.), Fotografia impressa e propaganda em Portugal no Estado Novo / Printed Photography and Propaganda in the Portuguese Estado Novo, Gijón: Muga, 2021, pp. 216-219.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, “O reino da (in)visibilidade / The Kingdom of (In)visibility”, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo & Joana Pontes (eds.), Visões do Império / Visions of Empire, Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2021, pp. 109-112.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Adam Phillips: Toda a literatura é mudança”, Electra 13, 2021, pp. 202-219. Adam Phillips é actualmente um dos mais reconhecidos psicanalistas, críticos literários e intelectuais públicos no Reino Unido. Já escreveu... more
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Adam Phillips: Toda a literatura é mudança”, Electra 13, 2021, pp. 202-219.
Adam Phillips é actualmente um dos mais reconhecidos psicanalistas, críticos literários e intelectuais públicos no Reino Unido. Já escreveu vinte e cinco livros sobre psicanálise, literatura e cultura, sobre temas que vão de Freud e Winnicott a Sebald e Houdini. É o organizador das novas obras completas de Sigmund Freud na colecção Modern Classics da Penguin e professor convidado de literatura inglesa na Universidade de York. O seu novo livro, On Wanting to Change, discute de que maneiras e porque é que mudamos, e a urgência de termos mais conversas e menos conversões.
Adam Phillips dirigiu o serviço de Psicoterapia Infantil do Hospital de Charing Cross em Londres, e hoje trabalha como psicanalista e Professor Convidado de Literatura Inglesa na Universidade de York. Considerado um dos mais destacados psicanalistas e críticos literários no Reino Unido, é autor de uma extensa lista de livros, entre os quais Attention Seeking (2019), In Writing (2017), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), Becoming Freud (2014), Missing Out (2012), Intimacies (com Leo Bersani, 2010), Darwin’s Worms (2000), On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993) e Winnicott (1988). Membro da Royal Society of Literature, colabora regularmente com o London Review of Books, The Observer, The Raritan e The New York Times. Foi o editor das obras de, entre outros, Edmund Burke, Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, John Clare e Richard Howard, e conta, entre os seus ilustres admiradores, com escritores como Will Self, Zadie Smith ou Jonathan Safran Foer. Um dos maiores peritos na história da psicanálise e em Sigmund Freud, Adam Phillips foi também convidado pela Penguin Press para ser organizador da nova edição em inglês das obras completas de Freud em dezassete volumes, relançando-o ao público, menos como autor de textos científicos do que como uma figura literária maior.
Adam Phillips foi considerado por John Banville «um dos mais elegantes estilistas de prosa na língua inglesa, um Emerson da nossa era», e elogiado por Judith Butler como um dos poucos autores que «pensaram e repensaram a psicanálise em termos decisivos para a cultura contemporânea». Mais do que qualquer outro crítico, os seus ensaios têm teorizado a relação da psicanálise com a escrita, da terapia com a leitura, apresentando a primeira delas como um parente mais próximo da literatura do que da ciência. Embora sonantes, os títulos dos seus livros são enganadoramente simples, escondendo ensaios perspicazes e eruditos que cobrem um vasto espectro de temas, de Nietzsche a Pessoa, de Shakespeare a Lacan, de Karl Kraus a Marianne Moore, ou de J.-B. Pontalis a Frederick Seidel. Abarcam tudo, desde teorias sobre alta-costura e desarrumação doméstica até histórias da insinuação e das primeiras impressões. O estilo caracteristicamente aforístico dá forma a um ímpeto provocador de refutar certos clichés modernos, manifestando-se tanto contra as ideias de autocrítica e conhecimento, diagnóstico e cura, como a favor da solidão, do aborrecimento ou das chamadas de atenção. A entrevista para a Electra foi realizada pelo telefone dias depois do lançamento do novo livro de Adam Phillips, On Wanting to Change [Sobre querer mudar], no qual o mais eminente dos «psicanalistas literários» desmonta o constante apelo contemporâneo para mudarmos as nossas vidas, como parte do mito liberal de progresso que condena a ideia de conversão que remonta a São Paulo ou Santo Agostinho. Nesta conversa, Adam Phillips fala sobre algum do seu trabalho como ensaísta literário e também do futuro da psicanálise.
Ver mais em:
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-13/adam-phillips-toda-literatura-e-mudanca
Palavras-chave: Psicanálise / Literatura / Crítica Literária
Adam Phillips é actualmente um dos mais reconhecidos psicanalistas, críticos literários e intelectuais públicos no Reino Unido. Já escreveu vinte e cinco livros sobre psicanálise, literatura e cultura, sobre temas que vão de Freud e Winnicott a Sebald e Houdini. É o organizador das novas obras completas de Sigmund Freud na colecção Modern Classics da Penguin e professor convidado de literatura inglesa na Universidade de York. O seu novo livro, On Wanting to Change, discute de que maneiras e porque é que mudamos, e a urgência de termos mais conversas e menos conversões.
Adam Phillips dirigiu o serviço de Psicoterapia Infantil do Hospital de Charing Cross em Londres, e hoje trabalha como psicanalista e Professor Convidado de Literatura Inglesa na Universidade de York. Considerado um dos mais destacados psicanalistas e críticos literários no Reino Unido, é autor de uma extensa lista de livros, entre os quais Attention Seeking (2019), In Writing (2017), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), Becoming Freud (2014), Missing Out (2012), Intimacies (com Leo Bersani, 2010), Darwin’s Worms (2000), On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993) e Winnicott (1988). Membro da Royal Society of Literature, colabora regularmente com o London Review of Books, The Observer, The Raritan e The New York Times. Foi o editor das obras de, entre outros, Edmund Burke, Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, John Clare e Richard Howard, e conta, entre os seus ilustres admiradores, com escritores como Will Self, Zadie Smith ou Jonathan Safran Foer. Um dos maiores peritos na história da psicanálise e em Sigmund Freud, Adam Phillips foi também convidado pela Penguin Press para ser organizador da nova edição em inglês das obras completas de Freud em dezassete volumes, relançando-o ao público, menos como autor de textos científicos do que como uma figura literária maior.
Adam Phillips foi considerado por John Banville «um dos mais elegantes estilistas de prosa na língua inglesa, um Emerson da nossa era», e elogiado por Judith Butler como um dos poucos autores que «pensaram e repensaram a psicanálise em termos decisivos para a cultura contemporânea». Mais do que qualquer outro crítico, os seus ensaios têm teorizado a relação da psicanálise com a escrita, da terapia com a leitura, apresentando a primeira delas como um parente mais próximo da literatura do que da ciência. Embora sonantes, os títulos dos seus livros são enganadoramente simples, escondendo ensaios perspicazes e eruditos que cobrem um vasto espectro de temas, de Nietzsche a Pessoa, de Shakespeare a Lacan, de Karl Kraus a Marianne Moore, ou de J.-B. Pontalis a Frederick Seidel. Abarcam tudo, desde teorias sobre alta-costura e desarrumação doméstica até histórias da insinuação e das primeiras impressões. O estilo caracteristicamente aforístico dá forma a um ímpeto provocador de refutar certos clichés modernos, manifestando-se tanto contra as ideias de autocrítica e conhecimento, diagnóstico e cura, como a favor da solidão, do aborrecimento ou das chamadas de atenção. A entrevista para a Electra foi realizada pelo telefone dias depois do lançamento do novo livro de Adam Phillips, On Wanting to Change [Sobre querer mudar], no qual o mais eminente dos «psicanalistas literários» desmonta o constante apelo contemporâneo para mudarmos as nossas vidas, como parte do mito liberal de progresso que condena a ideia de conversão que remonta a São Paulo ou Santo Agostinho. Nesta conversa, Adam Phillips fala sobre algum do seu trabalho como ensaísta literário e também do futuro da psicanálise.
Ver mais em:
https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-13/adam-phillips-toda-literatura-e-mudanca
Palavras-chave: Psicanálise / Literatura / Crítica Literária
Research Interests:
Adam Phillips is one of Britain’s most celebrated psychoanalysts, literary critics and public intellectuals today. He has written twenty-five books about psychoanalysis, literature and culture on subjects ranging from Freud and Winnicott... more
Adam Phillips is one of Britain’s most celebrated psychoanalysts, literary critics and public intellectuals today. He has written twenty-five books about psychoanalysis, literature and culture on subjects ranging from Freud and Winnicott to Sebald and Houdini. He is the General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classic Freud series and a Visiting Professor of English at the University of York. His new book, On Wanting to Change, is about how and why we change, and the urgency of having conversations rather than conversions.
Adam Phillips, former Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and visiting professor at the Department of English at the University of York. Widely considered to be one of the leading psychoanalysts and literary critics in Britain, Phillips has authored twenty-five books, which include Attention Seeking (2019), In Writing (2017), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), Becoming Freud (2014), Missing Out (2012), Intimacies (with Leo Bersani) (2010), Darwin’s Worms (2000), On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), and Winnicott (1988). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, The Observer, The Raritan, and The New York Times, and has edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, John Clare and Richard Howard. Among his notable admirers are writers like Will Self, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Safran Foer. As one of the most prominent experts on Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips was also invited by Penguin Press to serve as General Editor of the new English edition of the complete works of Freud in seventeen volumes, reintroducing him to the public, less as the author of scientific texts than as a major literary figure in his own right.
Adam Phillips has been called by John Banville ‘one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time’, and was praised by Judith Butler as one of the few authors today to have ‘thought and rethought psychoanalysis in powerful terms for contemporary culture.’ More than any other critic, his essays theorise the relationship between psychoanalysis and writing, therapy and reading, recasting it as a closer cousin of literature than science. The catchy but deceptively simple-sounding book titles include perceptive and erudite essays that cover a broad range of topics, from Nietzsche to Pessoa, Shakespeare to Lacan, Karl Kraus to Marianne Moore, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis to Frederick Seidel. They encompass everything from theories of couture and clutter, to histories of hinting and first impressions. The signature epigrammatic style informs the provocative urge to turn modern clichés on their heads, whether arguing against the idea of self-criticism, self-knowledge and diagnosis, or championing solitude, boredom and attention-seeking behaviour.
This interview for Electra was conducted over the phone only days after the release of Adam Phillips’ new book, On Wanting to Change (2021), in which the foremost literary psychoanalyst picks apart the constant contemporary injunction to change our lives as part of a liberal myth of progress that condemns the idea of conversion harking back to Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. In this conversation, Phillips talks about some of his work as a literary essayist, and the future of psychoanalysis.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “All literature is change - Interview with Adam Phillips”, Electra 13, 2021, pp. 202-219.
Adam Phillips, former Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and visiting professor at the Department of English at the University of York. Widely considered to be one of the leading psychoanalysts and literary critics in Britain, Phillips has authored twenty-five books, which include Attention Seeking (2019), In Writing (2017), Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), Becoming Freud (2014), Missing Out (2012), Intimacies (with Leo Bersani) (2010), Darwin’s Worms (2000), On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (1993), and Winnicott (1988). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, The Observer, The Raritan, and The New York Times, and has edited works by, among others, Edmund Burke, Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, John Clare and Richard Howard. Among his notable admirers are writers like Will Self, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Safran Foer. As one of the most prominent experts on Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips was also invited by Penguin Press to serve as General Editor of the new English edition of the complete works of Freud in seventeen volumes, reintroducing him to the public, less as the author of scientific texts than as a major literary figure in his own right.
Adam Phillips has been called by John Banville ‘one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time’, and was praised by Judith Butler as one of the few authors today to have ‘thought and rethought psychoanalysis in powerful terms for contemporary culture.’ More than any other critic, his essays theorise the relationship between psychoanalysis and writing, therapy and reading, recasting it as a closer cousin of literature than science. The catchy but deceptively simple-sounding book titles include perceptive and erudite essays that cover a broad range of topics, from Nietzsche to Pessoa, Shakespeare to Lacan, Karl Kraus to Marianne Moore, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis to Frederick Seidel. They encompass everything from theories of couture and clutter, to histories of hinting and first impressions. The signature epigrammatic style informs the provocative urge to turn modern clichés on their heads, whether arguing against the idea of self-criticism, self-knowledge and diagnosis, or championing solitude, boredom and attention-seeking behaviour.
This interview for Electra was conducted over the phone only days after the release of Adam Phillips’ new book, On Wanting to Change (2021), in which the foremost literary psychoanalyst picks apart the constant contemporary injunction to change our lives as part of a liberal myth of progress that condemns the idea of conversion harking back to Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. In this conversation, Phillips talks about some of his work as a literary essayist, and the future of psychoanalysis.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “All literature is change - Interview with Adam Phillips”, Electra 13, 2021, pp. 202-219.
Research Interests:
Recensões críticas a: André Barata, O Desligamento do Mundo e a Questão do Humano, Lisboa: Documenta, 2020. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, O Futuro Começa Agora: Da Pandemia à Utopia, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2020. João Pedro Cachopo, A... more
Recensões críticas a:
André Barata, O Desligamento do Mundo e a Questão do Humano, Lisboa: Documenta, 2020.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, O Futuro Começa Agora: Da Pandemia à Utopia, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2020.
João Pedro Cachopo, A Torção dos Sentidos: pandemia e remediação digital, Lisboa: Documenta, 2020.
José Gil, O Tempo Indomado, Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 2020.
“No conto de László Krasznahorkai Teseu Universal, um homem é convidado a falar sem saber para quem, ou sobre o quê. Ao longo das três aulas que profere sobre melancolia, revolta e posse, insiste não se tratar da pessoa certa, e divaga sobre a condição humana, a função da arte e a ilegibilidade do mundo. Só a pouco e pouco o leitor dá conta de que estas conferências são entrevistas a um doente no asilo, e que os médicos em silêncio na plateia trancaram a sala e desaparecem no final. Um cenário semelhante tem definido o pensamento crítico sob a pandemia. A situação inesperada e inescapável compeliu os teóricos a pronunciarem-se, mas o que sobressaiu do excedente discursivo foi o desnorte, a perda de referências que levou a regurgitar velhos esquemas conceptuais e autorizou saltos especulativos. As incertezas vincaram ainda mais o fosso entre os filósofos e os trabalhadores de saúde durante a emergência, tornando evidente, para quem andasse distraído, a perda de autoridade, mas não o vigor, da teoria crítica. […]”
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Ensaio e pandemia: ficções do interlúdio”, Electra 13, 2021, pp. 248-250.
André Barata, O Desligamento do Mundo e a Questão do Humano, Lisboa: Documenta, 2020.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, O Futuro Começa Agora: Da Pandemia à Utopia, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2020.
João Pedro Cachopo, A Torção dos Sentidos: pandemia e remediação digital, Lisboa: Documenta, 2020.
José Gil, O Tempo Indomado, Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 2020.
“No conto de László Krasznahorkai Teseu Universal, um homem é convidado a falar sem saber para quem, ou sobre o quê. Ao longo das três aulas que profere sobre melancolia, revolta e posse, insiste não se tratar da pessoa certa, e divaga sobre a condição humana, a função da arte e a ilegibilidade do mundo. Só a pouco e pouco o leitor dá conta de que estas conferências são entrevistas a um doente no asilo, e que os médicos em silêncio na plateia trancaram a sala e desaparecem no final. Um cenário semelhante tem definido o pensamento crítico sob a pandemia. A situação inesperada e inescapável compeliu os teóricos a pronunciarem-se, mas o que sobressaiu do excedente discursivo foi o desnorte, a perda de referências que levou a regurgitar velhos esquemas conceptuais e autorizou saltos especulativos. As incertezas vincaram ainda mais o fosso entre os filósofos e os trabalhadores de saúde durante a emergência, tornando evidente, para quem andasse distraído, a perda de autoridade, mas não o vigor, da teoria crítica. […]”
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Ensaio e pandemia: ficções do interlúdio”, Electra 13, 2021, pp. 248-250.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Salette Tavares (1922-1994)", Helena de Freitas e Bruno Marchand (eds.), Tudo o que eu quero — Artistas Portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 / Tout ce que je veux — Artistes portugaises de 1900 à 2020 / All I Want / Portuguese... more
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Salette Tavares (1922-1994)", Helena de Freitas e Bruno Marchand (eds.), Tudo o que eu quero — Artistas Portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 / Tout ce que je veux — Artistes portugaises de 1900 à 2020 / All I Want / Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020, Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Direcção Geral do Património Cultural, 2021.
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Menez (1926-1995)", Helena de Freitas e Bruno Marchand (eds.), Tudo o que eu quero — Artistas Portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 / Tout ce que je veux — Artistes portugaises de 1900 à 2020 / All I Want / Portuguese Women... more
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Menez (1926-1995)", Helena de Freitas e Bruno Marchand (eds.), Tudo o que eu quero — Artistas Portuguesas de 1900 a 2020 / Tout ce que je veux — Artistes portugaises de 1900 à 2020 / All I Want / Portuguese Women Artists from 1900 to 2020, Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Direcção Geral do Património Cultural, 2021.
Research Interests:
A insistência em repetir que a guerra colonial carece de registos visuais tende a desprezar o facto de que a imprensa portuguesa a apresentou ao público com a maior das campanhas de imagens de choque. E isto foi determinante na forma como... more
A insistência em repetir que a guerra colonial carece de registos visuais tende a desprezar o facto de que a imprensa portuguesa a apresentou ao público com a maior das campanhas de imagens de choque. E isto foi determinante na forma como o conflito foi travado, narrado e como viria a ser relembrado. Foram precisos 60 anos, e apenas uma fotografia em sentido contrário, para que se questionasse esta exposição.
Afonso Dias Ramos
25 de Abril de 2021
https://www.publico.pt/2021/04/25/culturaipsilon/noticia/maldicao-imagens-coloniais-1959618
Keywords / Palavras-chave: Guerra Colonial / Fotografias / Ultramar / Portugal / Angola / Estado Novo / Front National / Jean-Marie Le Pen / Horst Faas / Ernst Jünger / Horácio Caio / Propaganda / Atrocidade
Afonso Dias Ramos
25 de Abril de 2021
https://www.publico.pt/2021/04/25/culturaipsilon/noticia/maldicao-imagens-coloniais-1959618
Keywords / Palavras-chave: Guerra Colonial / Fotografias / Ultramar / Portugal / Angola / Estado Novo / Front National / Jean-Marie Le Pen / Horst Faas / Ernst Jünger / Horácio Caio / Propaganda / Atrocidade
Research Interests:
"At what point did we begin referring to education predominantly as an investment, love as a contract, family as a partnership, friendship as a network, and the future as a dividend? When did the naturalisation of this language occur,... more
"At what point did we begin referring to education predominantly as an investment, love as a contract, family as a partnership, friendship as a network, and the future as a dividend? When did the naturalisation of this language occur, establishing a relationship to the world on the basis of a transaction according to which experience is defined by returns, and subjectivity by value? An indicator of this profound mutation can be found in the way the word speculation inscribed itself so vehemently and yet so banally in the contemporary imaginary. While current usage has reduced it to something commonplace due to its association with financial markets, deals and scams; the word still carries its centuries of muted meanings, when a speculator meant a mystical prophet, star gazer, mirror maker, or visionary artist. These are the forgotten declinations of the prime category of the era of financial capital, that which defines our political unconscious. [...]"
For more, see: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-12
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Speculation”, Dictionary of Received Ideas, Electra 12, 2021, pp. 222-223.
Keywords: Finance / Financialization / Speculation / Philosophy / Saint Augustine / Kant / Berardi
For more, see: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/en/editions/issue-12
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Speculation”, Dictionary of Received Ideas, Electra 12, 2021, pp. 222-223.
Keywords: Finance / Financialization / Speculation / Philosophy / Saint Augustine / Kant / Berardi
Research Interests:
"A partir de que momento se tornou dominante referir a educação como investimento, amor como contrato, família como parceria, amizade como rede, futuro como dividendo? Quando se naturalizou este tipo de linguagem que mantém com o mundo... more
"A partir de que momento se tornou dominante referir a educação como investimento, amor como contrato, família como parceria, amizade como rede, futuro como dividendo? Quando se naturalizou este tipo de linguagem que mantém com o mundo uma relação de transacção, segundo a qual a experiência se define pelo retorno e a subjectividade se orienta pelo valor? Um indicador da mutação profunda reside no modo como a palavra especulação se inscreveu com tanta veemência e vulgaridade no imaginário contemporâneo. Se o uso corrente a despromoveu ao lugar-comum pela associação a mercados financeiros, negócios e falcatruas, continua a emitir em surdina séculos de significação, quando especulador designava profeta místico, estudioso dos astros, fabricador de espelhos ou artista visionário. São as declinações esquecidas da categoria maior da era do capital financeiro que define o inconsciente político. [...]"
Ver mais em: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-12
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Especulação”, Dicionário das Ideias Feitas, Electra 12, 2021, pp. 222-223.
Ver mais em: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/editions/edicao-12
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Especulação”, Dicionário das Ideias Feitas, Electra 12, 2021, pp. 222-223.
Research Interests:
Quem não segue polémicas relativas a símbolos coloniais, decerto estranhou o recente anúncio nos jornais das mortes da Torre de Belém, Mosteiro dos Jerónimos e Padrão de Descobrimentos. Já não se trata de leviana ironia para encher... more
Quem não segue polémicas relativas a símbolos coloniais, decerto estranhou o recente anúncio nos jornais das mortes da Torre de Belém, Mosteiro dos Jerónimos e Padrão de Descobrimentos. Já não se trata de leviana ironia para encher páginas. Afirma-se hoje que os monumentos têm a cabeça a prémio, ignorando quando e como se dará o golpe. O caso passaria desapercebido se os comentadores não tivessem soado o alarme, numa contagem decrescente desde que a contestação à simbologia imperial no espaço público tomou novo fôlego na última década. Seria interessante lembrar como tudo isto ocorreu no meio da maior campanha de erradicação de marcas públicas de que existe registo, a retirada de milhares de estátuas a Lenine por decreto oficial ou gesto espontâneo, sem que uma coluna de opinião invocasse liberdade de expressão, apagamento da história e revisionismo ideológico, nem brandisse o anacronismo, radicalismo e dogmatismo que, na escala menor da questão colonial, são os termos obrigatórios do (ou contra o) debate.
Contrariamente a outros países, em Portugal não se registou um caso de derrube ou remoção de monumentos, apesar da maior concentração de simbologia imperial do mundo. O caso é tanto mais notável quanto a disputa pública sucedeu em torno, não da destruição de velhas marcas coloniais, mas da criação de novas marcas coloniais. Três casos dividiram a opinião pública. O primeiro, na ordem do dia, foi a decisão, em 2014, de não se refazer os brasões florais de cada uma das ex-colónias em Belém, inexistentes há quatro décadas. O segundo foi a inauguração de um memorial a Padre António Vieira rodeado de criancinhas indígenas nuas em 2017, ao mesmo tempo que esta tipologia da estatuária colonial era a causa da remoção destes objectos (centenários, por vezes) do espaço público, de São Francisco a Boston. O terceiro caso, de 2018, foi o plano de criar um museu sobre cinco séculos de história imperial com o nome Museu das Descobertas.
Afonso Dias Ramos, "São flores, senhor, são flores!", Público, Suplemento Ípsilon, 5 de Março de 2021.
Link: https://www.publico.pt/2021/03/05/culturaipsilon/noticia/sao-flores-senhor-sao-flores-1952698
Palavras-chave: Monumentos Coloniais / Polémico / Brasões / Praça do Império / Descolonizar
Contrariamente a outros países, em Portugal não se registou um caso de derrube ou remoção de monumentos, apesar da maior concentração de simbologia imperial do mundo. O caso é tanto mais notável quanto a disputa pública sucedeu em torno, não da destruição de velhas marcas coloniais, mas da criação de novas marcas coloniais. Três casos dividiram a opinião pública. O primeiro, na ordem do dia, foi a decisão, em 2014, de não se refazer os brasões florais de cada uma das ex-colónias em Belém, inexistentes há quatro décadas. O segundo foi a inauguração de um memorial a Padre António Vieira rodeado de criancinhas indígenas nuas em 2017, ao mesmo tempo que esta tipologia da estatuária colonial era a causa da remoção destes objectos (centenários, por vezes) do espaço público, de São Francisco a Boston. O terceiro caso, de 2018, foi o plano de criar um museu sobre cinco séculos de história imperial com o nome Museu das Descobertas.
Afonso Dias Ramos, "São flores, senhor, são flores!", Público, Suplemento Ípsilon, 5 de Março de 2021.
Link: https://www.publico.pt/2021/03/05/culturaipsilon/noticia/sao-flores-senhor-sao-flores-1952698
Palavras-chave: Monumentos Coloniais / Polémico / Brasões / Praça do Império / Descolonizar
Research Interests:
Tem passado despercebido como o silêncio e o vazio que desceu sobre as cidades nos últimos meses da pandemia surgia prefigurado no género de fotografia com maior afirmação neste século — as imagens de paisagens urbanas evacuadas, onde as... more
Tem passado despercebido como o silêncio e o vazio que desceu sobre as cidades nos últimos meses da pandemia surgia prefigurado no género de fotografia com maior afirmação neste século — as imagens de paisagens urbanas evacuadas, onde as condições normais de vida pareciam suspensas, o tempo paralisado e a presença humana expulsa, assinalando os eventos importantes através da sua sobrevivência em estruturas materiais, como restos e vestígios. Se a retirada e deserção anunciada nessas fotografias se tornaram o novo normal em tempos de confinamento, a condição mutante de tais cidades devolutas denunciava então um imaginário contemporâneo assombrado pela ameaça dupla da recessão e extinção, um presente incapaz de se pensar ou exprimir senão através da linguagem da crise e paradoxo, e uma violência de natureza mais dissimulada, ora viral, ora virtual, ora psíquica. Tal género experimental nascera essencialmente do protesto contra o estado moribundo da reportagem jornalística, recuando face à transmissão electrónica e instantânea das notícias para meditar sobre emergências sem a tirania da resposta imediata, e como fruto de crescentes pressões intelectuais que desviaram a fotografia do instante decisivo e da destruição espectacular em tempo real para uma reflexão mais profunda sobre violência nas suas manifestações diferidas, intermitentes ou fugidias, sem interpretação simples.
Sob forma de paisagens desocupadas e ruas despovoadas, as fotografias impunham ao mundo um interlúdio, o abrandamento do olhar para estudar o que comunicam os lugares sem pessoas, transfigurando cidades familiares em cenários estranhos que exigiam ser reanimados no teatro da imaginação, interpretação e memória. Em regra geral, este tipo de fotografia que saturava galerias de arte operava de modo retrospectivo, revisitando cenários de catástrofes políticas e desastres naturais que sacudiram a sociedade, mas enquanto registos visuais do que resta depois de o tumulto passar. O que se pretendia desse imaginário fantasmal que se soltava da casca das coisas era, no fundo, a própria aparição da história, «essa mistura indecente de banalidade e apocalipse», como um dia a definiu Emil Cioran. O anacronismo da mistura indecente não só remetia para os primórdios da fotografia quando, por limitações tecnológicas, os modelos privilegiados eram a arquitectura e o cadáver, dado que tudo o que se movesse passava à invisibilidade, mas também para um contexto actual no qual os ecrãs se enchem de paisagens vazias que já não são um pano de fundo mas protagonistas, face às quais a fotografia se insinua agora como testemunha muda, mais relevante pela inexplicabilidade que regista do que pela aparência que revela. Se indicia uma evacuação violenta ou ruptura radical, troca o grito pelo sussurro. A coincidência da inversão já não indica a melancolia do regresso patológico ao passado, mas dá o contorno de um presente desconjuntado no qual, como nos discursos sobre o fim do tempo, o instante sumiu e o tempo suspendeu-se dentro do tempo. [...]
Ver mais em: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/node/3301
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Jo Ractliffe no Roque Santeiro: Meditações na emergência”, Furo, Electra 11, 2020, pp. 116-132.
Sob forma de paisagens desocupadas e ruas despovoadas, as fotografias impunham ao mundo um interlúdio, o abrandamento do olhar para estudar o que comunicam os lugares sem pessoas, transfigurando cidades familiares em cenários estranhos que exigiam ser reanimados no teatro da imaginação, interpretação e memória. Em regra geral, este tipo de fotografia que saturava galerias de arte operava de modo retrospectivo, revisitando cenários de catástrofes políticas e desastres naturais que sacudiram a sociedade, mas enquanto registos visuais do que resta depois de o tumulto passar. O que se pretendia desse imaginário fantasmal que se soltava da casca das coisas era, no fundo, a própria aparição da história, «essa mistura indecente de banalidade e apocalipse», como um dia a definiu Emil Cioran. O anacronismo da mistura indecente não só remetia para os primórdios da fotografia quando, por limitações tecnológicas, os modelos privilegiados eram a arquitectura e o cadáver, dado que tudo o que se movesse passava à invisibilidade, mas também para um contexto actual no qual os ecrãs se enchem de paisagens vazias que já não são um pano de fundo mas protagonistas, face às quais a fotografia se insinua agora como testemunha muda, mais relevante pela inexplicabilidade que regista do que pela aparência que revela. Se indicia uma evacuação violenta ou ruptura radical, troca o grito pelo sussurro. A coincidência da inversão já não indica a melancolia do regresso patológico ao passado, mas dá o contorno de um presente desconjuntado no qual, como nos discursos sobre o fim do tempo, o instante sumiu e o tempo suspendeu-se dentro do tempo. [...]
Ver mais em: https://electramagazine.fundacaoedp.pt/node/3301
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Jo Ractliffe no Roque Santeiro: Meditações na emergência”, Furo, Electra 11, 2020, pp. 116-132.
Research Interests:
No-one seems to have noticed that the silence and the void that have descended on cities over these last months of the pandemic have been prefigured by the most dominant photographic genre of the twenty-first century – these images of... more
No-one seems to have noticed that the silence and the void that have descended on cities over these last months of the pandemic have been prefigured by the most dominant photographic genre of the twenty-first century – these images of abandoned urban landscapes, where normal life seems to have been put on hold, time has stood still and human presence has been banished, recording important events through their survival in physical structures, as remains or traces. While the abandonment and desertion in these photographs have become the new normal in times of lockdown, the alien condition of these deserted cities points to a contemporary imagination haunted by the dual threat of recession and
extinction. It speaks of a present that is incapable of expressing or thinking of itself other than through the language of crisis and paradox, and it speaks of violence of a more dissimulated nature, whether viral, virtual or psychological. This experimental genre had essentially grown from a protest against the waning status of photojournalism, retreating in the face
of the instantaneous and electronic transmission of news to meditate on emergencies without the tyranny of immediate responses and as a fruit of growing intellectual pressures that divert photography from the decisive instant and spectacular real-time destruction, to more profound reflection on violence in its deferred, intermittent or fleeting manifestations with
no simple interpretation.
"Jo Ractliffe in Roque Santeiro: Meditations in an emergency".
Unreleased Photographs by Jo Ractliffe.
Essay by Afonso Dias Ramos.
Electra 11, 2020, pp. 116-132.
extinction. It speaks of a present that is incapable of expressing or thinking of itself other than through the language of crisis and paradox, and it speaks of violence of a more dissimulated nature, whether viral, virtual or psychological. This experimental genre had essentially grown from a protest against the waning status of photojournalism, retreating in the face
of the instantaneous and electronic transmission of news to meditate on emergencies without the tyranny of immediate responses and as a fruit of growing intellectual pressures that divert photography from the decisive instant and spectacular real-time destruction, to more profound reflection on violence in its deferred, intermittent or fleeting manifestations with
no simple interpretation.
"Jo Ractliffe in Roque Santeiro: Meditations in an emergency".
Unreleased Photographs by Jo Ractliffe.
Essay by Afonso Dias Ramos.
Electra 11, 2020, pp. 116-132.
Research Interests:
Ariel de Bigault encabeça um extenso projecto de valorização e divulgação das culturas africanas no contexto lusófono que nunca foi devidamente conhecido nem reconhecido. Quer em recolhas que precipitaram triunfalmente a música... more
Ariel de Bigault encabeça um extenso projecto de valorização e divulgação das culturas africanas no contexto lusófono que nunca foi devidamente conhecido nem reconhecido. Quer em recolhas que precipitaram triunfalmente a música cabo-verdiana em França e consolidaram a história sónica de Angola, quer em sucessivas, embora pouco divulgadas e ignoradas, reportagens e documentários à volta da luta feminista em Portugal (Femmes au lute au Portugal, 1977), da cultura negra no Brasil (Éclats Noirs du Samba, 1987), música popular em Angola (Canta Angola, 2000), ou da experiência criativa dos afrodescendentes em Lisboa (Afro Lisboa, 1996; e Margem Atlântica, 2006). O recente documentário Fantasmas do Império, inserido no festival Indie Lisboa, entra num registo diferente do habitual dos trabalhos anteriores. Como obra de fôlego elaborada ao longo de três anos, transferindo o foco da vivência e música, propõe-se a reflectir, segundo a sinopse, sobre “o imaginário colonial no cinema português.”
Research Interests:
Philippe Sands, Franco-British human rights lawyer, professor of law at University College London, visiting professor at Harvard Law School, a Queen’s Counsel (QC), president of English PEN, and a regular presence at The Hague Tribunal,... more
Philippe Sands, Franco-British human rights lawyer, professor of law at University College London, visiting professor at Harvard Law School, a Queen’s Counsel (QC), president of English PEN, and a regular presence at The Hague Tribunal, is a towering reference in international law. In the last quarter of a century, Sands has been involved in bringing to justice some of the most important cases involving genocide, crimes against humanity, and environmental law, from the arrest of Pinochet and the indictment of Milosevic to the denunciation of Guantánamo. Sands has litigated cases of mass killing in Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Lebanon, Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and, recently, Myanmar. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Vanity Fair and the London Review of Books, and a regular broadcaster on the BBC and CNN. Sands published his recent debut in non-fiction with East West Street: On The Origins Of Genocide And Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016), a multi-award winning book written over a seven-year period and comprising research under- taken across twelve countries, integrating the life story of his grandfather, Leon Buchholz, and the origins of modern international law on genocide and crimes against humanity. The research led to the acclaimed BBC documentary, My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did (2015), exploring Sands’ relationship with Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter – the sons of two high-profile Nazi officials responsible for killing most of his family in what is Ukraine today – and dealing with diametrically opposed views on paternal responsibility. This paved the way for a BBC podcast series narrated by Sands and Stephen Fry, in addition to the sequel book entitled The Ratline (2020). In this interview, Philippe Sands talks to Electra about the polarized political landscape, the curbing of national passports, judicial action against climate change, the cultures of memory in Europe, and the disruptive effect as well as transformative potential of the new coronavirus pandemic.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Philippe Sands - The history of a city can contain the history of the world”, Electra 10, 2020, pp. 192-203.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Philippe Sands - The history of a city can contain the history of the world”, Electra 10, 2020, pp. 192-203.
Research Interests:
Philippe Sands, advogado franco-britânico de direitos humanos, professor de direito no University College London, professor convidado em Harvard, conselheiro legal da coroa britânica, presidente do English PEN e presença regular no... more
Philippe Sands, advogado franco-britânico de direitos humanos, professor de direito no University College London, professor convidado em Harvard, conselheiro legal da coroa britânica, presidente do English PEN e presença regular no Tribunal Penal Internacional (TPI), em Haia, é uma das referências cimeiras do direito internacional. Neste último quartel de século, envolveu-se legalmente em alguns dos casos mais importantes de genocídio, crimes contra a humanidade e direito ambiental, desde a detenção de Pinochet e a condenação de Milosevic, até à denúncia de Guantánamo. Sands tem estado ligado a inúmeros processos contra atrocidades cometidas no Congo, Ruanda, Serra Leoa, Chechénia, Líbano, Líbia, Jugoslávia, Afeganistão, Irão, Iraque, Síria ou, recentemente, na Birmânia. É um colaborador frequente do Financial Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, Vanity Fair e London Review of Books, e comentador assíduo na BBC e CNN. Sands teve a sua estreia recente na não ficção com Estrada Leste-Oeste: As origens do genocídio e dos crimes contra a humanidade [Vogais, 2019 (2016)], um livro amplamente premiado, escrito ao longo de sete anos com base numa pesquisa feita em doze países, entrecruzando a história do seu avô, Leon Buchholz, e as origens das leis internacionais modernas sobre genocídio e crimes contra a humanidade. A investigação levou também a um aclamado documentário na BBC, A Minha Herança Nazi: O que os nossos pais fizeram (2015), sobre a relação de Sands com Niklas Frank e Horst von Wächter — filhos de dois altos dignitários nazis responsáveis pela morte da maior parte da sua família numa região hoje pertencente à Ucrânia — e as suas visões contraditórias sobre a responsabilidade dos pais. Este trabalho resultou também numa série de podcasts da BBC narrados por Sands e Stephen Fry, além de uma sequela em livro, The Ratline, que acaba de ser lançada. Nesta entrevista, Philippe Sands conversou com a Electra sobre as polarizações do actual panorama político, restrições ao passaporte nacional, acções judiciais contra as alterações climáticas, as culturas da memória na Europa, bem como a mudança radical e o potencial transformador que a pandemia do novo coronavírus anuncia.
Philippe Sands, Estrada Leste-Oeste – As Origens do Genocídio e dos Crimes Contra a Humanidade, Amadora: Vogais, 2019.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Philippe Sands - A história de uma cidade pode conter a história de um mundo”, Electra 10, 2020, pp. 192-203.
Philippe Sands, Estrada Leste-Oeste – As Origens do Genocídio e dos Crimes Contra a Humanidade, Amadora: Vogais, 2019.
Afonso Dias Ramos, “Philippe Sands - A história de uma cidade pode conter a história de um mundo”, Electra 10, 2020, pp. 192-203.
Research Interests:
Attempts to write a consensual past will only increase as the polarisation of the present deepens. This may help explain why, at a time when the future of imperial history looks far from settled, many are defensive and anxious to preserve... more
Attempts to write a consensual past will only increase as the polarisation of the present deepens. This may help explain why, at a time when the future of imperial history looks far from settled, many are defensive and anxious to preserve a glowing image of colonialism shorn of its agonies. Examples are visible across the Western world. In 2005, the French parliament passed a law forcing national schools to stress “the positive role played by France overseas”, while in 2010 a former Belgian Foreign Minister hailed King Leopold II (under whom an estimated ten million died in the Congo Free State) as a “hero”. In 2017, an article making “The Case for Colonialism” led to half of the editorial board of Third World Quarterly resigning in protest, prompting a controversial project on ‘Ethics and Empire’ at Oxford University that sought to highlight the ‘positive’ aspects of imperialism. Surveys in Britain indicate that half the population thinks the British empire was a force for ‘good’, an opinion given new prominence in the age of Brexit. Debate over whether colonialism was ‘good’ or ‘bad’, for whom and in what ways, is back with a vengeance, and in many ways has become the prime topic in European public history and cultural heritage.
Available at:
http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/portuguese-discoveries/
Available at:
http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/portuguese-discoveries/
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
A espada vence e a palavra convence, dizia-se antigamente. O adágio popular parece mais oportuno do que nunca, no meio da inesperada controvérsia nacional acerca do nome para o museu que Fernando Medina prometeu a Lisboa. Se a polémica... more
A espada vence e a palavra convence, dizia-se antigamente. O adágio popular parece mais oportuno do que nunca, no meio da inesperada controvérsia nacional acerca do nome para o museu que Fernando Medina prometeu a Lisboa. Se a polémica provou alguma coisa, é que não faz sentido não discutirmos a palavra “Descobrimentos”.
À boa maneira democrática, uma centena de investigadores contestou em carta a atribuição do nome “Descobertas” a um novo museu em Lisboa, sem discussão prévia. A reacção na imprensa foi imediata e contundente: a palavra não se discute. Não só não se discute como a suspeita levantada é infame. Articulistas, à esquerda e à direita, apontam o dedo — e citarei avulsamente — às “últimas modas dos novos inquisidores” na “onda de histerismo do politicamente correto”, à “doença cultural que atravessa o Ocidente” e ao “novo fanatismo” que deseja o “revisionismo ou invenção do passado” só para “crucificar este velho país”. Feitas as contas, não faltaram sugestões ou apoios à moção. Mas o mais significativo de tudo isto é como parte da elite intelectual pasmou com choque e afronta. O debate sobre o nome não tem nada de novo. O mal-estar que gerou, esse sim, é inédito. ------ Museu das Descobertas/Descobrimentos ------ https://www.publico.pt/2018/06/22/culturaipsilon/opiniao/a-patria-nao-se-discute-defendese-1834352
À boa maneira democrática, uma centena de investigadores contestou em carta a atribuição do nome “Descobertas” a um novo museu em Lisboa, sem discussão prévia. A reacção na imprensa foi imediata e contundente: a palavra não se discute. Não só não se discute como a suspeita levantada é infame. Articulistas, à esquerda e à direita, apontam o dedo — e citarei avulsamente — às “últimas modas dos novos inquisidores” na “onda de histerismo do politicamente correto”, à “doença cultural que atravessa o Ocidente” e ao “novo fanatismo” que deseja o “revisionismo ou invenção do passado” só para “crucificar este velho país”. Feitas as contas, não faltaram sugestões ou apoios à moção. Mas o mais significativo de tudo isto é como parte da elite intelectual pasmou com choque e afronta. O debate sobre o nome não tem nada de novo. O mal-estar que gerou, esse sim, é inédito. ------ Museu das Descobertas/Descobrimentos ------ https://www.publico.pt/2018/06/22/culturaipsilon/opiniao/a-patria-nao-se-discute-defendese-1834352
Research Interests: Museum Studies, Portuguese Studies, Portuguese History, Portuguese Discoveries and Expansion, Colonialism, and 13 morePost-Colonialism, Brazil, Portugal, Imperialism, Museologia, História, Discoveries, Estudos Portugueses, Descobrimentos, História Da Expansão Portuguesa, Estudos Pós-Coloniais, Descobertas, and Historia Dos Descobrimentos
Few would have been able to situate Angola on the world map in 1961. Even fewer would have predicted that this land, then under Portuguese control, was about to become the epicentre of historical transformations that would change the... more
Few would have been able to situate Angola on the world map in 1961. Even fewer would have predicted that this land, then under Portuguese control, was about to become the epicentre of historical transformations that would change the geopolitical contours of that map beyond recognition. At stake in the struggle for Angola was, after all, the longest colonial empire in the globe, the oldest Western dictatorship and the last bastion of white rule in Africa.
Words by Afonso Dias Ramos. Illustration by Phil Goss.
Words by Afonso Dias Ramos. Illustration by Phil Goss.
Research Interests:
As René Pelissier memorably put in 1971, "Truth is at a premium in contemporary as well as historical Portuguese Africa". Indeed, after the colonial regime attempted an all-out media blackout on Angola as soon as the armed struggle begun... more
As René Pelissier memorably put in 1971, "Truth is at a premium in contemporary as well as historical Portuguese Africa". Indeed, after the colonial regime attempted an all-out media blackout on Angola as soon as the armed struggle begun in March 1961, scores of conflicting and unreliable accounts found their way to the international press, since none of them could be independently verified. This was precisely when, in October 1961, at the height of the propaganda war that ensued, media outlets across the US – which, under John F. Kennedy, censored Portuguese colonialism at the UN – received a letter from the Portuguese Embassy in Washington D.C. Entitled "Truth about Angola", it enclosed the reprint of an article. 'Afro-American' (1961) reproduced this letter:
"So much biased material has been printed about Portugal and its overseas provinces in recent months that I would like to call the AFRO’s attention to the September issue of the National Geographic Magazine. This copy includes an excellent article entitled, ‘Angola, Unknown Africa’, by Volkmar Wentzel. Mr. Wentzel describes the multi-racial society that exists in Angola, and points out the absence of racial tension. This report is in sharp contrast to anti-Portuguese propaganda…I believe you will find this article interesting, non-political and factual. B. TEIEXIRA [sic] Press Attache, Portuguese Embassy."
How does a popular cultural icon like 'National Geographic', one of the more dominant mainstream outlets in the world, come to be deployed as a prime propaganda weapon against US foreign policy (not, as often critiqued, in support of it), garnering sympathy for the hard-line stance of an increasingly infamous dictatorship? Could it really lend ideological support for imperial permanence in the face of a full-scale European retreat from colonial enterprise and general condemnation at the UN? What was it about NG’s coverage that held so high a truth-value? And under which conditions was this reprint made and sent out? [......] The rare visual account of late Portuguese Africa by Volkmar Wentzel as a writer-photographer on Angola (1961) and Mozambique (1964) for National Geographic offers a privileged conduit to approach that divisive endgame for the remaining colonial empire, as both stories coincided with the outbreak of war in each country. In addition to being hailed by Portuguese colonial rule as the ‘truth about Angola’ at a time of fanatical attempts to control the narrative of history, the reportages are made all the more relevant by the paucity of visual documents by foreigners, and by the fact that they generated two art exhibitions at US cultural powerhouses, both of which have gone altogether unnoticed thus far. The authoritative sway of Wentzel’s stories was also thrown into relief by the fact that official US institutions singled them out as essential reference material on Portuguese Africa until the late 1970s. [......] The spearhead of the propaganda campaign overseas, Franco Nogueira, clarified in 1968 what the status of ‘truth’ required, when he refused a visa to Angola for the US scholar Gerald Bender after the latter had rejected to give him complete censorship rights over all written material. When Bender pledged to be objective in his studies, Nogueira merely retorted: ‘To be objective is to be favorable to the Portuguese’. This was, coincidently, the same minister who proposed to the Portuguese President on 31 January 1964 that two foreign citizens be conferred high honorific orders for their valuable services to Portugal, National Geographic’s editor Melville Bell Grosvenor and Volkmar Wentzel, respectively as a Commander and Officer of the Military Order of Christ, ‘for his notable action in the journalistic field in favour of the defence of the Portuguese action in Africa’. Four years after National Geographic ’s story was distributed as the disinterested truth about the outbreak of war, on 20 April 1965, the Portuguese Embassy in Washington held a special ceremony to bestow both medals in gratitude for the institutional support the magazine lent to Portuguese Africa at its most critical juncture. It would be the final act in the consistently good relations between this media giant and the colonial dictatorship.
"So much biased material has been printed about Portugal and its overseas provinces in recent months that I would like to call the AFRO’s attention to the September issue of the National Geographic Magazine. This copy includes an excellent article entitled, ‘Angola, Unknown Africa’, by Volkmar Wentzel. Mr. Wentzel describes the multi-racial society that exists in Angola, and points out the absence of racial tension. This report is in sharp contrast to anti-Portuguese propaganda…I believe you will find this article interesting, non-political and factual. B. TEIEXIRA [sic] Press Attache, Portuguese Embassy."
How does a popular cultural icon like 'National Geographic', one of the more dominant mainstream outlets in the world, come to be deployed as a prime propaganda weapon against US foreign policy (not, as often critiqued, in support of it), garnering sympathy for the hard-line stance of an increasingly infamous dictatorship? Could it really lend ideological support for imperial permanence in the face of a full-scale European retreat from colonial enterprise and general condemnation at the UN? What was it about NG’s coverage that held so high a truth-value? And under which conditions was this reprint made and sent out? [......] The rare visual account of late Portuguese Africa by Volkmar Wentzel as a writer-photographer on Angola (1961) and Mozambique (1964) for National Geographic offers a privileged conduit to approach that divisive endgame for the remaining colonial empire, as both stories coincided with the outbreak of war in each country. In addition to being hailed by Portuguese colonial rule as the ‘truth about Angola’ at a time of fanatical attempts to control the narrative of history, the reportages are made all the more relevant by the paucity of visual documents by foreigners, and by the fact that they generated two art exhibitions at US cultural powerhouses, both of which have gone altogether unnoticed thus far. The authoritative sway of Wentzel’s stories was also thrown into relief by the fact that official US institutions singled them out as essential reference material on Portuguese Africa until the late 1970s. [......] The spearhead of the propaganda campaign overseas, Franco Nogueira, clarified in 1968 what the status of ‘truth’ required, when he refused a visa to Angola for the US scholar Gerald Bender after the latter had rejected to give him complete censorship rights over all written material. When Bender pledged to be objective in his studies, Nogueira merely retorted: ‘To be objective is to be favorable to the Portuguese’. This was, coincidently, the same minister who proposed to the Portuguese President on 31 January 1964 that two foreign citizens be conferred high honorific orders for their valuable services to Portugal, National Geographic’s editor Melville Bell Grosvenor and Volkmar Wentzel, respectively as a Commander and Officer of the Military Order of Christ, ‘for his notable action in the journalistic field in favour of the defence of the Portuguese action in Africa’. Four years after National Geographic ’s story was distributed as the disinterested truth about the outbreak of war, on 20 April 1965, the Portuguese Embassy in Washington held a special ceremony to bestow both medals in gratitude for the institutional support the magazine lent to Portuguese Africa at its most critical juncture. It would be the final act in the consistently good relations between this media giant and the colonial dictatorship.
Research Interests: African Studies, Anthropology, Visual Studies, Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, and 15 morePhotography, Visual Culture, Propaganda, Public Relations, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Mozambique, Angola, Portugal, Imperialism, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic magazine
At 9pm, on 19 September 1961, millions of spectators across the US tuned to the leading network in television news, NBC, for the awaited premiere of 'Angola: Journey to a War', an hour-long film by Robert Young and Robert McCormick. This... more
At 9pm, on 19 September 1961, millions of spectators across the US tuned to the leading network in television news, NBC, for the awaited premiere of 'Angola: Journey to a War', an hour-long film by Robert Young and Robert McCormick. This was the first documentary made about the Portuguese Colonial War/Angolan War of Liberation (1961–1974), and the last time this channel covered an independence struggle in Africa. The momentous event speaks volumes to both the short-lived heyday of the television documentary genre and to the visual status of what became the most protracted conflict in the continent. Though largely overlooked by critical scholarship (partly since it was censored in the lands it covered), one cannot overstate the unique significance of this film. It single-handedly achieved, in the first year, what proved impossible over the following forty years of conflict that beset Angola: to put it on TV screens worldwide, during prime time viewing hours, for mainstream audiences.
Research Interests: African Studies, Visual Studies, Visual propaganda, Media Studies, Censorship, and 15 moreFilm Studies, Television Studies, Portuguese Studies, Visual Culture, Propaganda, Cold War, Portuguese Colonialism and Decolonizaton, Colonialism, Cinema, Angola, Documentary Film, Film and Media Studies, Post Colonial Film Studies, John F. Kennedy, and Colonialism and Film
A major retrospective of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (Sagua la Grande, 1902 – Paris, 1992) has just berthed at Tate Modern in London, weighing in at more than two hundred works and neatly splayed in chronological order across eleven rooms.... more
A major retrospective of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (Sagua la Grande, 1902 – Paris, 1992) has just berthed at Tate Modern in London, weighing in at more than two hundred works and neatly splayed in chronological order across eleven rooms. After a season at both the Pompidou in Paris and Reina Sofía in Madrid, viewers may now step into this sprawling survey featuring Lam’s proclamation writ large on the wall: “My painting is an act of decolonization, not in a physical sense but in a mental one.” The oft-cited quote fires this curatorial endeavour, delving into the fringes of art history’s canon in a bid to weave more plural, or polycentric, histories of global modernism. This is in concurrence with the retrospectives of the Uruguayan modern artist Joaquín Torres-García at MoMA in New York, and the Portuguese modernist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso at the Grand Palais in Paris. These institutional redresses are long overdue, and the political moment is ripe for critical reappraisal. In the wake of the postcolonial turn, a wave of revisionary scholarship has thrust Lam’s work into new relief: Lam is a poster boy for diasporic displacement, cross-cultural hybridity, and black cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century.
Link: https://cubacounterpoints.com/archives/4636
Link: https://cubacounterpoints.com/archives/4636
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Contemporary Art, Cuban Studies, and 17 moreAfrican Diaspora Studies, Modern Art, Painting, Cross-Cultural Studies, Modernism (Art History), Modernism, Cuban History, Global Modernism, Visual and Cultural Studies, Decolonial Thought, Twentieth Century Art, Wifredo Lam, Tate Modern, Cuban art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofía
Why is it that among the photographs scorched into the pages of modern history nearly all the deadliest wars from the latter half of the twentieth century are missing? Despite the marked increase in publications on conflict photography... more
Why is it that among the photographs scorched into the pages of modern history nearly all the deadliest wars from the latter half of the twentieth century are missing? Despite the marked increase in publications on conflict photography about this period, the discourse overwhelmingly hinges on a limited roster of historical events (Bosnia, Iraq, Israel, Rwanda or Vietnam), with barely a trace of the world’s largest conflicts. Politics and media are often denounced for overlooking those so-called invisible wars, but the extent to which academics also continuously fail to address them in their own fields is rarely scrutinized. As a recent literary survey concerning global history since World War II revealed, for example, some of the bloodiest conflicts (Angola, Algeria, Burundi, Congo or Ethiopia) have been systematically unacknowledged. Surely, it is no coincidence that the wars written out of history are also those more often lamented for their absence of images. How to make sense of this apparent correlation between the lack of visual salience of some conflicts and their inability to register as history? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Available online at: http://ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/OBJ/article/view/857
Artists discussed:
Daniel Barroca; David Brits; Margarida Cardoso; Marius van Niekerk; António Ole.
Keywords:
Guerra Colonial / Arte Contemporânea / Portugal / África do Sul / Angola /
Available online at: http://ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/OBJ/article/view/857
Artists discussed:
Daniel Barroca; David Brits; Margarida Cardoso; Marius van Niekerk; António Ole.
Keywords:
Guerra Colonial / Arte Contemporânea / Portugal / África do Sul / Angola /
Research Interests: African Studies, Visual Studies, Photography, Human Rights, Postcolonial Studies, and 18 moreContemporary Art, Visual Culture, Cuban Studies, War Studies, Cold War, Photography Theory, History of Art, Angola, Visual and Cultural Studies, Photography and War, Portugal, Border War, Decolonial Thought, Angolan History, Angolan War, Guerra colonial, Cultural appropriation, and Portuguese Colonial Wars
In spite of the belated reception of post-colonial studies in the Lusophone world, a sea change is underway. The untried and unturned colonial experiences have finally gained traction, prompting recollections, investigations and fictions.... more
In spite of the belated reception of post-colonial studies in the Lusophone world, a sea change is underway. The untried and unturned colonial experiences have finally gained traction, prompting recollections, investigations and fictions. Two contradictory pulls are at work: the acute sense that the characters of these untold histories are disappearing from the stage at an alarming rate, and that our gain in critical distance has meant the irretrievable loss of historical data; and that, paradoxically, the realities and ghosts thereof have come to haunt us as never before. There has been perhaps no case as extreme as Portugal, in which a current post-colonial dispensation was ushered in without any anti-colonial trial. There has never been anything in the way of accountability, or a reckoning. What has happened to the critical legacies of this struggle then? Have they ever evaded the clandestine underground they were forced into by that colonial dictatorship? Should they be forsaken for good, along the unfulfilled promises they trumpeted? [......] Why have these theorists, whose output dominates the ways in which we conceive the relations between political violence and culture in the past century, been so off the mark when considering them in the longest colonial dictatorship? Why do Lusophone areas remain a blip on the radar – their experiences missed, or dismissed by foundational texts, as marginal players in the master discourse - even as their liberation processes pushed violence and culture to untried levels?
The othering of these spaces is not simply born out of indifference for peripheral nations, or as the natural outcome of the “subaltern colonialism” in the past. This disconnect cannot be fully grasped without considering the cultural tools which the regime used to shield and impose invisibility upon the overseas possessions, and, short of that, to emphatically stress only images of difference or uniqueness. While this task remains largely to be done, a staggering amount of denunciations of the lusotropical doctrine, upon which the case for a lusophone exceptionalism rested, might run the risk of sucking in and exhausting all of our critical energies, at the expense of the alternative political imaginaries they were contending with. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 17 Introductions for the Mozambique Institute, 2014 / Catalogue for the "Really Useful Knowledge" exhibition, Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid).
Book concept and publishing by Catarina Simão
312 pag, black&white print by Xerox.
3 originals in hand made cover.
For more information, see: www.catarinasimao.berta.me/book-mozambique-institute/ and www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/really-useful-knowledge
The othering of these spaces is not simply born out of indifference for peripheral nations, or as the natural outcome of the “subaltern colonialism” in the past. This disconnect cannot be fully grasped without considering the cultural tools which the regime used to shield and impose invisibility upon the overseas possessions, and, short of that, to emphatically stress only images of difference or uniqueness. While this task remains largely to be done, a staggering amount of denunciations of the lusotropical doctrine, upon which the case for a lusophone exceptionalism rested, might run the risk of sucking in and exhausting all of our critical energies, at the expense of the alternative political imaginaries they were contending with. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 17 Introductions for the Mozambique Institute, 2014 / Catalogue for the "Really Useful Knowledge" exhibition, Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid).
Book concept and publishing by Catarina Simão
312 pag, black&white print by Xerox.
3 originals in hand made cover.
For more information, see: www.catarinasimao.berta.me/book-mozambique-institute/ and www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/really-useful-knowledge
Research Interests:
Sobre o papel da fotografia na guerra colonial – ao contrário de trabalhos pioneiros noutros campos da cultura e média, como a literatura, cinema ou rádio –, pouco, ou nada, foi dito para interpelar as ideias-feitas que matam à partida a... more
Sobre o papel da fotografia na guerra colonial – ao contrário de trabalhos pioneiros noutros campos da cultura e média, como a literatura, cinema ou rádio –, pouco, ou nada, foi dito para interpelar as ideias-feitas que matam à partida a discussão: que esta foi uma guerra sem imagens, invisível porque travada longe do olhar público, inimaginável pois silenciada pela censura, impenetrável dado que bloqueada pelo trauma. O legado imagético, tanto se repete, é parco, pobre e comprometido, nunca tendo merecido escrutínio crítico – à excepção do pontual ensaio e de novos projetos artísticos que começam a alumiar tabus e buracos no arquivo colonial tardio. Embora várias recolhas de imagens da guerra a partir de colecções privadas venham dando origem a álbuns e exposições recentes, conferindo visibilidade ao passado reprimido, estas surgem mais como auxílio mnemónico de e para aqueles que a lutaram, e menos como um fórum público para discutir o significado deste conflicto ao nível da representação, imaginação, interpretação e memória colectiva.
Research Interests:
In the most evocative scene of Virginie Linhart’s film documentary "Vincennes, l’université perdue" (2018), Hélène Cixous can be seen alone in an empty forest clearing, surrounded by wild vegetation, proclaiming that the lack of any... more
In the most evocative scene of Virginie Linhart’s film documentary "Vincennes, l’université perdue" (2018), Hélène Cixous can be seen alone in an empty forest clearing, surrounded by wild vegetation, proclaiming that the lack of any archaeological vestiges of the Experimental University Centre in Vincennes is an unprecedented historical event. The building that had only taken three months to build in response to the turmoil of May 1968, to confine the radical groups from the Sorbonne in the woodlands outside of Paris, would become a mythical laboratory of contemporary thought, with an impossible cast of intellectuals such as Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière, and Michel Serres. Yet, such a radical pedagogic venture would not last longer than a decade. It only took three days, in 1980, to reduce this ‘thinking forest’ to nothingness, with its forced transplantation to Saint-Denis. So began, according to Félix Guattari, the ‘winter years’.
No one emulated the radical spirit of the Vincennes adventure quite like Deleuze – ‘when I went to another faculty’, he avowed, ‘I had the impression of falling back into the 19th century’ –, given his adamant refusal to teach in an amphitheatre or to speak through monologues, insisting on a pragmatic and experimental discourse that sought to address the most heterogenous of publics, looking for both horizontality in treatment and transversality in knowledge. If the forest remains abandoned, without any mark or sign of the radical past, the surviving images from that era disclose crowded rooms and a philosopher invariably surrounded by magnetophons, attesting to the general eargerness when it came to recording his impassioned speeches, as if they were Socratic dialogues. Decades later, the very same excitement drove the frantic quest for those amateur tapes on the internet – akin to what happened with the courses Barthes or Foucault gave at Collège de France. Seizing upon this seemingly boundless craving, Éditions de Minuit has just published the eight sessions of a course about the relationship between painting and philosophy which Deleuze gave shortly after moving over to Saint-Denis in 1981, in an edition that has been carefully annotated by the philosopher David Lapoujade.
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Gilles Deleuze, The Natural Catastrophe of Painting", Electra 24, 2024, pp. 220-223.
No one emulated the radical spirit of the Vincennes adventure quite like Deleuze – ‘when I went to another faculty’, he avowed, ‘I had the impression of falling back into the 19th century’ –, given his adamant refusal to teach in an amphitheatre or to speak through monologues, insisting on a pragmatic and experimental discourse that sought to address the most heterogenous of publics, looking for both horizontality in treatment and transversality in knowledge. If the forest remains abandoned, without any mark or sign of the radical past, the surviving images from that era disclose crowded rooms and a philosopher invariably surrounded by magnetophons, attesting to the general eargerness when it came to recording his impassioned speeches, as if they were Socratic dialogues. Decades later, the very same excitement drove the frantic quest for those amateur tapes on the internet – akin to what happened with the courses Barthes or Foucault gave at Collège de France. Seizing upon this seemingly boundless craving, Éditions de Minuit has just published the eight sessions of a course about the relationship between painting and philosophy which Deleuze gave shortly after moving over to Saint-Denis in 1981, in an edition that has been carefully annotated by the philosopher David Lapoujade.
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Gilles Deleuze, The Natural Catastrophe of Painting", Electra 24, 2024, pp. 220-223.
Research Interests:
RAMOS, Afonso Dias "[Recensão crítica a 'Constelações. Ensaios sobre Cultura e Técnica na Contemporaneidade', de José Bragança de Miranda]" / Afonso Dias Ramos. In: Revista Colóquio/Letras. Recensões Críticas, n.º 216, Maio 2024, p.... more
RAMOS, Afonso Dias "[Recensão crítica a 'Constelações. Ensaios sobre Cultura e Técnica na Contemporaneidade', de José Bragança de Miranda]" / Afonso Dias Ramos. In: Revista Colóquio/Letras. Recensões Críticas, n.º 216, Maio 2024, p. 202-205.
Research Interests:
Abstract This review of Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s provocative book "Investigative Aesthetics: Conflict and Commons in the Politics of Truth"(2021), tackles the ways in which the production of knowledge in contemporary societies... more
Abstract
This review of Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s provocative book "Investigative Aesthetics: Conflict and Commons in the Politics of Truth"(2021), tackles the ways in which the production of knowledge in contemporary societies increasingly intersects with the problem of aesthetics, and discusses this critical contribution to the constellation of art, facts, truth, and investigation.
Keywords:
Aesthetics; Investigation; Activism; Forensic Architecture
This review of Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s provocative book "Investigative Aesthetics: Conflict and Commons in the Politics of Truth"(2021), tackles the ways in which the production of knowledge in contemporary societies increasingly intersects with the problem of aesthetics, and discusses this critical contribution to the constellation of art, facts, truth, and investigation.
Keywords:
Aesthetics; Investigation; Activism; Forensic Architecture
Research Interests:
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Marie-José Mondzain and Kafka: The Possibility of a Leap", Electra 19, 2023, pp. 236-239. Upon visiting a Picasso exhibition, Kafka remarked that art is a mirror that foretells the future, like a clock running fast.... more
Afonso Dias Ramos, "Marie-José Mondzain and Kafka: The Possibility of a Leap", Electra 19, 2023, pp. 236-239.
Upon visiting a Picasso exhibition, Kafka remarked that art is a mirror that foretells the future, like a clock running fast. The interlocutor retorted that his literary oeuvre was precisely that, a ‘mirror of tomorrow’. Kafka would become the writer most often branded as avant la lettre in the entire history of literature, and yet, the prophetic character of his texts was not taken as a foresight of the future, but as a precise reading of the present. It was that time paradox that led Jorge Luis Borges to hold him as the model of a writer that invents his own predecessors, and led Edward Said to regard him as the best analyst of the yet non-existent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The premonitory aura of his allegories, consisting of generic places and characters, would nevertheless end up being forcibly made to mirror all kinds of historical tragedies, the decline of the Habsburg empire, the disintegration of Europe, the rise of the Third Reich, the Shoah. This insistence on Kafka as an eternal forerunner, sentenced to plagiarise the future, kept him hostage to the odd phenomenon of literary anticipation, as a visionary that, from outside time and above history, prefigured the world, intuiting political systems even before they were formed. The most radical turn in this reception has occurred in the last decades under the post-colonial aegis, repositioning Kafka as someone of his own time, or rather, against his own time, as the combative and learned critic of the machines of dehumanisation underway despite the fanatic negationism around them – an entire differential treatment that spanned from forced labour policies to ethnic cleansing, as the fruit of imperial expansion. The eminent philosopher Marie-José Mondzain has just made a precious contribution to the ongoing historicisation and re-politicisation of Kafka, with a surprising essay on the author and the decolonisation of the imaginary, which foregrounds the ‘violence exercised by the imperialist apparatus and the new capitalist slavery’ (Mondzain 2022:19).
Upon visiting a Picasso exhibition, Kafka remarked that art is a mirror that foretells the future, like a clock running fast. The interlocutor retorted that his literary oeuvre was precisely that, a ‘mirror of tomorrow’. Kafka would become the writer most often branded as avant la lettre in the entire history of literature, and yet, the prophetic character of his texts was not taken as a foresight of the future, but as a precise reading of the present. It was that time paradox that led Jorge Luis Borges to hold him as the model of a writer that invents his own predecessors, and led Edward Said to regard him as the best analyst of the yet non-existent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The premonitory aura of his allegories, consisting of generic places and characters, would nevertheless end up being forcibly made to mirror all kinds of historical tragedies, the decline of the Habsburg empire, the disintegration of Europe, the rise of the Third Reich, the Shoah. This insistence on Kafka as an eternal forerunner, sentenced to plagiarise the future, kept him hostage to the odd phenomenon of literary anticipation, as a visionary that, from outside time and above history, prefigured the world, intuiting political systems even before they were formed. The most radical turn in this reception has occurred in the last decades under the post-colonial aegis, repositioning Kafka as someone of his own time, or rather, against his own time, as the combative and learned critic of the machines of dehumanisation underway despite the fanatic negationism around them – an entire differential treatment that spanned from forced labour policies to ethnic cleansing, as the fruit of imperial expansion. The eminent philosopher Marie-José Mondzain has just made a precious contribution to the ongoing historicisation and re-politicisation of Kafka, with a surprising essay on the author and the decolonisation of the imaginary, which foregrounds the ‘violence exercised by the imperialist apparatus and the new capitalist slavery’ (Mondzain 2022:19).
Research Interests:
It is no longer possible to keep up with the torrent of books on colonial photography. As the salutary result of continued efforts in the arts and humanities, the centrality of this topic today has motivated a veritable exodus of scholars... more
It is no longer possible to keep up with the torrent of books on colonial photography. As the salutary result of continued efforts in the arts and humanities, the centrality of this topic today has motivated a veritable exodus of scholars from other disciplines. After an acclaimed volume on poetry and capital, Counterfeit Capital (2008), Jennifer Bajorek reoriented her research from comparative literature to photography in west Africa. This decade-long engagement with artists, curators, and museums culminated in her new book titled Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa, a prime resource for navigating what can already feel like a crowded and a disorienting field of studies.
See more at:
http://www.sehepunkte.de/2022/03/34152.html
See more at:
http://www.sehepunkte.de/2022/03/34152.html
Research Interests:
One of the most intensely anticipated book launches has been ten years in the making, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s 600-page volume "Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism" (2019), and it duly delivers on its promises to radically rethink... more
One of the most intensely anticipated book launches has been ten years in
the making, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s 600-page volume "Potential History:
Unlearning Imperialism" (2019), and it duly delivers on its promises to radically rethink archives, history, museums, and photography. With encyclopaedic scope and scale, but the uncompromising urgency of a political manifesto, this landmark publication is the culmination of over a decade of thought-provoking reckonings with imperial violence by
the Brown University professor, curator, and filmmaker. It says something about this book that most reviewers consider it a handbook for the vexing issues of our time, yet all seem to have read a different copy. Covering an impressive range of contentious topics and jumping between specific situations and overarching generalities, it does not lend itself to quick summations. It keeps moving in unexpected directions and across multiple
registers, making a provocative case for unlearning our complacency with inherited political formations – concepts like archive, art, document, human rights and sovereignty, institutions like borders, nations, and citizens, disciplines like history, law, and theory, and categories like the new and the neutral, all of which drive what she describes as imperialism’s “progressive credo”. All of this, Azoulay claims, determined how the world is shared, experienced, and represented, pigeonholing bodies, lives and acts of violence as distinct and final, so that they can be consigned to the past in order to make way for the future. This is not yet another counter history, Azoulay tells us, but a counter to history.
Full review: http://analisesocial.ics.ul.pt/documentos/n235_a09.pdf
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha
Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism,
London and New York, Verso, 2019, 656 pp.
ISBN 9781788735711
the making, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s 600-page volume "Potential History:
Unlearning Imperialism" (2019), and it duly delivers on its promises to radically rethink archives, history, museums, and photography. With encyclopaedic scope and scale, but the uncompromising urgency of a political manifesto, this landmark publication is the culmination of over a decade of thought-provoking reckonings with imperial violence by
the Brown University professor, curator, and filmmaker. It says something about this book that most reviewers consider it a handbook for the vexing issues of our time, yet all seem to have read a different copy. Covering an impressive range of contentious topics and jumping between specific situations and overarching generalities, it does not lend itself to quick summations. It keeps moving in unexpected directions and across multiple
registers, making a provocative case for unlearning our complacency with inherited political formations – concepts like archive, art, document, human rights and sovereignty, institutions like borders, nations, and citizens, disciplines like history, law, and theory, and categories like the new and the neutral, all of which drive what she describes as imperialism’s “progressive credo”. All of this, Azoulay claims, determined how the world is shared, experienced, and represented, pigeonholing bodies, lives and acts of violence as distinct and final, so that they can be consigned to the past in order to make way for the future. This is not yet another counter history, Azoulay tells us, but a counter to history.
Full review: http://analisesocial.ics.ul.pt/documentos/n235_a09.pdf
Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha
Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism,
London and New York, Verso, 2019, 656 pp.
ISBN 9781788735711
Research Interests:
Joanna Bourke (ed.), Art and War: A Visual History of Modern Conflict, London, Reaktion Books, 2017; 392 pp.; £40.00 hbk; ISBN 9781780238463 There is a disconcerting recentness about the word ‘postwar’, a late nineteenth century invention... more
Joanna Bourke (ed.), Art and War: A Visual History of Modern Conflict,
London, Reaktion Books, 2017; 392 pp.; £40.00 hbk; ISBN
9781780238463
There is a disconcerting recentness about the word ‘postwar’, a late nineteenth century invention that speaks to modern trials and tribulations. It is no consolation that this term is now back with a vengeance. Some contend that it defines the present condition, since the arc of history is bending away from military strife. Others claim that there never was a postwar era, as it only served to cover up imperial conflicts across the world. Some predict that this millennium will be a new age of unending
civil and global wars. Others ring alarm bells that we are at the end of the postwar era and its liberal order. What remains undisputed in this age of foreboding is that concerns with warfare pervade contemporary culture. The visual arts became its prime example, judging by the flood of publications and large-scale shows on conflict-related issues in the last decade. It is then salutary that one of the leading historians of war and violence, Joanna Bourke, whose work defined how these concepts are thought of in relation to gender, emotions and the body, sought to redress such issues through the prism of visual culture. The result is a large, lavishly illustrated tome expertly edited by Bourke, with 16 chapters by as many scholars.
Volume: 55 issue: 2, page(s): 435-436
Article first published online: April 23, 2020; Issue published: April 1, 2020
London, Reaktion Books, 2017; 392 pp.; £40.00 hbk; ISBN
9781780238463
There is a disconcerting recentness about the word ‘postwar’, a late nineteenth century invention that speaks to modern trials and tribulations. It is no consolation that this term is now back with a vengeance. Some contend that it defines the present condition, since the arc of history is bending away from military strife. Others claim that there never was a postwar era, as it only served to cover up imperial conflicts across the world. Some predict that this millennium will be a new age of unending
civil and global wars. Others ring alarm bells that we are at the end of the postwar era and its liberal order. What remains undisputed in this age of foreboding is that concerns with warfare pervade contemporary culture. The visual arts became its prime example, judging by the flood of publications and large-scale shows on conflict-related issues in the last decade. It is then salutary that one of the leading historians of war and violence, Joanna Bourke, whose work defined how these concepts are thought of in relation to gender, emotions and the body, sought to redress such issues through the prism of visual culture. The result is a large, lavishly illustrated tome expertly edited by Bourke, with 16 chapters by as many scholars.
Volume: 55 issue: 2, page(s): 435-436
Article first published online: April 23, 2020; Issue published: April 1, 2020
Research Interests:
‘There are three rules for writing biography’, Somerset Maugham once quipped, ‘but fortunately no one knows what they are’. It is precisely this sort of indeterminacy and irreverence that makes Ashraf Jamal’s writing so compelling. This... more
‘There are three rules for writing biography’, Somerset Maugham once quipped, ‘but fortunately no one knows what they are’. It is precisely this sort of indeterminacy and irreverence that makes Ashraf Jamal’s writing so compelling. This collection of essays on twenty-four contemporary South African artists is unlike any publication on the topic.
Review of Ashraf Jamal, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South african Art, Milan: Skira, 2018. Available online at Burlington Contemporary: http://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/reviews/reviews/ashraf-jamals-essays-on-art-in-south-africa
Review of Ashraf Jamal, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South african Art, Milan: Skira, 2018. Available online at Burlington Contemporary: http://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/reviews/reviews/ashraf-jamals-essays-on-art-in-south-africa
Research Interests:
Reviews of: Delinda Collier, Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Alisa LaGamma (ed.), Kongo: Power and Majesty (New York: Metropolitan Museum... more
Reviews of:
Delinda Collier, Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016);
Alisa LaGamma (ed.), Kongo: Power and Majesty (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2015);
Adeline Pelletier (ed.), Beauté Congo, 1926–2015: Congo kitoko (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2015).
Delinda Collier, Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016);
Alisa LaGamma (ed.), Kongo: Power and Majesty (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2015);
Adeline Pelletier (ed.), Beauté Congo, 1926–2015: Congo kitoko (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2015).
Research Interests:
Revista de História da Arte, n. 10, Lisboa: Instituto de História da Arte, 2012, pp. 297-301.
Research Interests:
Counterhistory: Latent and Underground Currents in American Art July 13, 2019 Keynote: Professor Molly Nesbit (Vassar College) Speakers: Larne Abse Gogarty (Slade School of Fine Art), Eric C. H. de Bruyn (Freie Universität Berlin),... more
Counterhistory: Latent and Underground Currents in American Art
July 13, 2019
Keynote: Professor Molly Nesbit (Vassar College)
Speakers: Larne Abse Gogarty (Slade School of Fine Art), Eric C. H. de Bruyn (Freie Universität Berlin), Afonso Dias Ramos (Forum Transregionale Studien, FU Berlin), Leigh Raiford (University California, Berkeley), Stephanie Schwartz (University College London), Blake Stimson (University of Illinois at Chicago), Andrew Witt (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Abstract: This conference spotlights the ways in which artists, critics, and historians have mobilised critical methods and methodologies against the rising tide of authoritarianism and illiberal populism. Featuring a wide range of projects — from the militant image to secret and clandestine works and networks — the one-day conference, Counterhistory: Latent and Underground Currents in American Art, aims to articulate new forms in the writing and research in art history. The goal of the event is to rethink the notion of the underground as an evocative terrain for thought and struggle, in particular, the peculiar ways through which images and objects are historically obscured and silenced but emerge, unexpectedly, out of states of latency. The conference seeks to make sense of these forms of delay, resurrection and survival.
The proposition to think counterhistorically presupposes a renewed engagement with method. The principle question this conference seeks to address is the following: how to reactivate repressed aesthetic projects and social forms as an act of political reorientation? As a way to rethink the standard narratives on modern American art, we encourage papers that closely consider the forking paths and broken links in the life world of objects and images. The project is premised on developing new strategies to respond to the countermovements demanded by the object of study as a means to identify and explore the elisions of official history.
Organized by Andrew Witt (Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow, Terra Foundation for American Art, HU Berlin) and Afonso Dias Ramos (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Fellow, Forum Transregionale Studien, FU Berlin).
Please direct any questions to: andrew.witt(at)hu-berlin.de or a.ramos.11(at)ucl.ac.uk
The event is wheelchair accessible.
Please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/counterhistory-latent-and-underground-currents-in-american-art-tickets-62999006725
IKB - Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt Universität Berlin / Terra Foundation for American Art
July 13, 2019
Keynote: Professor Molly Nesbit (Vassar College)
Speakers: Larne Abse Gogarty (Slade School of Fine Art), Eric C. H. de Bruyn (Freie Universität Berlin), Afonso Dias Ramos (Forum Transregionale Studien, FU Berlin), Leigh Raiford (University California, Berkeley), Stephanie Schwartz (University College London), Blake Stimson (University of Illinois at Chicago), Andrew Witt (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Abstract: This conference spotlights the ways in which artists, critics, and historians have mobilised critical methods and methodologies against the rising tide of authoritarianism and illiberal populism. Featuring a wide range of projects — from the militant image to secret and clandestine works and networks — the one-day conference, Counterhistory: Latent and Underground Currents in American Art, aims to articulate new forms in the writing and research in art history. The goal of the event is to rethink the notion of the underground as an evocative terrain for thought and struggle, in particular, the peculiar ways through which images and objects are historically obscured and silenced but emerge, unexpectedly, out of states of latency. The conference seeks to make sense of these forms of delay, resurrection and survival.
The proposition to think counterhistorically presupposes a renewed engagement with method. The principle question this conference seeks to address is the following: how to reactivate repressed aesthetic projects and social forms as an act of political reorientation? As a way to rethink the standard narratives on modern American art, we encourage papers that closely consider the forking paths and broken links in the life world of objects and images. The project is premised on developing new strategies to respond to the countermovements demanded by the object of study as a means to identify and explore the elisions of official history.
Organized by Andrew Witt (Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow, Terra Foundation for American Art, HU Berlin) and Afonso Dias Ramos (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Fellow, Forum Transregionale Studien, FU Berlin).
Please direct any questions to: andrew.witt(at)hu-berlin.de or a.ramos.11(at)ucl.ac.uk
The event is wheelchair accessible.
Please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/counterhistory-latent-and-underground-currents-in-american-art-tickets-62999006725
IKB - Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt Universität Berlin / Terra Foundation for American Art
Research Interests:
Symposium, 13 Jun 2019 - 15 Jun 2019 Forum Transregionale Studien and ICI - Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry Organized by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos With contributions by Khaled Barakeh, Rabiaâ Benlahbib,... more
Symposium, 13 Jun 2019 - 15 Jun 2019
Forum Transregionale Studien and ICI - Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry
Organized by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos
With contributions by Khaled Barakeh, Rabiaâ Benlahbib, Alice von Bieberstein, Zuzanna Dziuban, Adam Harvey, Paul Lowe, Stephan Milich, Lamia Moghnieh, Tom Snow
Keynotes by Allen Feldman (NYU Steinhardt) and Andreas Maercker (WIKO fellow)
Artist Talk with Omer Fast, Kasia Fudakowski, Abdessamad el Montassir, and Damir Arsenijevic
Abstract:
Is there anything beyond trauma, and what does it look like? One of the most ubiquitous and fruitful concepts in contemporary cultural and academic discourse, trauma has been under fire as a Western-centric narrative and representational form that universalizes and decontextualizes violence, often perpetuating or conflating the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and spectators. Have critical discourses on and artistic and activist thematizations of trauma run out of steam? Have they generated new forms of inquiry? Which alternative models have emerged in the process? The symposium proposes a transregional reassessment of the concept of trauma across a range of academic disciplines and cultural contexts. The future of this paradigm will be discussed primarily through the prism of representation, the arts, and visual culture in relation to forms of political, historical, and structural violence. The symposium explores the relation of trauma and aesthetics in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which it is being reshaped by increasing transnational displacements of people and digital flows of images and stories. At the same time, post-humanism and new materialism have challenged common conceptions of subjectivity and non-human agency, profoundly changing the understanding of traumatic ruptures affecting nature, landscapes, and animals. By implying that extreme experiences may pass down genetically across generations, the contentious field of epigenetics insists that the transmission of trauma has a bodily dimension. Last but not least, current anxieties about technology and the climate crisis seem to have generated a form of ‘pre-trauma’, channeled through narratives of global catastrophe and post-apocalypse. If there is anything beyond ‘trauma’, as these developments suggest, how should it be looked at? What new images, concepts, practices, and ways of seeing should be mobilized toward this task? Taking on the future of trauma studies as a pressing intellectual question of our time, the symposium will reflect on new forms of witnessing, representing, and possibly coping with extreme violence to emerge in the last decade, the variety of cross-cultural aesthetic responses they elicit, and their implications for rethinking the field at large.
Websites:
https://www.khi.fi.it/en/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/2019/06/beyond-trauma.php
https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/beyond-trauma/
Forum Transregionale Studien and ICI - Berlin Institute of Cultural Inquiry
Organized by Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Afonso Dias Ramos
With contributions by Khaled Barakeh, Rabiaâ Benlahbib, Alice von Bieberstein, Zuzanna Dziuban, Adam Harvey, Paul Lowe, Stephan Milich, Lamia Moghnieh, Tom Snow
Keynotes by Allen Feldman (NYU Steinhardt) and Andreas Maercker (WIKO fellow)
Artist Talk with Omer Fast, Kasia Fudakowski, Abdessamad el Montassir, and Damir Arsenijevic
Abstract:
Is there anything beyond trauma, and what does it look like? One of the most ubiquitous and fruitful concepts in contemporary cultural and academic discourse, trauma has been under fire as a Western-centric narrative and representational form that universalizes and decontextualizes violence, often perpetuating or conflating the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and spectators. Have critical discourses on and artistic and activist thematizations of trauma run out of steam? Have they generated new forms of inquiry? Which alternative models have emerged in the process? The symposium proposes a transregional reassessment of the concept of trauma across a range of academic disciplines and cultural contexts. The future of this paradigm will be discussed primarily through the prism of representation, the arts, and visual culture in relation to forms of political, historical, and structural violence. The symposium explores the relation of trauma and aesthetics in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which it is being reshaped by increasing transnational displacements of people and digital flows of images and stories. At the same time, post-humanism and new materialism have challenged common conceptions of subjectivity and non-human agency, profoundly changing the understanding of traumatic ruptures affecting nature, landscapes, and animals. By implying that extreme experiences may pass down genetically across generations, the contentious field of epigenetics insists that the transmission of trauma has a bodily dimension. Last but not least, current anxieties about technology and the climate crisis seem to have generated a form of ‘pre-trauma’, channeled through narratives of global catastrophe and post-apocalypse. If there is anything beyond ‘trauma’, as these developments suggest, how should it be looked at? What new images, concepts, practices, and ways of seeing should be mobilized toward this task? Taking on the future of trauma studies as a pressing intellectual question of our time, the symposium will reflect on new forms of witnessing, representing, and possibly coping with extreme violence to emerge in the last decade, the variety of cross-cultural aesthetic responses they elicit, and their implications for rethinking the field at large.
Websites:
https://www.khi.fi.it/en/aktuelles/veranstaltungen/2019/06/beyond-trauma.php
https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/beyond-trauma/
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Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar, 27 June 2024, Lisbon
Research Interests:
II CONGRESSO DE HISTÓRIA PÚBLICA EM PORTUGAL - Usos do Passado nos 50 Anos da Revolução dos Cravos, 7 June 2024, Auditório do Museu do Aljube - Resistência e Liberdade
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Anf. VIII da Universidade dos Açores, Ponta Delgada. 20 February 2024.
"Anticolonial History, Postcolonial Legacies and the Futures of the 20th Century: A Joint International Workshop by IHC/IN2PAST and Goldsmiths, University of London", 31 January 2024, NOVA FCSH
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Um pálido vazio aerograma: Fantasmas coloniais portugueses na literatura e nas artes, 31 January 2024, NOVA FCSH
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"Hervé Guibert e Roland Barthes: escrita, fotografia, cinema e cultura queer", 2 October 2023, NOVA FCSH.
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"Arts and Humanities in Digital Transition", NOVA FCSH / Centro Cultural de Belém, 7 July 2023. Abstract: With the recent upsurge of interest in restitution, reparation and repatriation around the world, there has been a renewed... more
"Arts and Humanities in Digital Transition", NOVA FCSH / Centro Cultural de Belém, 7 July 2023.
Abstract:
With the recent upsurge of interest in restitution, reparation and repatriation around the world, there has been a renewed critical engagement with media archaeologies in the digital age, exploring the particular affordances that they bring, and the problems that they pose, to such debates. In the last years, a slew of radical projects devoted to “digital restitution” – a term originally used to describe making historic photographs and audio recordings available to source communities – has made this issue infinitely more complex and nuanced, increasingly involving artists, theorists and activists in the experimental use of mobile scanners, 3D printing, VR, data mining, NFTs and several other automated processes, to challenge ideas of public access to cultural heritage and the epistemological foundations of the arts and humanities, fueling an unprecedented techno-political debate on the digital futures. Thus, this paper considers some of the most radical and contested digital restitution projects over the last few years – from the high-quality scans of the Nefertiti bust and subsequent release of data into the public domain, to the contested ultra-precise robot-made replicas of the Parthenon Marbles, or the non-fungible tokens for looted African artworks as the Benin Bronzes – so as to discuss the constitutive role of digital technology in both culture, society and politics. If contemporary technologies, as Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler have claimed, facilitate “restitution as ‘living present’ of what is dead”, this talk attempts to, on the one hand, contextualize the recent digital restitution projects, and, on the other hand, spotlight and discuss some of the aesthetic and theoretical limitations of such models.
Abstract:
With the recent upsurge of interest in restitution, reparation and repatriation around the world, there has been a renewed critical engagement with media archaeologies in the digital age, exploring the particular affordances that they bring, and the problems that they pose, to such debates. In the last years, a slew of radical projects devoted to “digital restitution” – a term originally used to describe making historic photographs and audio recordings available to source communities – has made this issue infinitely more complex and nuanced, increasingly involving artists, theorists and activists in the experimental use of mobile scanners, 3D printing, VR, data mining, NFTs and several other automated processes, to challenge ideas of public access to cultural heritage and the epistemological foundations of the arts and humanities, fueling an unprecedented techno-political debate on the digital futures. Thus, this paper considers some of the most radical and contested digital restitution projects over the last few years – from the high-quality scans of the Nefertiti bust and subsequent release of data into the public domain, to the contested ultra-precise robot-made replicas of the Parthenon Marbles, or the non-fungible tokens for looted African artworks as the Benin Bronzes – so as to discuss the constitutive role of digital technology in both culture, society and politics. If contemporary technologies, as Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler have claimed, facilitate “restitution as ‘living present’ of what is dead”, this talk attempts to, on the one hand, contextualize the recent digital restitution projects, and, on the other hand, spotlight and discuss some of the aesthetic and theoretical limitations of such models.
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"Arquivos fotográficos: estudo, digitalização e divulgação", Arquivo Fotográfico de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal, 17 May 2023.
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"Spring Seminar 2023 · Montage", Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal, 12 May 2023. Abstract: It has recently become increasingly clear that André Malraux’s influential vision of the “imaginary museum” (1947),... more
"Spring Seminar 2023 · Montage", Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto, Portugal, 12 May 2023.
Abstract:
It has recently become increasingly clear that André Malraux’s influential vision of the “imaginary museum” (1947), predicated upon a succession of images arranged on the basis of montage and collage, was more heavily indebted to the rhetoric of film and photography than had previously been thought. This transformative model of what a truly transnational and multicultural museum should aspire to be in the postwar liberal world order defined the institutional context of art and visual culture in the last half a century. This paper attempts to address the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of montage mobilized in the context of a museum without walls – drawing on important variations on this theme, from Sigmund Freud’s “mystic writing-pad” (1924) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizome” (1980), to Jean-Luc Godard’s “museum of the real” (1994) –, but it likewise confronts it with the specific valences, and shortcomings of the critical discourse on photography around this historical period – specifically the anti-humanist critiques of the medium levelled by Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. Thus, another idea of montage that followed on from Malraux’s “imaginary museum” will also be taken into consideration in relation to The Family of Man (1955-62), the most visited exhibition of photography to ever tour the world, assembling hundreds of images by photographers from many nations, as a declaration of global solidarity following the Second World War, created by Edward Steichen.
What does montage look like in the particular context of an historical era that has been deemed “postwar” even as colonial powers waged protracted and far-flung wars to retain imperial control of most of the world? How might we reckon with those ideas of montage that enabled the emancipatory promise of another world, and yet failed to account for the violence organizing the world from which they emerged?
Abstract:
It has recently become increasingly clear that André Malraux’s influential vision of the “imaginary museum” (1947), predicated upon a succession of images arranged on the basis of montage and collage, was more heavily indebted to the rhetoric of film and photography than had previously been thought. This transformative model of what a truly transnational and multicultural museum should aspire to be in the postwar liberal world order defined the institutional context of art and visual culture in the last half a century. This paper attempts to address the theoretical underpinnings of the idea of montage mobilized in the context of a museum without walls – drawing on important variations on this theme, from Sigmund Freud’s “mystic writing-pad” (1924) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizome” (1980), to Jean-Luc Godard’s “museum of the real” (1994) –, but it likewise confronts it with the specific valences, and shortcomings of the critical discourse on photography around this historical period – specifically the anti-humanist critiques of the medium levelled by Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. Thus, another idea of montage that followed on from Malraux’s “imaginary museum” will also be taken into consideration in relation to The Family of Man (1955-62), the most visited exhibition of photography to ever tour the world, assembling hundreds of images by photographers from many nations, as a declaration of global solidarity following the Second World War, created by Edward Steichen.
What does montage look like in the particular context of an historical era that has been deemed “postwar” even as colonial powers waged protracted and far-flung wars to retain imperial control of most of the world? How might we reckon with those ideas of montage that enabled the emancipatory promise of another world, and yet failed to account for the violence organizing the world from which they emerged?
Research Interests:
"“Até que um dia não haverá mais amanhã.” Configurações da guerra e da resistência em filosofia, na literatura e noutras artes", FCSH NOVA, Portugal, 5 May 2023. Abstract: To Kill Literature: Photography of Fiction and War in... more
"“Até que um dia não haverá mais amanhã.” Configurações da guerra e da resistência em filosofia, na literatura e noutras artes", FCSH NOVA, Portugal, 5 May 2023.
Abstract:
To Kill Literature: Photography of Fiction and War in Angola
Several critical theorists have long pointed towards the vexing relationship between texts and images as a foundational aspect of history, existing in a dialectical conflict. But in an age that has come to be primarily defined by visual media, what is one to make of Walt Whitman’s old lament that “the real war will never get in the books”?
What happens when seeing supersedes reading in the public imagination? Over the last decade, a discernible trend within historiography and contemporary art has lent credence to the contemporary truism that, as Paul Virilio claimed, “it is impossible to imagine war without images”. And yet, in some large-scale conflicts such as the recent liberation and civil wars in Angola (1961-2002), the archival legacy and official memory of those events has instead been largely linked to the hegemony of written culture as well as to a perceived dearth of images. Taking this peculiar context into account, this paper discusses the ways in which, over the last decade, both fiction writers and visual artists have been assigning a newly privileged role to spectatorship over readership whenever they address those specific conflicts. In particular, this paper discusses a series of experimental lens-based artistic projects around those wars in Angola, in which photography increasingly steps into or takes over the domain of literary fiction, troubling the conventional cultural models and narrative forms associated with each medium, in the attempt to renegotiate the contract between the viewer and history.
Abstract:
To Kill Literature: Photography of Fiction and War in Angola
Several critical theorists have long pointed towards the vexing relationship between texts and images as a foundational aspect of history, existing in a dialectical conflict. But in an age that has come to be primarily defined by visual media, what is one to make of Walt Whitman’s old lament that “the real war will never get in the books”?
What happens when seeing supersedes reading in the public imagination? Over the last decade, a discernible trend within historiography and contemporary art has lent credence to the contemporary truism that, as Paul Virilio claimed, “it is impossible to imagine war without images”. And yet, in some large-scale conflicts such as the recent liberation and civil wars in Angola (1961-2002), the archival legacy and official memory of those events has instead been largely linked to the hegemony of written culture as well as to a perceived dearth of images. Taking this peculiar context into account, this paper discusses the ways in which, over the last decade, both fiction writers and visual artists have been assigning a newly privileged role to spectatorship over readership whenever they address those specific conflicts. In particular, this paper discusses a series of experimental lens-based artistic projects around those wars in Angola, in which photography increasingly steps into or takes over the domain of literary fiction, troubling the conventional cultural models and narrative forms associated with each medium, in the attempt to renegotiate the contract between the viewer and history.
Research Interests:
"Artes do Colonialismo. A Fotografia, o Cinema e a Arte Contemporânea na (Re)Construção Crítica da História e da Memória", Centro de Estudos de História do Atlântico - Alberto Vieira , Funchal, Portugal, 22 November 2022.
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Conferência no âmbito da exposição “42 Desenhos de António Carneiro para o “Inferno” de Dante”, Casa dos Livros, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, CITCEM, Porto, Portugal, 21 October 2022.
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"Counter-Image International Conference 2022", FCSH NOVA, Lisbon, Portugal, 13 June 2022.
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Movart Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal, 11 November 2022
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“Photography and History - International Conference”, Colégio dos Jesuitas, Universidade da Madeira, Madeira Island, Portugal, Via Zoom, 17 December 2021.
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"Dante, a Filosofia e as Artes", Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal, 10 December 2021.
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Apresentação no lançamento do livro “Visões do Império”, Padrão dos Descobrimentos, Lisboa, 25 September 2021.
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Jornada de Trabalho “Augusta Conchiglia nos Trilhos da Frente Leste - Imagens da Luta de Libertação em Angola”, Colégio Almada Negreiros, Auditório CAN 217, Campus de Campolide, 7 September 2021.
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Conferência de abertura do Seminário Internacional "Arte e Cultura na História Pública" Departamento de História da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Mediação: Alexandre A. Marcussi (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais) 4 Dezembro de... more
Conferência de abertura do Seminário Internacional "Arte e Cultura na História Pública"
Departamento de História da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Mediação: Alexandre A. Marcussi (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
4 Dezembro de 2020
Departamento de História da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Mediação: Alexandre A. Marcussi (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
4 Dezembro de 2020
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Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 3 July 2019.
CARMAH Research Meeting with Damani Partridge and Duane Jethro.
CARMAH Research Meeting with Damani Partridge and Duane Jethro.
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Forschungskolloquium zur Kunst Afrikas, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, 16 April 2019.
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Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, 15 April 2019 Abstract: This talk attempts to make historical sense of arguably the two most controversial incidents of our time around the stake of visual images and public monuments in issues of... more
Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, 15 April 2019
Abstract: This talk attempts to make historical sense of arguably the two most controversial incidents of our time around the stake of visual images and public monuments in issues of race and representation: the #RhodesMustFall movement and the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town; and the contested appropriation of a photograph of the lynched black boy Emmett Till by a white painter, Dana Schutz, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Aiming to throw these events into productive dialogue, the talk reconsiders these controversies from a comparative and transnational angle, in the light of current campaigns to decolonize visual culture. Specifically, it addresses contemporary debates about the politics of representing colonial history by looking at the unresolved tension and vexed articulation between the monuments that whitewash the past outside the museum, and the pictures that explicitly foreground its disturbing violence inside the museum.
Abstract: This talk attempts to make historical sense of arguably the two most controversial incidents of our time around the stake of visual images and public monuments in issues of race and representation: the #RhodesMustFall movement and the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town; and the contested appropriation of a photograph of the lynched black boy Emmett Till by a white painter, Dana Schutz, exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Aiming to throw these events into productive dialogue, the talk reconsiders these controversies from a comparative and transnational angle, in the light of current campaigns to decolonize visual culture. Specifically, it addresses contemporary debates about the politics of representing colonial history by looking at the unresolved tension and vexed articulation between the monuments that whitewash the past outside the museum, and the pictures that explicitly foreground its disturbing violence inside the museum.
Research Interests:
MACA Contemporaries Lecture, Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, 5 April 2019 Abstract: The 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibited a recent painting by Dana Schutz of an historical photograph showing the body of lynched African-American... more
MACA Contemporaries Lecture, Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, 5 April 2019
Abstract:
The 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibited a recent painting by Dana Schutz of an historical photograph showing the body of lynched African-American teenager Emmett Till. The response to this work by a white woman has bitterly divided the art world, leading to demonstrations on-site, calls to remove and destroy the painting, attempts to boycott the artist, and a barrage of protest art emerging in retaliation, but also shows of support, including essays, editorial defences and public interventions. The controversy quickly reached online and mainstream news networks, becoming a touchstone in ongoing debates concerning cultural appropriation, political correctness, identity politics, and free speech. Roughly one year later it has become virtually impossible to keep track of the controversy’s media and legal footprint. But what was it specifically about this display that initially aroused such cultural backlash? And why has the conversation since largely rested on a recurrent yet limited set of discursive tropes? This lecture reconsiders the controversy in light of current attempts to decolonize visual culture, aiming to reframe the uniquely fraught aspects of this image in its longer historical stakes.
Abstract:
The 2017 Whitney Biennial exhibited a recent painting by Dana Schutz of an historical photograph showing the body of lynched African-American teenager Emmett Till. The response to this work by a white woman has bitterly divided the art world, leading to demonstrations on-site, calls to remove and destroy the painting, attempts to boycott the artist, and a barrage of protest art emerging in retaliation, but also shows of support, including essays, editorial defences and public interventions. The controversy quickly reached online and mainstream news networks, becoming a touchstone in ongoing debates concerning cultural appropriation, political correctness, identity politics, and free speech. Roughly one year later it has become virtually impossible to keep track of the controversy’s media and legal footprint. But what was it specifically about this display that initially aroused such cultural backlash? And why has the conversation since largely rested on a recurrent yet limited set of discursive tropes? This lecture reconsiders the controversy in light of current attempts to decolonize visual culture, aiming to reframe the uniquely fraught aspects of this image in its longer historical stakes.
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Presentation at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 22 March 2019
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MAAT: Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Turbine Hall, Lisbon, 9 March 2019
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Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, 7 February 2019
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ICNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa / Fotográfico, Lisbon, 20 December 2018. --- Esta sessão pretende explorar alguns dos modos como a arte contemporânea tem abordado casos de violência explícita no período da... more
ICNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa / Fotográfico, Lisbon, 20 December 2018.
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Esta sessão pretende explorar alguns dos modos como a arte contemporânea tem abordado casos de violência explícita no período da guerra colonial. Em particular, procura destacar-se o lugar fundamental e negligenciado da fotografia nestes processos históricos, tanto no modo instrumental como se articulou diretamente com a brutalidade do conflito, como no leque de estratégias experimentais a que tem dado lugar no trabalho de artistas, cineastas e escritores, afim de rever e reimaginar o passado contestado. Que significa descolonizar a memória visual de tais eventos? E porque nos falha tão clamorosamente a teoria fotográfica neste propósito?
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O ciclo "Conversas Foto-fílmicas” é uma iniciativa do ICNOVA - Cluster em Estudos Visuais e Arqueologia dos Média, do GI de Cultura, Comunicação e Artes em parceria com o Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa | Fotográfico.
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Esta sessão pretende explorar alguns dos modos como a arte contemporânea tem abordado casos de violência explícita no período da guerra colonial. Em particular, procura destacar-se o lugar fundamental e negligenciado da fotografia nestes processos históricos, tanto no modo instrumental como se articulou diretamente com a brutalidade do conflito, como no leque de estratégias experimentais a que tem dado lugar no trabalho de artistas, cineastas e escritores, afim de rever e reimaginar o passado contestado. Que significa descolonizar a memória visual de tais eventos? E porque nos falha tão clamorosamente a teoria fotográfica neste propósito?
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O ciclo "Conversas Foto-fílmicas” é uma iniciativa do ICNOVA - Cluster em Estudos Visuais e Arqueologia dos Média, do GI de Cultura, Comunicação e Artes em parceria com o Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa | Fotográfico.
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Forschungskolloquium zur Kunst Afrikas, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, 3 December 2018.
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Galeria Av. da Índia, Lisbon, 15 September 2018
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‘Imagens em Conflito: Política, Memória, Império’, Fotografia: Arquivo, Teoria, História, Institute of Social Sciences - University of Lisbon (ICS-UL), Lisbon, Portugal, 20 September 2017.
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Decolonising History: Visualisations of Conflict in a ‘Post-War’ Europe, UCL, 18 March 2017.
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New Directions in Lusophone African Studies, Saint Peter’s College, Oxford University, November 26, 2016.
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Visual Gateways at Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, 22 October 2016.
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SOAS, London, May 2016.
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Global Urbanisms, Regional Specificities, Institute of Advanced Studies - UCL Urban Laboratory, UCL, London, UK, 17 May 2016.
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King’s College, London, January 2016.
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Wits University / Institut Français d’Afrique du Sud, Johannesburg, November 2015.
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Instituto de Ciências Sociais - Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, September 2013.
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'António Carneiro – Colecção de Pintores Portugueses', vol. 7, Raquel Henriques da Silva (ed.), Lisboa: Quidnovi / Instituto de História da Arte.
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Curadoria científica: Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo e Joana Pontes "Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese colonialism. The idealization and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources and... more
Curadoria científica: Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo e Joana Pontes
"Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese colonialism. The idealization and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources and populations, would have been different in its absence. Their uses in the past and their legacy in the present were, and still are, vast, heterogeneous and long-lasting. Visions of Empire offers us a glimpse into the contexts of production and the uses of photography, connecting them to some of the main events and processes that shaped the history of the modern Portuguese empire."
"A fotografia foi um elemento fundamental da história do moderno colonialismo português. Sem ela, a idealização e o conhecimento sobre os territórios coloniais, seus recursos e populações, teriam sido diferentes. As imagens fotográficas foram encenadas e comercializadas, com diferentes propósitos. Os seus usos no passado e os seus legados no presente foram e são vastos, heterogéneos e duradouros. Visões do Império dá-nos um vislumbre dos contextos de produção e de uso da fotografia, relacionando-os com alguns dos eventos e processos mais relevantes da história do império colonial português."
COORDENAÇÃO
Margarida Kol de Carvalho
Maria Cecília Cameira
CURADORES
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Joana Pontes
TEXTOS
Afonso Dias Ramos
Aniceto Afonso
Carmen Rosa
Catarina Mateus
Cláudia Castelo
Joana Pontes
José Pedro Monteiro
Mia Couto
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Myriam Taylor
Nuno Domingos
Telma Tvon
INSTALAÇÃO ARTÍSTICA Romaric Tisserand
VÍDEO-COMENTÁRIO Myriam Taylor
"Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese colonialism. The idealization and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources and populations, would have been different in its absence. Their uses in the past and their legacy in the present were, and still are, vast, heterogeneous and long-lasting. Visions of Empire offers us a glimpse into the contexts of production and the uses of photography, connecting them to some of the main events and processes that shaped the history of the modern Portuguese empire."
"A fotografia foi um elemento fundamental da história do moderno colonialismo português. Sem ela, a idealização e o conhecimento sobre os territórios coloniais, seus recursos e populações, teriam sido diferentes. As imagens fotográficas foram encenadas e comercializadas, com diferentes propósitos. Os seus usos no passado e os seus legados no presente foram e são vastos, heterogéneos e duradouros. Visões do Império dá-nos um vislumbre dos contextos de produção e de uso da fotografia, relacionando-os com alguns dos eventos e processos mais relevantes da história do império colonial português."
COORDENAÇÃO
Margarida Kol de Carvalho
Maria Cecília Cameira
CURADORES
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Joana Pontes
TEXTOS
Afonso Dias Ramos
Aniceto Afonso
Carmen Rosa
Catarina Mateus
Cláudia Castelo
Joana Pontes
José Pedro Monteiro
Mia Couto
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Myriam Taylor
Nuno Domingos
Telma Tvon
INSTALAÇÃO ARTÍSTICA Romaric Tisserand
VÍDEO-COMENTÁRIO Myriam Taylor
Research Interests: History, African Studies, Humanities, Photography, Human Rights, and 14 moreRace and Racism, African History, Portuguese Colonialism and Decolonizaton, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, History of the Portuguese Empire, Angola, Empire, Portugal (History), Portugal, Moçambique, History of Mozambique, História de Portugal, and Colonialism and Imperialism
AAVV COORD. MIGUEL BANDEIRA JERÓNIMO e JOANA PONTES Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese colonialism. The idealisation and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources and populations,... more
AAVV COORD. MIGUEL BANDEIRA JERÓNIMO e JOANA PONTES
Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese
colonialism. The idealisation and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources
and populations, would have been different in its absence. Photographic
images were staged and commercialised with diverse purposes. They changed
hands, both officially and secretly, and they were forgotten or destroyed. They
documented individual and collective dreams and memories. They fuelled
the imagination around colonial domination, helping to make it come true.
They contributed to defining a particular vision of the “Other” as essentially
different — regarding ways of life, customs and mentality — and to the establishment
and maintenance of laws and practices founded on political, social,
economic and cultural discrimination and drawn along racial lines. But they
also served to denounce the iniquities and violence of colonialism, encouraging
aspirations for a more humane and egalitarian future that spanned various
political hues and orientations. Their uses in the past and their legacy in
the present were, and still are, vast, heterogeneous and long‑lasting.
Visions of Empire offers us a glimpse into the contexts of production and the uses
of photography, connecting them to some of the main events and processes
that shaped the history of the modern Portuguese empire.
O «TERCEIRO IMPÉRIO COLONIAL» PORTUGUÊS ATRAVÉS DA FOTOGRAFIA Uma recolha polifacetada de fotografias que, acompanhadas de breves textos de contextualização, colocam em perspectiva a história, os eventos e os actores mais relevantes do império colonial português. Recuperam‑se passados coloniais diversos e oferecem‑se pistas para novas reflexões, mais apuradas, sobre as suas reverberações contemporâneas. «A produção e a disseminação da fotografia, operadas com propósitos diversos e com impactos desiguais, foram elementos constitutivos das formas de imaginação (geo)política, económica e sociocultural dos territórios coloniais, dos seus recursos e das suas populações. Serviram o expansionismo colonial de finais de Oitocentos, documentaram e exibiram o ‘outro’, as suas putativas ‘tradições’, os seus ‘usos e costumes’, o seu corpo e ‘alma’ (muitas vezes de modo indigno, despudorado e voyeurista, em especial no que dizia respeito ao género feminino), produzindo estereótipos e preconceitos resistentes ao tempo e ao conhecimento acumulado, que perduram até hoje.» — Da Introdução Com textos de: Aniceto Afonso, Cláudia Castelo, Mia Couto, Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Catarina Mateus, José Pedro Monteiro, Joana Pontes, Afonso Dias Ramos, Carmen Rosa, Myriam Taylor, Romaric Tisserand e Telma Tvon
EDIÇÃO BILINGUE PT | EN
Photography was a crucial element in the history of modern Portuguese
colonialism. The idealisation and knowledge of the colonial territories, their resources
and populations, would have been different in its absence. Photographic
images were staged and commercialised with diverse purposes. They changed
hands, both officially and secretly, and they were forgotten or destroyed. They
documented individual and collective dreams and memories. They fuelled
the imagination around colonial domination, helping to make it come true.
They contributed to defining a particular vision of the “Other” as essentially
different — regarding ways of life, customs and mentality — and to the establishment
and maintenance of laws and practices founded on political, social,
economic and cultural discrimination and drawn along racial lines. But they
also served to denounce the iniquities and violence of colonialism, encouraging
aspirations for a more humane and egalitarian future that spanned various
political hues and orientations. Their uses in the past and their legacy in
the present were, and still are, vast, heterogeneous and long‑lasting.
Visions of Empire offers us a glimpse into the contexts of production and the uses
of photography, connecting them to some of the main events and processes
that shaped the history of the modern Portuguese empire.
O «TERCEIRO IMPÉRIO COLONIAL» PORTUGUÊS ATRAVÉS DA FOTOGRAFIA Uma recolha polifacetada de fotografias que, acompanhadas de breves textos de contextualização, colocam em perspectiva a história, os eventos e os actores mais relevantes do império colonial português. Recuperam‑se passados coloniais diversos e oferecem‑se pistas para novas reflexões, mais apuradas, sobre as suas reverberações contemporâneas. «A produção e a disseminação da fotografia, operadas com propósitos diversos e com impactos desiguais, foram elementos constitutivos das formas de imaginação (geo)política, económica e sociocultural dos territórios coloniais, dos seus recursos e das suas populações. Serviram o expansionismo colonial de finais de Oitocentos, documentaram e exibiram o ‘outro’, as suas putativas ‘tradições’, os seus ‘usos e costumes’, o seu corpo e ‘alma’ (muitas vezes de modo indigno, despudorado e voyeurista, em especial no que dizia respeito ao género feminino), produzindo estereótipos e preconceitos resistentes ao tempo e ao conhecimento acumulado, que perduram até hoje.» — Da Introdução Com textos de: Aniceto Afonso, Cláudia Castelo, Mia Couto, Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Catarina Mateus, José Pedro Monteiro, Joana Pontes, Afonso Dias Ramos, Carmen Rosa, Myriam Taylor, Romaric Tisserand e Telma Tvon
EDIÇÃO BILINGUE PT | EN