Repairing Colonial Violence Against Women: Revisiting Mulheres Sempre Presentes

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.5528

Keywords:

women's portraits, physical anthropology, bertillonage, resignification, reparation

Abstract

This essay resumes the project Mulheres Sempre Presentes (Women Always Present) produced for the exhibition "O Impulso Fotográfico. (Des)arrumar o Arquivo Colonial" (The Photographic Impulse. (Dis)placing the Colonial Archive). The proposal aims to resignify analogue photographs of Portuguese colonial physical anthropology by removing them from their original context and inserting them into a new one. The goal is to stop the reproduction of negative stereotypes about the Black women in these photographs. These stereotypes are prevalent in the archive of colonial anthropology surveys, from which the portraits were selected. The choice of Black women's portraits is intended to honour the enduring struggles undertaken by Black populations throughout history and to underscore their role as agents of historical processes in patriarchal societies, both European and traditional African, where they are often marginalised. The essay also combines the different voices and reflections of its authors, drawing inspiration from Spivak's (1988/2021) essay Pode a Subalterna Tomar a Palavra? (Can the Subaltern Speak?), which addresses the conditions of women when speaking and being heard and interrogates their position of subalternity.

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Author Biographies

Teresa Mendes Flores, Instituto de Comunicação da NOVA, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Teresa Mendes Flores (Mozambique, 1969), a White woman, is a researcher at NOVA Institute of Communication, where she is vice-coordinator of the Culture, Mediation, and the Arts research group and is a member of the board of directors. Her research focuses on visual culture, the history of photography, and optical media. She also teaches semiotics, media archaeology, and image theory. She also serves as a co-editor of the Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, a journal published by the NOVA Institute of Communication. Additionally, she was the lead researcher of the project Photo Impulse.

Soraya Vasconcelos, Centro de Investigação em Comunicação Aplicada, Cultura e Novas Tecnologias, Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon, Portugal

Soraya Vasconcelos (1977) is a visual artist, teacher, and researcher. She has a degree in Painting (2002, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon), has also studied Photography and Philosophy, and has a PhD in the visual arts area (2014, University of Algarve). She teaches in the Photography programme at Universidade Lusófona (https://doi.org/10.54499/UIDB/05260/2020). She was also a contracted researcher at the NOVA Institute of Communication for the Photo Impulse project, where she developed artistic research proposals. Her practice is multidisciplinary, with a focus on photography and editing.

Catarina Mateus, Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

Catarina Mateus (Portugal, 1975) has been a photography curator since 1997. She previously served as a conservator and curator of the photography collections at both the Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical and the National Museum of Natural History and Science. She holds a master's degree in Preventive Conservation from the University of Northumbria and a degree in conservation and restoration from the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar. Additionally, she completed a postgraduate qualification in photography from the Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication. Catarina Mateus is also a member of the Photo Impulse project.

Carmen Loureiro Rosa, Arquivo de Documentação Fotográfica, Direção Geral do Património Cultural, Sacavém, Portugal

Carmen Maria Loureiro Rosa (Angola, living in Portugal since 1979) holds a degree in History, with a specialisation in documentation. She works as a senior civil service technician at the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage/Photographic Documentation Archive in the area of photographic archives/photography conservation. Driven by a deep concern for human rights and gender equality, she has collaborated, at the invitation of Joana Pontes, on the project Visões do Império. Her involvement encompassed participation in the section titled "O [Outro] Arquivado" (The Archived [Other]), which featured both an exhibition and a catalogue. In 2022, she contributed to the participatory curation of the exhibition "Impulso Fotográfico. (Des)arrumar o Arquivo Colonial" at the section Mulheres Sempre Presentes. She organised parallel programmes within the exhibition on the same topic. Regarding music, she arranged for the gospel group Coro Alegria and the jazz ensemble GeraJazz, from the Orquestra Geração project, to perform at the exhibition.

References

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Published

2024-06-04

How to Cite

Flores, T. M., Vasconcelos, S., Mateus, C., & Rosa, C. L. (2024). Repairing Colonial Violence Against Women: Revisiting Mulheres Sempre Presentes. Vista, (13), e024008. https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.5528

Issue

No. 13 (2024): January - June 2024

Section

Visual Projects

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Teresa Mendes Flores, Soraya Vasconcelos, Catarina Mateus, Carmen Loureiro Rosa

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors own the copyright, providing the journal with the right of first publication. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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