Archival and memorial practices are essential in contexts where addressing historical wrongs or demanding reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository of what needs to be gathered and recognized so that it can be left behind and usher in the future. The archive manifests, on the one hand, the authority of the law as well as its troubled conscience and, on the other, the resistance to it. While it is true that there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparation, the archive is an indispensable part of the response to the biopolitical violence of the capitalocene.
However, especially in cases where collective memory has been usurped or made invisible, in addition to being the mouthpiece of history, the archive is also a source of possibilities for the future. In these cases, the (re)construction of an archive becomes imperative as a way of strengthening a sense of belonging, self-esteem and hope.
Curatorship by Kitty Furtado
Ana Cristina Pereira (Kitty Furtado) is a cultural critic committed to blurring the boundaries between academia and the public sphere. She has curated exhibitions of (post)colonial cinema and promoted public discussion around Memory, Racism and Reparations, creating the Reparations Workshop (mala voadora, Porto, 2023). She is a researcher at CECS (University of Minho), where she is developing the individual project Black Gaze and is a guest lecturer at FBAUP (University of Porto). She was part of the curatorial team representing Portugal at the Venice Biennale 2024, where she curated the Biomes program. She is an active member of SOPCOM’s Visual Culture WG, of which she was the coordinator between 2019 and 2024 and, in this capacity, deputy director of VISTA: journal of Visual Culture. Among other texts and special issues, she published, with Rosa Cabecinhas, the book “Abrir os gomos do tempo: conversas sobre cinema em Moçambique” (2022).
Imagining the Archive
