IMAGINING THE ARCHIVE
DECEMBER 6 – 4 PM
Conversation between Kitty Furtado and Felisbela Ramalho
IMAGINING THE ARCHIVE is a research program curated by Kitty Furtado.
Hangar – Centre for Artistic Research
This moment is proposed as the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, by summoning the hidden archive of black women born in Angola before independence and who grew up in Portugal. A conversation between two long-time friends, which extends to the present audience — two children in Africa, in the death throes of the empire; two black women who grew up in post-imperial Portugal.
Archival and memorial practices are essential in contexts where addressing historical errors or demanding reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository of what needs to be gathered and acknowledged so that it can be left behind and inaugurate 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 made to it. If it is true that there can be no victims without recognition, nor 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, beyond the mouth 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 to strengthen the sense of belonging, self-esteem, and hope.
Ana Cristina Pereira (Kitty Furtado) is a cultural critic committed to blurring the boundaries between academia and the public sphere. She has curated (post)colonial film exhibitions and promoted public discussion around Memory, Racism, and Reparations, having created the Oficina de Reparações (Reparations Workshop) (mala voadora, Porto, 2023). She is a researcher at CECS (University of Minho), where she develops the individual project Black Gaze, and is a guest lecturer at FBAUP (University of Porto). She was part of the curatorial team for the Portuguese representation at the Venice Biennale 2024, within which she curated the Biomes program. She is an active member of the SOPCOM Visual Culture Working Group, which she coordinated between 2019 and 2024, and in that capacity is deputy director of VISTA: Revista de Cultura Visual. Among other texts and special issue editions, she co-published, with Rosa Cabecinhas, the book “Abrir os gomos do tempo: conversas sobre cinema em Moçambique” (2022)
Felisbela Ramalho is a primary and secondary school teacher. She has a degree in teaching Portuguese, Latin, and Greek from the University of Aveiro. She was born in Angola in 1968, the daughter of an Angolan mother and a Portuguese father. In 1975, she came to Portugal with her nuclear family during the process of Angolan independence. To date, she has not returned to her country of origin.