THE MONUMENT IN THE EXPANDED FIELD
How to care for an archive that does not yet exist

In Lisbon, can monuments become useful in the process of decolonising the city and providing encounters with alternative histories?
The workshop The Monument in the Expanded Field – How to care for an archive that does not yet exist is a collaborative research that intends to use art to develop methodologies and modes of public participation in order to rethink the role that heritage and commemoration can and/or should play in a time of post-colonial violence. For this purpose, the workshop chooses Lisbon and the colonial exaltation heritage scattered around the city as a case study.

Márcio Carvalho is an artist whose projects revolve around collective technologies and practices of remembering, and on how they influence individual and group memory of past events. Being of African descent, from a family made of Angolans and Portuguese, Carvalho shares the ancestors of two distinct world geographies with different epistemological and belief systems. He interconnects those legacies with the notions of autobiographical and collective remembrance. His work examines public life and archives, autobiographical memory and collective memory, with a focus on acts of remembering and their biological, cultural and social influences. He uses art as a means of research and a tool to examine representative memories that are embedded in various urban and private settings, especially the ones that still commemorate colonialism and imperialism at the cost of indigenous people´s exploitation and oppression.