Inês Beleza Barreiros (Universidade Nova de Lisboa/Brown University) is an art historian, cultural critic, and curator. Her research delves into how art an images become knowledge producing objects and she has published on the visual cultural, public memory, and afterlives of colonialism in the Portuguese-speaking worlds. She is presently prepering the monograph Thinking Virtually: The Afterlives of Portuguese Imperialism. Wednesday, December 4th, 5:30pm Marketplace
Colonialism inaugurated an epistemological tradition molded by image-making and image-reading that remains operational to this day. Thus, images aren’t just documents of colonialism; they are colonialism (still) in action. For the sake of historical truth and documental authority, scholars dealing with the visual colonial archive often end up reifying the past in the present. Through the process of reproduction and circulation of this visuality, they eternalize the colonial complex at work—and at large—in contemporary Portugal. A worldview to be inhabited, reproducible and updatable, this colonial complex has served to impose and administer authority. The question then is how to examine colonialism without eternalizing its spell in the present? How to challenge this enduring colonial complex?
Taking as premise that to know colonialism is, first and foremost, to know what has resisted and has been resisting to it, this talk (1) unpacks some of the ways in which the colonial complex manifests itself in contemporary Portugal; (2) elaborates upon a few devices and assemblages of countervisuality, i.e., new forms of exploring the Portuguese colonial archive pursued by artists, scholars, and activists, including Landra, Left Hand Rotation, Kilunaji Kia Henda, Grada Kilomba, Cristina Roldão et al., Alexandra Lucas Coelho, Dulce Fernandes, and Sara Serpa; and (3) expands on how to use the visual archives of power to elaborate on a critique of domination, distinguishing image-archive from image-memory. Through this threefold (visual and conceptual) itinerary—on representation, gesture, and reparation—Beleza Barreiros reclaims the ontology of critique as reparative (rather than at the service of the colonial complex).