The Discoveries Museum and the Contested Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Portugal

This paper, titled “The Discoveries Museum and the Contested Colonial Legacies in Contemporary Portugal”, is part of a curatorial investigation into the colonial contemporary affects and aesthetics in post-revolution Portugal. This project has explored the problematic untangling between the narratives around the revolution and the liberation movements in the African continent, more specifically, in the former Portuguese colonies. This project revisits the presence of the liberation movements in the making of the revolution in the official narratives in Portugal and in public memory. The project does so by looking at and juxtaposing material culture, discourses, and aesthetic phenomena (i.e., public iconography, exhibitions’ displays, artworks, texts). As part of this curatorial research project, with the umbrella title Unfinished Revolutions, I have been preoccupied with the crisis of the colonial memory regimes in contemporary Portugal, and the colonial continuities that, arguably, remain untouched or from being actualised after the Portuguese Revolution (1974) and subsequent decolonisation process of the territories of Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea Bissau, and Cape Verde in 1974-1975.