A critical reflection on memory and images through a collection of rare photography books produced as part of liberation movements in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa between the 1960s and 1980s, reflecting on the importance of visual culture in anti-colonial struggles and the early years of independence, between activism and formal experimentation closely linked to armed struggles.
Edited by Catarina Boieiro and Raquel Schefer, the publication "Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements" brings together and revisits a set of photobooks produced between the 1960s and 1980s, in the context of anti-colonial Liberation struggles and the early years of independence in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde.
Started in 2018, this research collected various materials including photobooks, militant publications, magazines, posters, photographs, films and artworks, in the form of exhibitions before being translated into book form. Now a trilingual publication (Portuguese, French and English), it constitutes an unprecedented visual archive of the emancipatory uses of the image as an instrument for transforming the world. At the same time, it contextualizes the precise geo-political and cultural circumstances of their production, and reconstructs the material history, motifs and forms of the transnational Liberation aesthetics of the period, extensively illustrated with excerpts from various photobooks currently out of print.
With a foreword by Miguel de Barros, this volume brings together an introductory essay by the editors, unpublished texts by researchers Drew Thompson and Lúcia Ramos Monteiro, and a reprint of the speech "The Growth of a New Culture," given by FRELIMO in 1971. Newly commissioned interviews with photographers and filmmakers Augusta Conchiglia and Moira Forjaz allow us to complexify dominant historiographical approaches from a gendered perspective, among others. The Furtado Schefer design studio – in charge of the publication's graphic design – offers a visual essay addressing the complex genealogy of anti-colonial visual culture, in its different declinations and ramifications.
Published on the occasion of exhibitions at the National Institute of Art History, Paris; and Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional – Galerias Municipais (Lisbon), between 2021 and 2022. Project funded by República Portuguesa – Cultura and DGArtes - Direção-Geral das Artes, under the partnership support program "Arte pela Democracia." With the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – Delegation in France; Galerias Municipais de Lisboa | EGEAC; Institut pour la Photographie; and Camões – Centro Cultural Português in Paris.
Published following the eponymous exhibitions at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris, and at the Galeria Municipal do Torreão Nascente da Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon, in 2021-2022.
Catarina Boieiro has dedicated herself to independent research and production around the documentary image and the relationship between aesthetics and politics, through exhibitions, production of non-fiction films, coordination of editorial projects, film screenings and encounters.
Raquel Schefer is a researcher, filmmaker, programmer and Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Audiovisual at Sorbonne Nouvelle University.
