Papers by Ana Catarina Pinho
MemWar II: Memory and Oblivion of twentieth century wars and trauma, 2023
When most European countries began a process of decolonization in the 20th century, Portugal star... more When most European countries began a process of decolonization in the 20th century, Portugal started a war against the liberation movements in the African colonies. In an anachronistic movement regarding other colonial powers, Portugal extended a violent conflict affecting those who experienced it and following generations. The war led to the fall of the Portuguese colonial empire, marked by the Revolution in 1974, but the politics of silence promoted by the regime prevailed. Yet, such silence does not lead to the erasure of traumatic events, it holds the potential to become a ‘language’ of memory. Such is the case with forms of artistic expression which started to unveil, question and contest the war. In this framework, this essay articulates the notions of communicative memory (Assmann) and communicative silence (Winter) through the work of Portuguese artists of different generations, hence different experiences and memories, to demonstrate that silence can be a socially constructed space that reveals more than it hides.
"Forever//Now: New research into the mythologies, identities and territories of photography" Edited by Gemma Marmalade and Philip Harris ISBN: 1-5275-6339-1, 2020
"Specters of Tyranny: An Interdisciplinary Lens on Memory, Collective Consciousness, and Authoritarian Dictatorships" — Edited by Marc T. Voss & Heather Moore, 2020
Photographies, 2020
The relationship with the past is complex and almost always conflictive. Events obtain their mea... more The relationship with the past is complex and almost always conflictive. Events obtain their meaning only a posteriori, relying on a process of signification in which gaps are opened and silences are installed, all at the same time. It is through the archive, a repository of traces and fragments, that the contours and scope of the understanding of the past are traced. As such, the image of the past is constructed through the fabrication of narratives that influence not only perception of historical events but also the sense of identity and memory, both individual and collective. Theoretical contributions of authors such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst van Alphen, Georges Didi-Huberman and Gerhard Richter will be explored in this essay, regarding the reanimation of images from the past as critical acts that question knowledge production. This framework will be specifically addressed to explore the memory of the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–1974) through artistic practice, in this case, through the appropriation of photo albums from that historical period, from different sources such as the personal, the anonymous or from national archives. The work of Portuguese contemporary artists Manuel Botelho (1950), Daniel Barroca (1976), Susana de Sousa Dias (1962) and Filipa César (1975) will be examined, in order to explore the limits of representation of historical memory and experience, the dynamics between the individual and the collective, reality and fiction, the ambivalence of visual documents regarding the construction of meaning, and the use of remembrance as a productive and critical process.
Conference Presentations by Ana Catarina Pinho
This paper presents ongoing research centred on archival imagery from the colonial war, exploring... more This paper presents ongoing research centred on archival imagery from the colonial war, exploring the complex politics of visuality surrounding the conflict. By delving into the regime’s manipulation of visual narratives, it scrutinizes strategies employed to depict and conceal images of death and violence, while analysing the mechanisms through which narrative control was enforced via censorship and manipulation.
This paper delves into how the FSA's representational practices were politically regulated to per... more This paper delves into how the FSA's representational practices were politically regulated to perpetuate a specific narrative and notion of 'truth' throughout history, examining how artistic and photographic practices were appropriated to serve such purpose.
NECS Conference 2022: Epistemic Media: Atlas, Archive, Network, 2022
Focusing on two films that filmmakers Susana de Sousa Dias and Filipa César developed through the... more Focusing on two films that filmmakers Susana de Sousa Dias and Filipa César developed through the appropriation of archival images from the period of the Portuguese dictatorship, this paper examines the violence perpetrated by the regime through a poetic work over the invisible traces left on both institutional and vernacular archives. Exploring archival visibility and invisibility, this paper addresses the films as artistic devices that subvert the regime's discourse by reframing photographic documents, often neglected in the historical archive. It further explores how photography contributes to the perception of historical events, questioning the factual and objective dimension associated with the archive, and underlining the ambivalence of the photographic image and its limits of representation, thus demonstrating how the archive functions as a power-knowledge device (Foucault) through which an exercise of power aimed at limiting the 'other' is imposed. Traumatic events in the national memory are explored through dialectical forms of montage that cross heterogeneous times and act as critical forms of deterritorializing (Deleuze and Guattari) and reframing the perception of past events and its relationship to present consciousness.
International Conference MemWar: Memory and forgetting of the war and trauma in the 20th century ... more International Conference MemWar: Memory and forgetting of the war and trauma in the 20th century
Università degli Studi di Genova Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture Moderne
University of Genoa, Italy
International Conference Manufacturing the Past
02-04 NOV 2021
European University at Saint-Pet... more International Conference Manufacturing the Past
02-04 NOV 2021
European University at Saint-Petersburg
Supported by The French-Russian Research Center for Social Sciences in Moscow
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Conference:
BRINGING DOWN THE ARCHIVE FEVER
organized by the Institute of Art History and is pa... more Conference:
BRINGING DOWN THE ARCHIVE FEVER
organized by the Institute of Art History and is part of the project The Cycle: European Training in Photographic Legacy Management (2020 – 2022), financed by the European Union (Creative Europe Programme).
21-22 OUT 2021
Zagreb, Croatia
Conference:
IMAGENS E NARRATIVAS (PÓS)COLONIAIS
Encontro de Comunicação Intercultural & Cultura ... more Conference:
IMAGENS E NARRATIVAS (PÓS)COLONIAIS
Encontro de Comunicação Intercultural & Cultura Visual
Portugal
Memory, Collective Consciousness, and Authoritarian Dictatorships International Conference — The Regimes Museum / The Wende Museum — Chapman University, CA, USA, 2020
Traumatic events in the national memory, both individual and collective, are explored through the... more Traumatic events in the national memory, both individual and collective, are explored through the appropriation of archival material, via dialectical forms of montage, intersecting heterogeneous times and reconfiguring the perception of past events. Approaching the concept of spectrality as a form of responsibility and justice (Derrida), this paper will focus on the work of Portuguese contemporary artists, examining their practices in a logic of afterness (Richter), as a way of exploring the ghosts and survivals (Didi-Huberman) of the regime, and working with memory and archives as the inheritance of a national legacy. Their work will be addressed as a critical act that questions and contests documents and memories, hence, history and narratives, making the past present (Huyssen) through multiple interpretations, thus opening new possibilities of knowledge production.
IBÉRICOS - Encuentros hispanoportugueses en torno a la imagen | Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, 2019., 2019
Why Remember? Memory and Forgetting in Times of War and Its Aftermath International Conference — 'Border Poetics and Politics: 1989 and the Fall of the Wall', Sarajevo, BiH, 2019., 2019
This paper examines visual works that explore and contest the propaganda strategies developed by ... more This paper examines visual works that explore and contest the propaganda strategies developed by Estado Novo (1926-1974) in Portugal, thus creating counter narratives that unveil the flaws and imperfections of the fictions instigated by the regime.
Forever//Now International Conference — University of Derby, United Kingdom, 2019
This article aims to articulate Benjamin’s concepts of now-time and play-space, in order to exami... more This article aims to articulate Benjamin’s concepts of now-time and play-space, in order to examine contemporary artistic practices in relation to the historical and collective memories inherited from the Portuguese empire, and the traces of the past which keeps emerging in the national reality as inconclusive histories.
Books by Ana Catarina Pinho
Catalogue of the exhibition "El Imperio de la Ficción" [The Empire of Fiction], curated by Ana Ca... more Catalogue of the exhibition "El Imperio de la Ficción" [The Empire of Fiction], curated by Ana Catarina Pinho and presented at the Extremaduran and Latin American Museum of Contemporary Art, in Badajoz, Spain, from Sept 10, 2021 to Jan 24, 2022. The exhibition included the work of artists Manuel Botelho, Daniel Barroca, Paulo Mendes, Susana de Sousa Dias, and Filipa César.
The exhibition "The Empire of Fiction" explores the fictional dimension inherent in the construction of the image of the Portuguese colonial empire and its historical-mythological essence, while at the same time rethinking the determining role played by the technical image in the perception of reality. The exhibition brings together the work of five Portuguese artists who reframe their national past through the appropriation of images produced during the New State (1933-1974), a Portuguese authoritarian and colonialist regime. These works reformulate the original narrative context of the images, coming both from institutional archives and from vernacular albums and collections of the time, through dialectical montages that cross heterogeneous times and produce critical proposals to rethink the heritage and traces of the dictatorial past.
The book “Reframing the Archive” emerges from a cycle of research seminars presented at the Portu... more The book “Reframing the Archive” emerges from a cycle of research seminars presented at the Portuguese Center of Photography (CPF), Portugal, between 2018 and 2019, attended by experts on photography, art history, philosophy and visual arts, including artists whose work explores the appropriation of archival images, approached as critical devices for rethinking historical narratives and the memory of past events. The book brings together the contribution of guest speakers who participated in the events and whose contributions address the complexity of the archive and the potential interactions between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of its structure, between official and excluded documents, acknowledged histories and forgotten stories, thus opening up new possibilities not only of perceiving the gaps in historical narratives but also of reconfiguring the processes of individual and collective memory. By contesting the principles of historicism and creating new aesthetic and conceptual articulations within photographic records, both scholars and artists defy previous structures of knowledge, providing new spaces of thinking and meaning.
Editor: Ana Catarina Pinho
Contributing authors: Susana Lourenço Marques; Pedro Lagoa; José Maçãs de Carvalho; Paula Ribeiro Lobo; Manuel Botelho; Daniel Barroca; Paulo Mendes; Ana Janeiro.
ARCHIVO YEARBOOK, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or used in any form... more All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or used in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without permission in writing from the editors.
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Papers by Ana Catarina Pinho
Conference Presentations by Ana Catarina Pinho
Università degli Studi di Genova Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture Moderne
University of Genoa, Italy
02-04 NOV 2021
European University at Saint-Petersburg
Supported by The French-Russian Research Center for Social Sciences in Moscow
Saint Petersburg, Russia
BRINGING DOWN THE ARCHIVE FEVER
organized by the Institute of Art History and is part of the project The Cycle: European Training in Photographic Legacy Management (2020 – 2022), financed by the European Union (Creative Europe Programme).
21-22 OUT 2021
Zagreb, Croatia
IMAGENS E NARRATIVAS (PÓS)COLONIAIS
Encontro de Comunicação Intercultural & Cultura Visual
Portugal
Books by Ana Catarina Pinho
The exhibition "The Empire of Fiction" explores the fictional dimension inherent in the construction of the image of the Portuguese colonial empire and its historical-mythological essence, while at the same time rethinking the determining role played by the technical image in the perception of reality. The exhibition brings together the work of five Portuguese artists who reframe their national past through the appropriation of images produced during the New State (1933-1974), a Portuguese authoritarian and colonialist regime. These works reformulate the original narrative context of the images, coming both from institutional archives and from vernacular albums and collections of the time, through dialectical montages that cross heterogeneous times and produce critical proposals to rethink the heritage and traces of the dictatorial past.
Editor: Ana Catarina Pinho
Contributing authors: Susana Lourenço Marques; Pedro Lagoa; José Maçãs de Carvalho; Paula Ribeiro Lobo; Manuel Botelho; Daniel Barroca; Paulo Mendes; Ana Janeiro.
Università degli Studi di Genova Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture Moderne
University of Genoa, Italy
02-04 NOV 2021
European University at Saint-Petersburg
Supported by The French-Russian Research Center for Social Sciences in Moscow
Saint Petersburg, Russia
BRINGING DOWN THE ARCHIVE FEVER
organized by the Institute of Art History and is part of the project The Cycle: European Training in Photographic Legacy Management (2020 – 2022), financed by the European Union (Creative Europe Programme).
21-22 OUT 2021
Zagreb, Croatia
IMAGENS E NARRATIVAS (PÓS)COLONIAIS
Encontro de Comunicação Intercultural & Cultura Visual
Portugal
The exhibition "The Empire of Fiction" explores the fictional dimension inherent in the construction of the image of the Portuguese colonial empire and its historical-mythological essence, while at the same time rethinking the determining role played by the technical image in the perception of reality. The exhibition brings together the work of five Portuguese artists who reframe their national past through the appropriation of images produced during the New State (1933-1974), a Portuguese authoritarian and colonialist regime. These works reformulate the original narrative context of the images, coming both from institutional archives and from vernacular albums and collections of the time, through dialectical montages that cross heterogeneous times and produce critical proposals to rethink the heritage and traces of the dictatorial past.
Editor: Ana Catarina Pinho
Contributing authors: Susana Lourenço Marques; Pedro Lagoa; José Maçãs de Carvalho; Paula Ribeiro Lobo; Manuel Botelho; Daniel Barroca; Paulo Mendes; Ana Janeiro.