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PHOTO IMPULSE: (DIS)PLACING THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE

"The Photographic Impulse" refers to the spread of photography worldwide and its appropriation as a medium considered trustworthy and realistic. In this exhibition, the expansion of photography is associated with the colonial scientific expansion, which envisages photography as the appropriate technology to visualise, measure, classify and archive its objects of study. Moreover, it does that in a potentially infinite way in a growing extractivist context.

Drawing on the obsession with measurement and classification, this exhibition shows how colonial territories and bodies were visually appropriated during scientific missions of geodesy, geography, and anthropology in the period 1890-1975 and how the narratives of colonial science had spread. One also wants to show how colonised people resisted in various ways. In the colonial archive, we found considerable evidence of both oppression and forms of resistance.

This exhibition is the result of several meetings of a group of researchers, artists and activists who, in a collaborative curatorial process, contributed with their ideas, doubts and questions to discuss issues such as: what is the meaning of these collections of photographs and objects, in the past, in the present and for the different communities? What marks have these images left rooted in society? What to show and how to show it?

We brought together other stories - some fictional, others not - created or unravelled by the acute sense of this multidisciplinary team that was involved in different phases of the project: from the conservation and restoration of photographic albums to the digitalisation of photographs and films, through theoretical or artistic research, to the museography construction itself.

This is an exhibition designed to question and be questioned.

That is also why the museography project of this exhibition takes on the motto of disarray, of work in progress, and of the unfinished.

The exhibition is one of the results of the research project “The photographic impulse: measuring colonies and colonised bodies. The photographic and film archive of the Portuguese missions of geography and anthropology”, with public funding from FCT nº PTDC/COM-OUT/29608/2017, hosted by ICNOVA of NOVA-FCSH.

Geodesic Mission to East Africa, 1907-1910.

Photograph by Carlos Viegas Gago Coutinho [attrib.]

Reproduction of original glass negative on gelatin and silver, 9x12cm.

Reframing by Teresa Mendes Flores