Living history
Site-Specific Installation — White Pavilion, Lisbon City Museum, 2006
September 2006
Site-specific installation comprising 66 photographs accompanied by text, plants, sound and an eight-page A4 newspaper. The exhibition also included a performance on its opening day.
The installation unfolded through a series of interconnected narratives, weaving together fictional elements inspired by real-life testimonies with historical events. The project drew on interviews with ordinary people who had witnessed significant moments in the histories of the countries where they were born—Mozambique, Goa (India), East Timor and Angola—all places connected through a shared Portuguese colonial past.
Drawing on these personal accounts, I constructed a series of stories set across different decades, each with its own characters and circumstances, yet all converging within a larger, interconnected narrative.
At the heart of the work was an exploration of the relationship between macro-history—the major political and social events that shape nations—and the intimate, often overlooked details of individual lives. Through the interweaving of personal memories, everyday experiences and historical events, the installation sought to reveal how History enters into the lives of ordinary people, shaping their identities, relationships and destinies.
The resulting work created a space in which personal and collective memory intersected, revealing the profound and sometimes unexpected ways in which individual lives are entangled with the larger movements of History.