In 2014, Filipa César and I were invited by Nuno Faria to curate a conference at the Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães (CIAJG) for their cycle, „Beyond History.“ The conference was to be part of the Luta ca caba inda project and took place one year later, in December 2015, under the title „Luta ca caba inda: An archive in relation.“ The following text was probably written in December 2014 after a first joint visit to the institution. It was meant to be an email to Filipa, but apparently remained unfinished and was never sent―for reasons that are not totally clear to me anymore. I only shared this email with Filipa when I happened on it again during the preparation for the book, The struggle is not over yet: An archive in relation, which was to be published by CIAJG and Archive Books (Berlin) as a late outcome of the conference in 2017. We briefly considered to include the unsent email in that book, but then followed an advise from our co-editor Paolo Caffoni and decided against it. The critical movement of this text will only be worth an effort, if, as Paolo reminded us at the time, it is understood as concerning „a conflict which is inherent to knowledge production“ and therefore inevitably also questions the very practice which Filipa and I were struggling to establish for ourselves.

The text was then first published in Meteorizações – Filipa César Et. Al., a volume edited by Amarante Abramovici on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name at Fundação de Serralves, Porto, in 2026. Amarante came up with the title „Boulder“.

Dear Filipa.

I am writing this as a letter because I probably wont be able to structure my thoughts already at this early stage, and would rather enjoy the freedom of roaming around with some ideas, testing them while putting them down. And it will be in English, just in case it turns out to make sense and could serve as an input for others, even though it is coming from an „outsider“, but where is the safe distance from which I could speak as an outsider?

I have started to consult the books you gave me, the catalogs by CIA José de Guimarães. From the most recent conference publication I only read one essay so far (the one on Alheava by José Maia, because it was on a work I knew), and I am now working my way through the exhibition catalog published for the inauguration in 2012 (was it?). After a while I realize that I keep coming across things that I find disturbing, that irritate me, but in an interesting way, i.e. in a way that seems to already have a lot to do with the challenge we are facing. I would like to jot down some of these things as they occurred to me; some might be irrelevant, some might be based on misunderstandings, some might be worth keeping in mind for our own efforts. But I hope that by the end of this letter I will also have succeeded in putting down a few straightforwardly productive ideas towards our common project.

I found it irritating that in a publication (in both of them) positioned within a „post-colonial“ field and taking an explicitly critical approach to the colonial legacy materialized in the collection which the institution is based on and named after, none of the contributions seem to be by a non-European, or non-Western author. This might be a too obvious and literal objection, but to me it seems to be a relevant point particularly for the Portuguese context. While it is certainly true that the post-colonial condition is not exclusively experienced within the cultural territories of the former colonies only (but also in Portugal), it is also true that a particularity of Portuguese colonialism was the ideological statement of unity and homogeneity between Portugal and „her colonies“.

It should have been acknowledged by now that 500 years of domination have not created a unified cultural commonwealth but have produced differences, discrimination, stark contradictions and gross misunderstandings. If the entire labor of decolonization is done from within the Portuguese perspective, from the family archives, literally as first and foremost a „family affair“, it is running the risk of reproducing the colonial ideology of the Estado Novo – even if the intentions are going in opposite directions. True: there are a lot of family stories still to be uncovered and the contemporary generation of artists is in a particularly privileged position for this challenge, because most of them were born during the final years of the colonial project, many of them in the colonies, often to parents who were involved in the colonial or military administration. So, for a whole generation of artists working today the colonial (or liberation) wars constituted the faint or inaudible background of their childhood and for many of them their earliest memories are of Angola, Guinea-Bissau or Mozambique.

I think that the quite understandable urge to address this personal entanglement has resulted in recent years in a number of art works and films which are aesthetically rich and mature, but critically quite weak and neglectful. I think Maia’s film Alheava suffers from this imbalance, and Miguel Gomes‘ Tabu is an outstanding example: a beautiful film, totally (and consciously) reviving and reaffirming the colonial past. The psychoanalytical framework suggested in this film serves to guise the historic narrative ‒ the colonial relation, the RELATION (Glissant) ‒ as a family affair rich with unrequited love, incest and betrayal. On a more factual level we should note that in Tabu Africans are all made phantoms with no intelligible subjectivity neither in the past, nor the present. The epitomization of this mystification of „the Other“ is the old lady’s (black) nurse whose role is certainly to act as a reminder of unresolved conflicts and to bring these conflict „home“, but who is ultimately the personification of the old lady’s fears: an angel of revenge, a sorcerer, the carrier not so much of truth, but of the evil eye. Even if we are made to sympathize with the revengeful intentions we project into this character, it still means that her role is entirely fixed within the phantasmagoria of the former colonizer.

I think that these things are very important, because they show that even if the unresolved colonial past does appear, it often does so within the conceptual frame of a classical technique of Western self-criticism: psychoanalysis; and one might argue a similar case for that other common pattern, Marxist critique.

What bothers me, in short, is the impression that „the Other“ is always absent. The other is mourned, there is remorse and pity, but he/she is never addressed. Rather his/her withdrawal and inaccessibility are being grieved. No space/time is given for him/her to speak, and I think that this is what needs to urgently happen: the interruption of the phantasma that the other was so heavily harmed (and that in the process the self was harmed in equal measure) that he/she is either unwilling or unable to raise his/her voice. In many cases the lament is this: There is a common history but no common presence; no common space; no common language (anymore). There once was, but there is no more. This comes very close to the revisionist’s lament that the colonial times were a time of harmony. In reading the essay on Alheava I had a strong impression that despite the lamenting rhetoric the author remains totally confined in this post-colonial melancholia, made worse by references to a „national“ cause, especially suspicious when evoked in times of failure of the nation-state. (I have to read it again, but it seemed to me a typical example of a critical gesture which deliberately misses the point.)

In fact, I think (and gradually come to understand) that one of the most difficult and important efforts you have undertaken with your project is to try to find ways to let „the other“ always be heard and seen without taking recourse to the patronizing gesture of „making the other speak“. (You would probably reject the term „the other“ and yes, in the end, the project might just be to make the term avoidable.) This is very difficult and I think you (at times: we) have struggled with this difficulty, sometimes successfully and that is already a lot.

All this would not be so relevant if it didn’t have anything to do with our project. But of course it has everything to do with it. Not only on the level of content, but also because we are asked to position the project, the objects, and ourselves in a given context and the context seems to be burdened with these problems. My feeling is that it is not only burdened with it, but soaked in it. This is a challenge, potentially a very interesting one but also very dangerous.

Some problems I see (problems is not the right word, I was looking for a better one, maybe „boulder“? Things lying around that cannot simply be moved away or dissolved, things with a long history that have to be worked around or even integrated):

– It seems that within the overall concept of the museum the „contemporary“ is mainly cast with Portuguese artists, in juxtaposition to the non-European as ancient or historic. With this dichotomy I also sense trouble with the (generally quite attractive Warburgian) concept to deconstruct chronologies, lineages and genealogies, to cross-connect objects over long distances in space and time. If one part of the melange is always given as a „contemporary“ position, the „ahistorical“ is a quality brought into play by the objects in the collection, and this role play echoes the well-known tendency to ignore the historicity of African cultures.

– I think a similar ambivalence (probably connected) lies in the explicit attempt to re-enchant the objects, to revive their „magical power“. „The objects are summoned, gathered and arranged as constellations of energy, magnetic fields, stress fields set into motion by attraction or repulsion, that disturb, move or question us with an intensity which, the stronger it is the more unfathomable it becomes.“ (Nuno Faria, Introduction, p. 15, my italics) I think there is an incredible ambivalence expressed in this concept: a desire to re-empower the objects, to bring them back to life, next to the desire for an endless mystification, a desire to get utterly lost, lost in oblivion in a way, in a place where it is „impossible to distinguish between what is strange and familiar, between the collective and the individual, light and darkness, sight and blindness, the child and the adult.“ (p. 16)

The imagination of „us“ being „questioned“ plays out against the background of the eternal vagueness of an „unfathomable“ depth, which in this connection means that the questioning is not expected to yield answers.

I would like to discuss this with Nuno, as I think it touches the core of our project and I believe that such a discussion could be extremely powerful and empowering for all of us. In any case, if this sentence describes the general curatorial outline of the museum (as I think it does in the context of the text), it stands in stark juxtaposition to some basic elements in our work with the INCA material. If the INCA material is to be considered as a collection of „objects“ (and films are objects within this concept, as becomes clear in another text in the catalog), they were hitherto „summoned“ and „gathered“ with much more fact-oriented intentions ‒ maybe precisely to give contours and make speakable what had conveniently been treated as „unfathomable“ and „opaque“.

„The main question [that the exhibition Beyond History] raises is perhaps, among others, that of finding out the mysterious reason behind man’s practice of producing objects and keeping them in darkness, burying or placing them out of reach of the majority, and then unearthing them many centuries later, bringing them to light so as to exhibit them […]“ (p. 16) I find this sentence endlessly problematic, not only (but that is relevant, too), because one object in the exhibition thus described was also your facsimile reproduction of Aimé Césaire’s „Discourse on colonialism“: the facsimile reprint of a 1970’s underground publication of this essay in Portuguese, if I remember well ‒ i.e. this work is primarily contextualized here as the reproduction/reenactment/re-enchantment of a unique event in the history of Portugal, as well as (and Nuno stresses this point: a fact „that should not be ignored“, p.18) a unique event in your family history: „impossible to distinguish the collective and the individual“. We might have to make Césaire heard again, let’s see.

But there are other problems with/in this sentence quoted above:

‒ For example, that very different historical stages and agencies are all aligned as „man’s practice“. As if it was always the same „man“, the same „mysterious reason“ behind all these different and seemingly contradictory ways to treat the object: produce it, bury it, hide it, unearth it, excavate and exhibit it. But the contradictions are real, they are not stages of an evolution, they are not only stages of the relation between man and object but between man and man (and woman). If an object is buried in a funeral rite along with the body of a deceased, and then a few thousand years later unearthed and exhibited in an ethnological collection these are not mysteriously linked stages of the same human practice, but rather the second act violates the first act. The object was produced to be used and then buried and meant to remain hidden. Its exhibition is a violation, maybe a useful and legitimate one, but one to be reckoned with and not made mysterious.

‒ In the particular context of this collection the „mysterious“ relations suggested in the quote above also serve to deviate interest from the intentions of the collector, José de Guimarães. His collecting is contextualized in his anthropological practice serving his artistic practice. The object is not (as far as I can see) seen as a space for conflict. The intentions of whoever produced and owned and used it before are not seen to be curtailed, because now comes the collector with his intentions, and according to the lineage of „mysterious reasons“ his doing with the object is just the next step in „man’s practice“. After him comes the curator and we the audience etc. No question of legitimacy is raised between these steps. (Looking at the photographs of these incredibly beautiful, powerful and, yes, mysterious objects, but mysterious for whom? The less we know, the more we forget, the more mysterious they appear.)

‒ The text then goes on to describe the correlation of the museum display as a whole (the three collections, José de Guimarães‘ work, the „contemporary art“ and the regional folk art) as a „spiritual and symbolic itinerary that elaborates a geographic and temporal trajectory which has his hometown ‒ the city of Guimarães ‒ as its starting point, and which spans the civilisations of three continents with rich and complex cultures, in order to return to the place of origin, offering a reflection on diversity as a form of identity creation.“ (p. 17) I have a very strong feeling that this sentence describes precisely and accurately a colonial project; it reads like a description of the great era of the discoveries. The concept of the Origin, defined next as „a search for a root from which everything emerges and develops“ is certainly just that fantasy which Glissant identified as European, a connection to a territory on which can be accumulated the riches brought home from the discoveries, riches that were robbed and whose turning into capital was the product of slave labor, the labor of people who had been uprooted and for whom ‒ for better or worse ‒ the idea to identify with an Origin from which everything emerges and develops had become meaningless. The idea of an identity based in Origin is an instrument of power, then and now, and it is the counterpart to Glissant’s concept of Creolization; if an awareness and embracing of Creolization would be the effect of a more open and self-aware discourse on colonialism in Portugal, the prestige given to the Origin in this museum is surely a „boulder“.