Dictatorship

We’re still here, afraid we won’t be anymore

Walter Salles knows this perfectly well, being the third richest filmmaker in the world, ‘second’ only to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with inherited wealth of very controversial origin, bringing together Unibanco, the result of an expansion benefiting from the Brazilian dictatorship's policy of banking centralization, with metallurgy and mining that dominate 80% of the global metal market.

Afroscreen

13.02.2025 | by Gabriella Florenzano

De/Re-Memorization of Portuguese Colonialism and Dictatorship: Re-Reading the Colonial and the Salazar Era and Its Ramifications Today

I believe that through art we can find a strong path of remembrance. Artists are able to communicate across temporalities and spaces, which traditional historiographical treatment could hardly accomplish. Artists who work with individual and personal history build empathy through works compared to academic research. Colonial monuments and street names left un-vandalized are not neutral spaces. As static as stone and tarmac may seem, memory is a process, not something carved and eternally preserved. New practices of memory preservation, from manifold perspectives, allow for addressing misconceptions and novel understandings of where certain contemporary situations emerge. In the absence of these practices, our imaginary becomes an accomplice to denials of violent that can always be repeated in unexpected ways.