Ultramar

ULTRAMAR Exhibition | Gustavo Lopes Pereira

Following the revolution of April (1974) and the independence of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, thousands of people traveled from the African continent to Portugal.

About 500,000 national citizens made the journey in the first year after the revolution, between 1974 and 1975. They became known as “returnees”: former colonizers who returned to the metropolis. Others made the journey less abruptly, over the next decade, in search of good living conditions that the countries where they lived, in their view, had failed to guarantee.

Regardless of when they traveled and the implicit idea of return in the term “returnee”, the truth is that some of these people did not know Portugal. Some were born in Africa or arrived there as children and built their lives there. When they migrated, they left everything behind: the place where they grew up, studied, worked, formed a family and friendships. Others had even participated in the colonial war, adding the trauma of the war to the forced or unwanted displacement. Many may have thought that one day they would return to Africa, that they were experiencing a transitional period, but this would not happen in the vast majority of cases. Africa seemed to be left behind in the history of these families.

But memory doesn’t work like that.

In conversations around the table, in objects, in photographs and texts, in food, in relationships and in behavior, Africa makes itself felt, sometimes in an unexpected and violent way. Some families seem to have never arrived from overseas.

This project uses photography to document the presence of Africa in families that migrated to Portugal after the 25th of April 1974.The creation of a photographic archive intends to record evidence of this presence in various dimensions of family life. The premise is that what people choose to keep, the objects they have around them, their personal collections, the decorative choices, the culinary options, are a door to their personal history. In this case, this is also collective history.