Cosimo Chiarelli
Over the past decade, photography, and more generally the photographic archive, has become an object of
interest for several artists of the Portuguese theatre scene, integrating their performative practice in various
ways.
Artists such as Joana Craveiro (Um museu vivo de memórias pequenas e esquecidas, 2015), Jorge Andrade
(Moçambique, 2016), Ana Janeiro (The Archive is Present, 2018), Tânia Dinis (Imaginário familiar,
2014/2017), André Amálio (Hotel Europa, 2018) often conceive the dramaturgy of their productions starting
from archive images, be they personal, vernacular, or official.
At the intersection of documentary theater, family album, and exhibition/performance installation, these
productions resort to the presence on the scene of optical devices (sometimes pre-digital) and use the
photographic object in its materiality in order to re-enact or manipulate the intimate and familiar
remembrance or collective memory to reflect on specific moments of political or colonial history of the recent
Portuguese past.
In my communication I intend to present some of these cases, questioning the function of these images and
their performative status. How do these images act? What relationship do they establish with memory or post-
memory? What is the boundary between their evocative power and their fictional dimension?
