The Era of Involuntary Memory
A project that examines distinct memory representations of the colonial empires of Portugal and Germany and how they have been modulating their citizens' autobiographical and collective memories. Carvalho prints pictures of Portuguese historical tiles and 16th and 17th century animal hunt paintings on found pictures of Portuguese and German anonymous peoples. The result is a distortion of their identities- a metaphor on how official narratives shape one's economy of remembrance and identity.
Artist Biography
Márcio Carvalho is an artist whose projects are primarily focused on collective technologies and practices of remembering, and how they influence individual and group memories of past events. Carvalho's interest in memory and remembrance was triggered by the complexity of his family story- a multiracial family made of Angolans an
d Portugueses. Carvalho shares the ancestors of two distinct world geographies with distinct epistemological and belief systems, and it is based on them that he complicates the notions of autobiographical and collective remembrance. Love, shamanism, colonialism and exile stories of his family are some of the elements he departs from to understand what constitutes today's societies’ economy of remembrance.
-