DESTRUCTION DEED/ AUTO DE DESTRUIÇÃO
(Working Title)
Decades of neglectful housing policies, forced austerity measures and a giant wave of gentrification have left Lisbon’s most vulnerable families in extreme precariousness. With no other options, families resort to ocupying decaying municipal housing or self built communities risking state sanctioned violent illegal evictions, demolitions and jail time.
It is impossible to ignore that this situation disproportionally affects racialized people and questions of identity politics in relation to Portugal´s colonial past are raised.
The colonial constitution perpetuates the acceptance of the status quo, meaning that certain people leave in the worst places. The same marginalised bodies remain at the margins. Finding methods of story telling and development to avoid othering these communities is key, In other words:
How to tell the story of the marginalised without further marginalizing them?
"We are all many kinds of image: Images in the form of data, abstractions and as the objects of voyerism, desire, stereotyping, profiling, copying, sexism, racism, admiration, concern and respect.
The biggest chalenge facing us in our culture of hyper visibility, is perhaps that not everyone is a photographer, but rather that the machines that categorize, discipline and patrol the individual body operate through discriminatory abstractions that are simultaneously hidden by a semblance of neutrality and thus invisibility"
Louise Wolters, New Visibilities 1976
Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color ´
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw , 1991
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039
Mamma´s Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book
Hortense J. Spillers, 1997
https://www.jstor.org/stable/464747
Difference and Simiilarity: The burden of Identity
Jorge Vala
Can there Be Life Without the Other
Antonio Pinto Ribeiro/ Arjun Arpadurai/ Emilio Vilar/
Dipesh Chakrabarty/ Eunice de Souza/ Filip de Boek/
Jorge Sampaio/ Jorge Vala/ Karen Armstrong/
Katerina Brezinova/ Manuela Ribeiro Sanches/ Miag Tiampo/
Mustapha Tlili/ Ruy Duarte de Carvalho/ Sherifa Zuhur
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2009