National Museum of Natural History and Science | December 15, 2023

On December 15, 2023, several members of the TRANSMAT team and the Santos Rocha Municipal Museum took part in a guided tour of the exhibition “The Photographic Impulse: (Dis)arranging the Colonial Archive” at the National Museum of Natural History and Science, led by professor and curator Teresa Flores (NOVA University – FCSH).

The exhibition, which is the result of the research project, “The Photographic Impulse: Measuring the Colonies and the Colonial Bodies. The Photographic and Filmic Archive of the Portuguese Geographic and Anthropologic Missions” (PTDC/COM-OUT/29608/2017), reflects on the relationship between the expansion of photography and the development of colonial science, unmasking the permanence of colonial traces in Portuguese archives and collections, such as the photography collections of the Institute for Scientific and Tropical Research (IICT). Curated by several artists, a transdisciplinary approach to the archive was constructed, where the artists’ interventionist language helps to dismantle the symbols of colonialism.