The Embassy Filipa César, 2011

The Embassy deals with the ethnographic codes of representation used by the former Portuguese colonial power over the West African country GuineaBissau and delicate gestures of countermemory. It shows a photo album depicting the perspective of the Portuguese colonist, who photographed with documentary diligence landscapes, people, architecture and monuments in GuineaBissau in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, this photo displaygrabbed, flipped through and reframed by the hands of the Guinean archivist Armando Lonais the departure point for a disruption of the former order into a multilayered narration on the historical violence of these two countries.