MARCIO
CARVALHO
A New Urban Plan for Lisbon
The project aimed to decolonize and demythologize several statues and monuments spreadout through Lisbon city, at the same time that dealt with today’s Portuguese lack of awareness about Portuguese colonial past. The work reflected and worked upon statues and their public spaces as archives, reflecting and counter-archiving their crystallized social classifications related to an idyllic colonial past of privilege. It proposed a new urban project for the city of Lisbon in which Carvalho projected different counter-monuments to be implemented in different locations around Lisbon. Humor and historical precision was used by Carvalho to open a conversation about how artists and art projects can contest and disrupt the hegemonic histories that are still being glorified in Lisbon’s public spaces.
Demythologize That History and put it to Rest / Program / Press
Carvalho mapped Lisbon cityscape and its colonial forms of urbanism and used performance art, drawing, photography and video as decolonial tools, to raise a need, and claim, a ownership of Lisbon public spaces, to tune them into a 21st century societies that praise democratic values of freedom and equality. Six photos, one video, an installation map and a African wooden statue brought from his parents house was the elements he presented.
A New Urban Project for Lisbon was Carvalho’s contribution to the exhibition Muscle Memory, curated by Ece Pazarbasi at Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien.
