Traces: a visual essay with photography by Lilla Szász and words by Elsa Peralta

This visual essay is the result of a long collaboration between an anthropologist who studies the memory of the end of the Portuguese empire and a visual artist who uses her artistic sensibility to give expression to places of memory for which there is an absence of words. In it we present images that convey small fragments of past experiences of violence, war and displacement related to Portuguese colonialism and decolonisation. These include objects found in forgotten personal archives or in Lisbon’s flea markets, together with a plethora of material spoils of the former life of colonial Portugal, such as letters sent by soldiers to their war godmothers, photo albums from which the images have been torn away by time and where only captions remain, and negatives of lost and unclaimed photographs. They are no more than traces of memory of an illegitimate history, with no place in written and spoken memory, but that nonetheless reveal the feelings, the affect and the life of the time that has passed.