Overlapping history and space

If there is a time when we wish to have all the past revealed before us, either as a will to re-invent narratives or as the justification of actions taken in the future, that time is now. And yet, the knowledge we demand of things past has been mainly supported on historigraphic reports which seek to recover events, to represent historical scenes, and to explain a chronological linearity taking us all the way from the past until the moment when the story is described, and into conclusions about chained causalities of events, into demonstrations of the timely continuity of events. In a traditional sense, to know the past implies a sort of time-travel in which the historian tries to detach himself from the setting he inhabits and to be immersed in a total – and ideally unbiased – understanding of the time he is investigating. Perhaps this is not anymore the most reliable perspective, but it still has a strong power over the predominant construction of seductive images of the past.F.C.H.S. e E.S.E. da Universidade do Algarve, British Council, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Luso-American Foundation for Development, Embassy of the USA, Institute for Educational Innovation, Faro City Hall, Centre for Anglo-Portuguese Studies at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Centre for Comparative Studies Program in Literary Theory at Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa, APEAA e Algarve Tourism Board