The space was not chosen by chance, pointed out the two curators of the exhibition "Family Albums. Photographs of the African Diaspora in Greater Lisbon (1975-present)", Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inocência Mata, who during a visit for journalists stressed the importance of this initiative to "give a voice to the African community" in Portugal. "Our goal is to make visible the people of this segment of Portuguese society, always seen as foreign and immigrant, but whose great majority were born in Portugal or have lived here for more than 50 years, and are part of the Portuguese nation," researcher Inocência Mata stressed in statements to the Lusa agency. The temporary exhibition brings together "family albums" with images that Afro-descendant Portuguese and resident Africans have recorded of themselves and their communities since 1975, the date of the independence of African countries of Portuguese colonization. The curators considered that "it would be a way of making visible these faces that have contributed to creating Portugal since April 25, not neglecting the past either," said the professor of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon in the area of Literatures, Arts and Cultures, with a doctorate in Post-colonial Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. Two reasons were very strong for creating this exhibition, she said: "The 50th anniversary of April 25 is being commemorated and this is the last year of the International Decade for People of African Descent [2015-2024], instituted by the United Nations to promote the ideas of recognition, justice and development. However, few initiatives have been carried out in this area in Portugal, so it has had little visibility," lamented the researcher. For the exhibition, the curators challenged nine Afro-descendant and African artists with family and professional relations with Portugal to work on the idea of "Family Albums", from singers, plastic artists, writers and photographers, and also asked for the collaboration of anonymous people to contribute with their personal photographs. "At the heart of the exhibition are the photographs of unknown people, the result of the idea that we all have personal stories that intersect with national and international history. The people we want to see represented here are also part of that narrative of 50 years ago and the present," curator Filipa Lowndes Vicente, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, told Lusa. The researcher indicated that, throughout a year of preparation, both thought of the exhibition as a space to give a voice, through photography, to ordinary people from the African community in Greater Lisbon. "We have always imagined this exhibition as a way of being able to counter and deconstruct the Portuguese colonial archive, which is very powerful. The official public archives, and the private archives of many Portuguese, are full of photographs of black people in colonial situations, often violent, unequal," pointed out Filipa Lowndes Vicente. She recalled that the invention of photography coincided with the modern colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries, "therefore this archive [of documentary and personal photography] is gigantic, and is very present". "With this exhibition we wanted to show the other side, to show people who have a name and a voice, which does not happen with the other photographs of the colonial period, in which no one is identified," observed the editor of the work "The Empire of Vision: photography in the Portuguese colonial context (1860-1960)", released in 2014. Filipa Lowndes Vicente also said that the assembly of the content of the exhibition "Family Albums" "implied a lot of collaborative work with people who generously lent their original personal photographs, and told stories linked to these images". Along the way, the visitor will find works by artists such as Mónica de Miranda, one of the curators of Portugal's representation at the Venice Art Biennale, inaugurated on Saturday, by photographer Adão Marcelino, as well as António Pedro, owner of the photographic studio-shop, created in 1960, in Damaia, and who for decades photographed Afro-descendants and Africans from the local resident community. Portraits of Afro-descendant or African women, men and children, families, friends socializing in nightclubs in Lisbon cover the walls of the exhibition room of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, a monument that was first erected in 1940, ephemerally, as part of the Portuguese World Exhibition, promoted by the dictatorship of the Estado Novo. It was in Lisbon and in the bordering areas of the capital that the vast majority of Africans who came to Portugal in recent decades settled and where the majority of the African diaspora, originating from countries that were Portuguese colonies, namely Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe, now reside. The curators recalled that, since 1975, when most of the Portuguese colonies in Africa became independent, the flow of people who came from Africa to Portugal has been more or less continuous: "A large part of the Afro-descendants in Portugal were born here, and are Portuguese". The African Union considers the diaspora as its sixth region, and predominates in Atlantic countries and regions or that were colonial powers and agents in the slave trade -- Portugal, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, United States of America, Caribbean, Brazil -- being "inseparable from a historical past of centuries of slavery and colonialism", they also mentioned. Read Also: Ai Weiwei exhibits in Lisbon ceramics inspired by freedom of expression (Portuguese version)