Salão Nobre | Salão Pobre

An image Memory

Abstract

Salão Nobre | Salão Pobre [Noble Hall, Poor Hall] is an image-memory aimed at unleashing the imagination and encapsulate a potentiality: what is yet not but could otherwise.1 It is a visual intervention into Portugal’s colonial archive, understood here as the law determining what can and cannot be represented.2 Such intervention is born out of a need to examine colonial “visuality” without reproducing its effects and eternalizing its spell in the present. It is part of a larger project of mine—a “visual archaeology”—a methodological critique, in which the image levies itself as the very object of its own deconstruction (Barreiros 2018).