Starting from a set of amateur photos taken by my father, José Alberto Vidal de Almeida—a Portuguese scholarship-holding student in former Czechoslovakia from 1978 to 1987—my dissertation traces the transformation of a collection of photos stored inside a shoebox into an archive where lived and transmitted (inscribed) experience is articulated alongside macro-political and historical processes. The analysis of the archive allows a simultaneous look into the final years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia and the first years after the left-wing revolution in Portugal in April 1974. Taking autobiography as its starting point, the objective of this research is to address the idea of a collective memory of revolution. It asks: how this memory is constantly formed, who are its protagonists, and how the potential for social upheaval it carries can be deliberately suppressed or released. Ultimately, it analyses different processes of image production in the inter-revolutionary archive.

Ana de Almeida is an artist and author from Lisbon, currently living and working in Vienna. After studying Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon, she continued her studies in Vienna, completing a Master in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts with a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the same institution, pursuing a doctoral thesis about the production of images and its ideological implications in the 1974—1989 inter-revolutionary space between the Carnation and the Velvet Revolutions. She is a member of the artists’ collective , a member and co-founder of the curatorial project Gudrun Ingenthron and of the Interndinner collective against precarization of work in the cultural field. Her artistic practice addresses memory processes and their different levels of responsibility in processes of subjectivization; conscious and subconscious narrative constructions that connect space and subject; and plurispatial and multilayered narratives in general.