Arquivo Atlântico is a research and creation project that proposes thinking about coloniality through the creation of an archive – a collection of gestures, images and accounts that has the potential to inform and problematize the present. The project was born out of a desire to look at the history of the various territories bordering the Atlantic Ocean in order to understand the forms of occupation, extraction, hierarchization, exclusion and extermination that still mark the experience of these territories today and the colonial legacy present in relations between the Global North and South. For us, the archive is not just evidence of a past, but generative material. Working with a wide range of sources – films, official documents, literature, sound recordings, oral narratives – we have explored how different creative and compositional practices can rescue the affective capacity of these materials and allow us to deconstruct narratives and visualities that characterize a colonial imaginary.
The project has been developed in different formats, including a podcast series that brings together narrative exercises and conversations, film screenings and, more recently, a choreographic approach to the relationship with different materials, experimenting and questioning their performative dimension. The residency at mala voadora corresponds to the work of creating the choreographic aspect of the project, where they will be developing a piece that will premiere in October, as part of the Materiais Diversos program at the Centro Cultural do Cartaxo.