Team: António Pinto Ribeiro

António Pinto Ribeiro

Researcher| Cultural Programmer
António Pinto Ribeiro is a researcher of the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. He was artistic director and curator of several Portuguese cultural institutions, namely Culturgest and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He was commissioner general of "Past and Present - Lisbon Ibero-American Capital of Culture 2017". His main research interests are in contemporary art, specifically in Africa and South America. His publications include: his latest books Peut-on Décoloniser les Musées? (2019), África os quatro rios - A representação de África através da literatura de viagens europeia e norteamericana (Africa the four rivers - Africa's representation through European and North American travel literature)  (2017) and the organization of the two volumes O Desejo de Viver em Comum  (The Desire to Live in Common)  (2018) in the scope of the Lisbon Conference Ibero-American Capital of Culture 2017. His new book is Novo Mundo – Arte Contemporânea no Tempo da Pós-Memória (2021). He was the main curator of the international exhibition Europa Oxalá, with Aimé Mpane and Katia Kameli (Mucem, Marseille, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, AfricaMuseum, Tervuren, Belgium, 2021-2023). Curator of the El Dorado cinema and video cycle, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, 2023.

apribeiro@ces.uc.pt     CES PROFILE

2022

O Desejo de Viver em Comum - Volume 1

In 2017, the city of Lisbon was the Ibero-American Capital of Culture, a cultural initiative of intense and diverse programming, that included an important cycle of conferences carried out by prominent personalities of the countries involved. These books are the result of this cycle of conferences. "It is not at all possible to make a synthesis of Latin America, a concept that is a little more than 150 years old, or even of Ibero-Americanism, an even more ambiguous concept, nor was it ever an illusion of the programming of Past and Present - Lisbon, Ibero-American Capital of Culture 2017.
What one tries to do is to give to see and to hear the discourses of the Americas. Not only those that concern the world as it is looked at from the other side - framed by the new narratives that began in the 1970s to nowadays , with the contributions of interpreters from the Latin American diaspora - but also the discourses and contributions of Europeans attentive to the need to look again at the expansion, the colonial, and to find new documentary sources, not to proceed to a synthesis, to the making of a single history, but to uncover what must be uncovered.

O Desejo de Viver em Comum - Volume 2

2019 | Lisboa: Tinta da China In 2017, the city of Lisbon was the Ibero-American Capital of Culture, a cultural initiative of intense and diverse programming, that included an important cycle of conferences carried out by prominent personalities of the countries involved. These books are the result of this cycle of conferences. "It is not at all possible to make a synthesis of Latin America, a concept that is a little more than 150 years old, or even of Ibero-Americanism, an even more ambiguous concept, nor was it ever an illusion of the programming of Past and Present - Lisbon, Ibero-American Capital of Culture 2017.
What one tries to do is to give to see and to hear the discourses of the Americas. Not only those that concern the world as it is looked at from the other side - framed by the new narratives that began in the 1970s to nowadays , with the contributions of interpreters from the Latin American diaspora - but also the discourses and contributions of Europeans attentive to the need to look again at the expansion, the colonial, and to find new documentary sources, not to proceed to a synthesis, to the making of a single history, but to uncover what must be uncovered.

África, os quatro rios

2017 | Porto: Edições Afrontamento 1958-2002 evokes four great African rivers - Niger, Zambezi, Nile and Congo - to offer  a reflection on the representations of Africa in Western travel literature. Considering, in the first step, a set of texts of travelers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the author then focuses on the analysis of three European and one American authors whose routes have been made along the great African rivers: The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski, Adventures in Africa by Gianni Celati, Bay of the Tigers by Pedro Rosa Mendes and Dark Star Safari, a voyage by land between Cairo and Cape Town by Paul Theroux. The voyages that shaped these works were made after 1945, after the ) endof World War II, in which we witnessed the transition from a colonized Africa to an independent and postcolonial Africa.
Who are these travelers writers? What subjectivities, prejudices and continuities or ruptures exist in these ways of narrating Africa? Which pasts are managed and rewritten? What relationship between Africa and Europe is presented here? And what futures are generated by these narratives?

A urgência da teoria

This book is a compilation of texts that emanate from the conferences in "The State of the World" Programme (Gulbenkian, 2007). António Pinto Ribeiro is the author of the first chapter with "A Urgência da Teoria: Conclusões", followed by the text of the inaugural conference by Homi K. Bhabha and thirteen "Grandes Lições" of the lecture series 'A Urgência da Teoria'. 

Próximo Futuro/ Next Future

This newspaper is a publication from Gulbenkian's Próximo Futuro/ Next Future (2009-2015) Programme, of which António Pinto Ribeiro was Chief Curator and for which has contributed with numerous specialized texts on contemporary art and its junctions and fusions with social and political contexts, where the issues of post-colonial identities particularly stand out.

Réplica e rebeldia: Artistas Plásticos de Moçambique, Angola, Cabo Verde e Brasil

Contemporary art exhibition launched in 2006 and commissioned by António Pinto Ribeiro, organized by Instituto Camões in partnership with the Museu Nacional de Arte in Maputo, the Museu de Arte Moderna in Baía, of the Museu Nacional de Antropologia in Angola, of the Palácio das Artes of Cape Verde, and of the Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil in Brasília. One of the goals of this exhibition was to give visibility to 30 artists of these countries, with a total of 76 exhibits. The selection of works encompassed a diversity of contemporary artistic realities and universes and their political and historical connections. A catalogue with the first narratives of visual arts of black artists from Portuguese-speaking countries was produced to accompany the exhibition, which was on display in several countries.

Peut-on Décoloniser les Musées?

2019 | Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian - Delegação em França "A partir des années 60, le "déseurocentrisme" de la production de la connaissance et la révision des canons et des épistémologies initiées avec les Etudes culturelles auxquelles ont succédé les différents post-colonialismes et les études de genre ont provoqué une révolution que l'on ne peut que comparer à la révolution copernicienne. C'est dans ce contexte que l'épistémologie et la muséographie se sont déplacées pour comprendre que les musées, n'étant pas seulement des collections mais fondamentalement des dispositifs narratifs, se confrontent au fait de devoir être postcoloniaux. Cette situation nous oblige à revoir les narrations et, au moins, à incorporer les tensions entre les anciennes et les nouvelles histoires, à réfléchir sur la forme dont ces collections et ces butins sont arrivés dans les musées européens et nord-américains et, enfin, à redéfinir le concept de musée à la lumière du "panafricanisme" et de la "pensée amérindienne"."

¿PODEMOS DESCOLONIZAR LOS MUSEOS?

"A partir des années 60, le "déseurocentrisme" de la production de la connaissance et la révision des canons et des épistémologies initiées avec les Etudes culturelles auxquelles ont succédé les différents post-colonialismes et les études de genre ont provoqué une révolution que l'on ne peut que comparer à la révolution copernicienne. C'est dans ce contexte que l'épistémologie et la muséographie se sont déplacées pour comprendre que les musées, n'étant pas seulement des collections mais fondamentalement des dispositifs narratifs, se confrontent au fait de devoir être postcoloniaux. Cette situation nous oblige à revoir les narrations et, au moins, à incorporer les tensions entre les anciennes et les nouvelles histoires, à réfléchir sur la forme dont ces collections et ces butins sont arrivés dans les musées européens et nord-américains et, enfin, à redéfinir le concept de musée à la lumière du "panafricanisme" et de la "pensée amérindienne"."

Novo Mundo ? Arte Contemporânea no Tempo da Pós-Memória

Novo Mundo ? Arte Contemporânea no Tempo da Pós-Memória (2021) is a book about works and about artists who practice different artistic languages and genres - from cinema to music, from visual arts to theatre, dance and photography. They have in common memories that were transmitted to them by their parents and grandparents of African origin, memories that are deferred and appropriated according to each one and that, today, constitute part of the material of their works. For this reason, they are called artists in the condition of post-memory. Currently, they comprise two generations of artists who star in much of what is pertinent, daring, expressive and critical in contemporary European arts. Due to the nature of their works, these artists are bearers of a gift that is as innovative as it is urgent and their transnational and transterritorial presence carries with them a combative energy in the face of the legacy of colonialism and racism, as well as clamoring for the urgency of decolonization of the canons and for need for a rewriting of the histories of Africa and Europe, and not just the History of Art.

Outras Publicações

 

2020- "Richard Burton, voyageur et « constructeur » colonial », Reflexos, N° 005, Savoirs en circulation dans l?espace atlantique entre les XVIe et XIXe siècles.

 

2020 - "La restitution des ?uvres d'art : un pas décisif dans le processus de décolonisation" in Memoires en Jeu (junho), Paris: Éditions Kimé (com Margarida Calafate Ribeiro).

 

2020 - "Uma outra necessidade cultural. O contacto com o luxo" in José Soares Neves e Clara Frayão Camacho (org.), Nos 50 anos de L'Amour de L'Art, Dívidas, Críticas e Desafios, Edit Mundos Sociais, p. 11-17.

 

2019 - "Olhar a energia das cidades" in Margarida Calafate Ribeiro e Francisco Noa (org.), Memória, Cidade e Literatura: De São Paulo de Assunção de Loanda a Luuanda, de Lourenço Marques a Maputo, Porto: Afrontamento, p. 215-216.

 

2019 - "Negro por fora, vermelho por dentro - o Teatro Griot" in Margarida Calafate Ribeiro e Phillip Rothwell (org.), Heranças Pós-Coloniais nas literaturas em língua portuguesa, Porto: Afrontamento, p. 335-348.


2018 - "Para acabar de vez com a lusofonia", Lusotopie, 17(2), p. 220?226.

 

2016 - "Podemos descolonizar os museus?" in António Sousa Ribeiro e Margarida Calafate Ribeiro (org.), Geometrias da memória: configurações pós-coloniais, Porto: Afrontamento, p. 95?111.