1 - Confinement Experiences and the Body as Archive: Reflections from Angola

Presentation Abstract
In this presentation, I will explore, using Federico Rahola’s (2007) concept of “camp-form”, the memories of detention, confinement and torture in the context of repression and political violence in Angola, before and after independence. In a historical context in which many colonial and dictatorial prison and torture spaces are undergoing a process of musealization and heritagization, we ask ourselves to what extent these processes include or exclude certain testimonies of imprisonment and confinement, particularly those that do not fit into the museum’s curation. I will do this based on testimonies of political prisoners held in the former Casa de Reclusão Militar de Luanda, the site of the future Museum of the Angolan Liberation Struggle.