Having opened the exhibition Ceci n’est Pas Francisco at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in April, Marta Pinto Machado is now extending it to the Cape Verde Cultural Centre (CCCV), where it will open on 22 May.

The exhibition stems from the artist-in-residence programme that the IHC PhD student undertook in Braga in 2025, and is “an exercise in storytelling about the absence of the archive, about what the archive cannot reveal”, she tells us. The project “questions the limits of the archive and official historiography, exposing their biases and the erasures they produce”. The subject of this exercise is Francisco Mendonça, a Black footballer who lived in Braga during the 1960s and whose photograph Marta discovered in the Braga District Archive. Between 1961 and 1962, there are no records of Francisco, and that was the year of his failed attempt to escape with students from the Casa dos Estudantes do Império via the N101, in the context of the anti-colonial struggles.

This work combines archival documents and images created “in mundane contexts, without artifice, using everyday objects”, seeking to “unlock the poetic potential of ordinary gestures”. Through this work, the artist “explores the possibility that the image might not only rewrite history, but also create the conditions for imagining different relationships with the past”.

The two exhibitions are complementary: as Marta Lança writes in Buala, “at the CCCV, the exhibition takes on a different presence in the space. The film shown at the MNAC is now accompanied by new elements, offering a more fragmented reading of this story. Francisco emerges amidst traces, questions and possible images, not as a fully recovered figure, but as a presence marked by an absence that remains active.”

At the MNAC, the exhibition can be visited until 28 June. At the CCCV, the opening on 22 May will feature a conversation between Marta Pinto Machado and Inês Vieira Gomes, starting at 6 pm. It will run until 27 June.