0065 Art and Politics in the Former "Portuguese Colonial Empire"

The Monument to Mouzinho de Albuquerque in Lourenço Marques

  • Gerbert Verheij (Author)
    Universitat de Barcelona, Facultat de Belles Arts

    Gerbert Verheij graduated from Universidade Nova de Lisboa with a degree in Art History. His M.A. thesis centred on public sculpture in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique during the 1930s-1940s. At the moment he is doing PhD research on the place of sculpture in public space in the early twentieth century at the Polis Research Centre, Universitat de Barcelona, with a scholarship from the FCT/Ministry of Education and Science (Portugal).

Identifiers (Article)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2013.0.69808

Identifiers (Files)

URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2013022716684 (PDF)

Abstract

In 1940, a monument to Mouzinho de Albuquerque is inaugurated in the former capital of the Portuguese Colony of Mozambique, Lourenço Marques. The result of a lenghty commissioning process, this homage to one of the main heroes of the colonial pantheon becomes a center-piece in the many political rituals which had become common-place during the 1930s. The concepts of aura and cult value are used to analyse its "traditionalist" aesthetics and the role it played in political spectacles, arguing that it obeys a strategy of representation of the public space as "Empire".

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Issue
2013: RIHA Journal
Section
Articles
Categories
20th Century
Language
en
Keywords
Public sculpture, Mozambique, Lourenço Marque, Monument to Mouzinho de Albuquerque, Estado Novo

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.