Exhibition De Passagem, Moçambique 1970-1973

The Soares dos Reis National Museum presents the exhibition De Passagem, Moçambique 1970-1973, by Mário Martins, an extension in Porto of Encontros da Imagem – International Photography and Visual Arts Festival, with programming by The Cave Photography, and curated by Mafalda Martins, Miguel Refresco, Rui Pinheiro and Sérgio Correia.

Mário Martins was born in Vila Real on 25 June 1948. Like thousands of young Portuguese men, he was called up for the Colonial War in 1970, mobilised against his will. He was a soldier In Mozambique within an independent military commission, operating in Niassa, Zambezia and Tete. From there he brought the experiences presented in this exhibition, which reveal his social concern in a war he considered senseless and which strengthened his affinity with the Portuguese liberation movement of 25 April 1974. This universal language of photography has always seduced him, but it was only in Mozambique that he became deeply involved in its practice.

A gaze upon the gaze, revisiting a personal archive of original photographs, printed over 50 years ago, is the proposal presented at the Soares dos Reis National Museum. A wandering narrative that contains parts of an organised, commented and partially closed collection, which includes elements of the photographic practice, printing experiments, technical notes and chemical and physical processes. Images that transcend the date they were taken, revealing the underlying reason that precedes them, somewhere between the exercise of contestation and the act of survival. 50 years after the April Revolution, the possibility of scrutinising the Colonial War from multiple perspectives, in an intrinsic dialogue between memory and contemporaneity that transposes linear history and opens it up to new understandings.