INVISIBLE ARCHIVES OF THE PORTUGUESE DICTATORSHIP, performance-lecture by Joana Craveiro investigating the politics of memory regarding the longest-running dictatorship in Europe. It is the second of seven performance-lectures that make up her 2017 doctoral thesis, “A Live/Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories: Performing Narratives, Testimonies and Archives of the Portuguese Dictatorship and Revolution.” Craveiro’s practice-as-research investigates the development, transmission, and erasure of memories of the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–1974), specifically the authoritarian, nationalist Estado Novo regime of dictator António de Olveira Salazar, which relied heavily on the strict control of information and repression of political activity.
Unlike other authoritarian leaders Salazar was uninterested in forming a party-state; instead he created the National Union, a single “non-party,” to restrain rather than mobilize public opinion. Institutions such as the political police (PIDE) were employed to monitor and suppress any form of dissent. Libraries, archives, and cultural institutions were subjected to strict censorship, with materials deemed subversive or critical of the regime either destroyed or hidden from public view. But while the dictatorship was defined by propaganda, censorship, and the stifling of dissent, beneath the oppressive veneer are testimonies of resistance.
In the years following the 1974 overthrow of the dictatorship official narratives denouncing the PIDE proliferated. Scholar Duncan Simpson observes that these depictions portray the PIDE as “quintessentially evil” and irredeemably violent, while the citizenry are represented as victims living in fear of the police’s activities. For Simpson these totalizing narratives fail to address the complexities of the relationship between Portuguese society and the PIDE. He argues that “the efforts to construct and preserve a certain social memory of the PIDE have contaminated the process of historical understanding by dictating which aspects of the secret police are studied and which are not. The historical study of the PIDE has in effect remained captive to memorial interests.”
In “Invisible Archives of the Portuguese Dictatorship” Craveiro addresses the legacy of the PIDE and draws on political prisoners’ testimonies of the torture they endured while imprisoned. She explains, “[B]y using the expression ‘Invisible Archives,’ I refer to the methods of erasing [politically repressive] violence from public awareness during and after the dictatorship.” The performance-lecture engages the experiences of three disparate prisoners: former dissident Francisco Martins Rodrigues, a member of the Communist Party during the dictatorship, who was unable to withstand the torture methods of the PIDE and gave away information about other dissidents; Aurora Rodrigues, a former member of a militant Maoist party, who was deprived of sleep for sixteen days even though she possessed no sensitive information; and António Ribiero Santos, also a Maoist militant, who became a symbol of resistance after being murdered by the PIDE. With each testimony Craveiro takes up a generalized experience: that of the prisoner who succumbs to torture and cooperates; that of the martyr; and that of the “innocent.” Craveiro’s investigation, reliant as it is on personal testimony, thus complicates official attempts to repress and control memory in the dictatorship’s wake.