Manuel Tur

I'm the grandson of returnees. And I'm the grandson of the Carnation Revolution - although it was never mentioned in my grandparents' house. I had never heard that "the forty-eight years of the most infamous night had come to an end". There was never any talk of 25 April at my grandparents' dinner table. Of the Freedom Day. (…) In their house (which was also mine), at their table, the word "colonialism" never came up. Not because it was avoided, but because it wasn't a topic. It was in their house, I don't think from their mouths, that I heard that "our misfortune was the good fortune of many". It was said and not contradicted. "You can't say we're racist. We are not. Black people sleep in our house. And we pay them!" I never questioned it. This is the beginning of my work, which begins with an exhaustive search for all textual, physical and audio documentation of my family's past. I've long been interested in and unsettled by the boundaries between the real, the documentary and the fictional. And this is a desire to deeply reflect on racism, on illusion, on what many people considered to be Portugal's golden age. — Manuel Tur