SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes

Rua Barata Salgueiro 36, 1250-044 Lisboa

05 . 09 . 2025 → 04 . 10 . 2025

monday - friday → 12:00 pm – 07:00 pm

saturday → 02:00 pm – 07:00 pm

Artist

Gloria Oyarzabal

Roman law defined property as the absolute, full, exclusive and perpetual enjoyment of an object or corporeal entity. USUS was the right to make use of the object according to its nature, FRUCTUS to receive the fruits, ABUSUS was the power to modify, sell or destroy the object or given entity.

Museums originated as institutions more than 300 years ago, when certain royal collections were made accessible to the great public. They would hence become instrumental tools in the construction of identity and the definition of Nation. And bearing in mind the outstanding colonialist origin of many of their collections, then conflict with History narrative, the creation of knowledge and, consequently, collective and individual memory, becomes unavoidable. Museums as creators of imaginaries, as institutions that aren’t and have never been neutral holders.

Is the concept of museum universal?

Revisit the relationship between colonial anthropology established not as a study of culture, but of a hierarchical difference based on supremacist discourses. Questions of spoliation, hegemonic narratives, race and gender are addressed based on the concept of ownership and plunder.

Consequently, the responsibility for the representation of black women in European art is innate.

Is returning what has been plundered and looted, both in terms of objects and identity, an urgent, universal and feasible matter? Ownership, restitution, reparation, recontextualisation .... who has agency to give, return, rename?

Let’s provoke a polyphonic debate on the function of objects and their role in processes of subjectivation of the individual, as well as in building collective identities.