Exhibition: "Disobedience Archive"

The Fundação Amélia de Mello Gallery at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Lisbon, is hosting the exhibition Disobedience Archive (The Agitational Billboard) until September. Conceived by Marco Scotini, this internationally acclaimed curatorial project explores the relationship between artistic practices, social movements and political action.

Featuring 18 filmic works organised into two thematic sections, entitled Gender Disobedience and Insurgent Communities and Colonialism, the exhibition also includes a special contribution by the artist Ângela Ferreira. Internationally recognised, her work has consistently explored the legacies of colonialism, the circulation of political forms, and the relationships between architecture, memory and liberation movements. By contributing to the exhibition’s spatial and visual configuration, her intervention provides a framework through which the archive can be reinterpreted from the perspective of transnational solidarities and histories of emancipation.

The conceptual framework of Disobedience Archive (The Agitational Billboard) also draws inspiration from the agitational billboard, historically used by political movements as a tool for communication, mobilisation and collective education. Reinterpreted within the exhibition space, this device assumes both an architectural and symbolic dimension, serving as a platform for the circulation of dissenting voices, counter-narratives and collective demands.

Initiated by Marco Scotini in Berlin in 2005, Disobedience Archive is a constantly evolving, non-site-specific audiovisual archive dedicated to the relationship between artistic practice and political action. Over the past two decades, it has developed from a travelling exhibition of videos, graphic materials and ephemeral documents into a dynamic platform for research, documentation and critical reflection on forms of resistance, social struggle and collective self-organisation. Each presentation of the archive is therefore developed in dialogue with artists whose practices resonate with its ongoing investigation into resistance and social transformation.

Admission to Disobedience Archive (The Agitational Billboard) is free, and the exhibition can be visited on weekdays from 2.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m., on Level 1 of the João Paulo II University Library building.

The presentation of Disobedience Archive formed part of the programme for the 2026 edition of the Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture and the Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema, organised by the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa and the Lisbon Consortium, an international academic programme of the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.