The Amélia de Mello Foundation Gallery presents a new exhibition
The Amélia de Mello Foundation Gallery, at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, is hosting Disobedience Archive (The Agitational Billboard) until September. Conceived by Marco Scotini, this internationally acclaimed curatorial project explores the intersections between artistic practices, social movements and political action.
Featuring 18 film works organised into two thematic sections, Gender Disobedience and Insurgent Communities and Colonialism, the exhibition includes a special contribution by the internationally renowned artist Ângela Ferreira. Her work has consistently examined the legacies of colonialism, the circulation of political forms, and the relationships between architecture, memory and liberation movements. Through her contribution to the exhibition's spatial and visual articulation, Ferreira provides a framework through which the archive can be reconsidered 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, a communication device historically employed by political movements as a tool for collective communication, mobilisation and education. Reinterpreted within the exhibition space, this structure 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 an ever-evolving audiovisual archive with no fixed location, dedicated to examining the relationship between artistic practice and political action. Over the past two decades, it has developed from a travelling exhibition of video works, graphic materials and ephemeral documents into a dynamic platform for research, documentation and critical reflection on practices 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.
Disobedience Archive (The Agitational Billboard) is open to the public free of charge and may be visited on weekdays from 2.00 pm to 5.00 pm on the first floor of the João Paulo II University Library building.
The presentation of Disobedience Archive formed part of the 2026 editions 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, the international academic programme of the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.