ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Portuguese artistic works dealing with the intimate, family archives related to the often-traumatic memories of retornados, people living in the colonies who had to “return” to the metropolis after decolonisation. A novel concept, the “archive of the sensible,” grasps a body of practices of dislocation of a previous order through the production of intervals in memorial narratives. The “archive of the sensible” is paired with the idea of transmemories concerning the intergenerational transmission of domestic and intimate migratory experiences that disrupt the conventional matching of homogeneous spaces, memory, and history. The workings of such interstitial memories are analysed in a theatrical project by Joana Craveiro, as well as an installation and a film made by Manuel Santos Maia. While Craveiro redeploys the memories of the descendants of retornados in the staging of her theatre-documentary, in his visual displays Santos Maia reconfigures the objects and images of his own family. In both cases the disordering effect which the archive of the sensible and transmemories create within the hegemonic distribution of meanings and feelings also produces an epistemic dislocation involving new connections between the present and the past, testimonies, places, and objects, opening up to other possible futures.
