I remember being in conferences with museum directors and other cultural sector stakeholders. One conference in particular stuck with me, when I was presented with an enslaved person’s collar, which was a deeply confronting and upsetting object. This collar was recovered in Portuguese soil in the early 1900s, found by an archaeologist and Director of the Portuguese ethnographic museum who described it in emotionally-charged terms.
The object then vanished for the next six decades. It was briefly shown to a researcher in
the 1950s, and disappeared again, not to come back to the limelight until 2017
The interview also addresses the current situation in Portugal and the important and ongoing efforts carried out by Joacine Katar Moreira since 2020 to put this issue on the country’s political agenda.
