In September 2021, I was in Lisbon, Portugal and visited the Aljube Museum, a collection dedicated to the country’s 20th c history of Resistance and Freedom. In photographs, original documents, videos and installations the museum tells the story of Portugal’s Salazar Dictatorship. This story includes political courts, colonial wars, prisoners in solitary in Aljube, the resistance and the April 25, 1974 Carnation Revolution which ended 48 years of dictatorship. My work was inspired by a visit to a second Portuguese prison of that era at Peniche. I had the Aljube in mind when I came across an attractive building rising from a rocky foundation perched over the Atlantic in a charming fishing town where I’d stopped to eat sardines. Peniche Remembered contemplates the quiet world of those left behind to mourn their disappeared loved ones, trapped behind cell doors or ‘disappeared’ into the ocean.
