to Sept 30 | PHOTO EXHIBIT | Uliano Lucas’ Photojournalism | Santa Maria Maior | 3€

The wars leading up to the independence of Portuguese colonies in Africa were devastating, and their history is about to get a major update thanks to Marcelo ordering the unsealing of a trove of previously classified documents. Get a glimpse of what they were like — and what Portugal was like leading up to its own Carnation Revolution — through Uliano Lucas’ work. Open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00am to 6:00 pm. Last entrance 5:30pm.

“REVOLUTIONS: Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Portugal (1969-1974) – photographs by Uliano Lucas

Curatorship: Elisa Alberani, Miguel Cardina and Vincenzo Russo

The exhibition “REVOLUTIONS – Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Portugal (1969-1974 )”, by Uliano Lucas, is the story of a journey made up of several journeys. The 56 photos gathered here, some unpublished, others published in Italy in photographic catalogs in the 1970s or in European magazines and newspapers of the time, constitute just a sample of the vast collection of images by Uliano Lucas on this subject.

The exhibition is divided into three parts corresponding to three territories photographed by Uliano Lucas between 1969 and 1974: the first section, entitled Guinea-Bissau, 1969, brings together some of the photos taken on the mission that took him to the “liberated zones” of Guinea, at the request of the PAIGC; the second section – Angola, 1972 – includes images of the daily life of the MPLA guerrillas; the third and final section is entitled Portugal, 1972 and 1974 and portrays aspects of everyday life in the country in the last period of the dictatorship (1972) and the feast days of the Revolution (1974).

Uliano Lucas’ photographs are exhibited for the first time in Portugal. There is no more propitious occasion than the year 2023, in the prelude to the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the “Carnation Revolution” and the independence of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. Published today, Uliano Lucas’ photographs contribute to short-circuiting the memory of pasts that marked the history of the 20th century, bringing them back to the present.

Photojournalist Uliano Lucas(born in 1942) grew up in Milan, where he studied at the ‘Rinascita’ schools and, from a very young age, frequented the circle of artists and intellectuals in the Brera district. In his first photographs, the protagonist is the city of Milan, in particular the artistic life (of writers, musicians, painters) between the ’60s and ’70s. The year 1968 will be fundamental for the Italian photojournalist, as the importance of the political commitment that he will never abandon emerges, a commitment that is reflected in the reports that portray the problems and realities of those years, such as the student and worker protests. The following years were marked by reports on liberation movements: the photographer often left, on his own initiative, for the African continent and his works were published in German and French magazines,L’Espresso or Vie Nuove – no newspaper was particularly interested in publishing images of this type: certainly political photos, which portray guerrilla warfare, everyday life in the forest, the struggle for freedom, the birth of new democracies. It was exactly during this period, and more precisely in the summer of 1969, that Uliano Lucas, together with the journalist Bruno Crimi (1939-2006), embarked on a trip to the liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau. The report carried out in this experiment will be published in different newspapers (namely, the publication in the weekly Vie nuove) and in the book, published in 1970, entitled Guinea Bissau: una rivoluzione africana , by the Vangelista publishing house in Milan – with texts by Bruno Crimi and photos by Uliano Lucas.

In those same years and later, Uliano Lucas traveled extensively across the African continent, through Algeria, Tunisia, Tanzania, Congo, Mozambique, Zambia, Ethiopia, Eritrea… accompanying the decolonization processes and, later, the problems, realities and transformations of these countries . He will also address violence in psychiatric institutions in Italy, denouncing the situation, as well as the social problems related to the migratory phenomenon in northern Europe.

From the 1990s onwards, in addition to reporting on countries at war – an exemplary case is the reporting during the conflict in Yugoslavia –, the Italian photographer documents social transformations in everyday life and in the world of work in large Italian cities such as Turin. , Milan and Genoa and in some regions in particular (such as Puglia, Abruzzo and Veneto), to later dedicate himself, until today, to issues related to emigration and immigration.”