Between the 1st of June and the 2nd of July, the Bordalo Pinheiro Museum will host the Unrolling the Past exhibition – The Panorama du Congo in Virtual Reality, organized by the CONGO-VR research project team. Decolonizing the Panorama du Congo: A Virtual Heritage Artistic Research (FilmEU RIT), whose host institution is Universidade Lusófona.

On the 23rd of June at 18:30, the exhibition curator and two researchers will be available for a conversation followed by a guided tour. Admission is free and no prior registration is required.

The project aims to preserve the image of the Panorama through photography to bring it to the debates of decolonization and decolonial thinking. The exhibition presents an ongoing investigation into an immersive device – a large circular painting from the colonial era, about the Belgian Congo of 1913 by Paul Mathieu (1872-1932) and Alfred Bastien (1873-1955) – highlighting some of the stages in this project: the photographic survey of the Panorama and the respective post-production; historical and artistic research on the production of the image and its device; and a Virtual Reality re-enactment of the Congo Panorama that will soon serve as a stage for interventions by Congolese artists and the Congolese diaspora.

Congo VR is the acronym of the research project Decolonizing the Panorama of Congo: A Virtual Heritage Artistic Research (FILMEU_RIT – Research | Innovation | Transformation project, European Union GRANT_NUMBER: H2020-IBA-SwafS-Support-2-2020).