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Initiated in 2022 by Lia Carreira, the Palácio das Belas Artes Lisboa is a memorial practice to the promises and potential pitfalls of the concept of memorials. Without keys to the Palácio building in Lisbon, the project points to the past while occupying the present, becoming a space for exhibitions, public talks, workshops, and residencies.

In partnership with the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, the PdBA Lisboa echoes the gesture of mirroring an existing physical building (the Palácio Iglésias) where artists, curators, architects, and designers are invited to reimagine relationships to space through digital means. Because its physical and narrative sites have undergone multiple reconstructions, one on top of the other and one after the other, the Palácio is a spatial palimpsest where the past is not fully overwritten but superimposed to the point of permeating its own limits.

Centrally located in Lisbon, the Palácio das Belas Artes is deeply intertwined in Portugal’s turbulent economic and social histories. Surrounded by the Saint Francis Convent, which later housed the National Library, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chiado, the Palácio witnessed key political events throughout the course of its life, one being the Revolution of the 25th of April 1974 which ended forty-eight years of dictatorship.

A negotiation of histories and memory, from the private to the public, and from the individual to the collective, the PdBA Lisboa comes as a critical gesture in a country where colonial triumphs and dictatorial ideals are still praised here and there. Consequently, the competitiveness of recognized memories of violence and trauma are not yet fully on the table, the present discussion being about whether they are even legitimate forms of contestation.