The National Archives of Torre do Tombo (ANTT) will open a photography exhibition next Monday on the Carnation Revolution, which aims to be “a portrait of the country” on April 25 and after, said Patrícia Ferreira, from the institution.
Speaking to the Lusa news agency, she explained that the exhibition, entitled “Days of April: A Path, Multiple Voices”, is the result of the Torre do Tombo’s networking with the district archives, with other public archives and private collections contributing to the exhibition.
“The exhibition is a portrait of the country, based on a survey carried out throughout the country, through the district archives, of photographs from the day or days following April 25, 1974, from all over the country, in order to give a broad view of what April 25 was,” he said.
“Dias de Abril: Um Caminho, Múltiplas Vozes” seeks to “present a testimony of the days of April 1974, when the dawn of April 25 changed forever the political and social path that Portugal had been on for the last 48 years.”
In addition to photography, the exhibition includes other documentation, namely a set of photographic proofs belonging to the Photographic Archive of the former SNI – National Information Secretariat, which “bear witness to the military movement in the streets of Lisbon”.
“There are also some posters, various press from the time, namely the five printings of the newspaper O Século on April 25, 1974, and a selection of documents from the archive [of Lieutenant Colonel] Ernesto Melo Antunes [1933-1999, one of the key figures in the Armed Forces Movement], where you can see his personal perspective on the events and meetings held in the days following the Revolution.”
“This exhibition is spread over three rooms in the Torre do Tombo National Archive, [in the university city] in Lisbon, with the first presenting a perspective on the immediate background to the revolutionary process, a second room, which shows the revolutionary process from the Caldas Movement [a thwarted coup attempt on March 16, 1974] to the dawn of April 25, and the third room where you can see the reflection of those April days at national level.”
The exhibition opens next Monday at 16:00 and will run until June 28.
The inauguration event will take place on April 15, at 16:00, at the National Archives of Torre do Tombo.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the April Revolution, a military-led movement that put an end to an autocratic regime that had been in place since 1926, aggravated by the 1933 Constitution that imposed the dictatorship of the Estado Novo, with its single party and restriction of civil liberties.
The Armed Forces Movement prioritized the “three Ds policy” – Democratize, Decolonize, Develop – which led to the Constitution of the Republic, approved by the Constituent Assembly in 1976, after the first democratic elections in nearly 50 years, the first in the country with universal suffrage.
