Military Road

Military Road is a project of visual mapping of the suburban realities of the city of Lisbon in connection to the migrant fluxes to Europe conected to de-colonization and the end of the Portuguese Empire in Africa. Military road was built around the city at the beginning of the XIX century, to defend the city from the French and English invasions. Exploring fragments of the former military axis that surrounds Lisbon and separates the formal city from the districts of illegal genesis, the investigation has several components (photography, video, mapping, performance). The Military Road project starts with a video in which I pursue the journey through the historic road, presenting the past history of this territory throughout analising the history of Portugal to its present urbanism - from the French invasions to the recent occupations by immigrants from the former colonies and returnees. The video is a road movie, a performance through spaces of memory, narratives of apropriation, resistence and the struggles of de-colonisation and migration. The journey traces, as in an archaeological search, the landscape of the so-called Military Road. At present, part of this road has disappeared, but in what is its remains, is occupied by social districts and urban Slums. The road, today, remains somewhat a kind of frontier that “protects” the city against foreign invasions; sustains a significant number of immigrants to the city, forcing them to remain on the outskirts of Lisbon, at its limit, in the limbo of city life. The military road project explores the double meaning and irony of the old territorial invasions, and of the current urban conflicts, of these places