Interview with Alana Castro de Azevedo, researcher within the CONCILIARE project
The European project CONCILIARE (Confidently Changing Colonial Heritage), which focuses on the legacies of the colonial past, was launched in March 2024. Bringing together partners from six countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Finland, and Croatia), the project includes social psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, as well as associations such as ICOM Belgique-Wallonie/Bruxelles and Afropean Project. Within this project, Chantal Kesteloot (CegeSoma/State Archives of Belgium) coordinated WP2, focused on public spaces in Belgium, Italy, and Portugal, while the postdoctoral researcher Alana Castro de Azevedo worked on the identification of colonial heritage in Brussels, Antwerp, and Mons. Following the identification of this heritage, a number of case studies were conducted to examine different forms of contestation in depth.
As Alana’s time on the project is coming to an end, we wanted to ask her a few questions.
Alana, in your previous research you had already worked on controversies related to public space. In what ways has the research you conducted within the CONCILIARE project changed your perspective on these controversies?
In my previous research, I focused on protests against the construction of new memorials in public space. Because these protests were unfolding while I was doing my research, most of my work consisted of interviewing both supporters and opponents of these memorial projects. The research I conducted within CONCILIARE was quite different, because many of the monuments, toponyms, and buildings we identified had been created more than a century ago. This meant that, in order to understand the context in which they were created, I had to engage with archival research, which was quite a challenge at first for someone trained as an anthropologist and unfamiliar with the Belgian context. What really changed my perspective was realizing how rich the archives are. They showed that some of these monuments and street names were already contested when they were created (although not for the same reasons they are today), and that pubic space was constantly transformed over time: streets were renamed, buildings destroyed or repurposed, monuments relocated or modified, and the meanings attached to them changed. Working with these materials changed the way I do research, because it made me realize the importance of making the wider public aware that the functions and meanings attached to colonial monuments and toponyms are never fixed. Bringing this historical perspective into contemporary debates on colonial heritage is important, I think, because it shows that struggles over public memory and demands for change have always existed.
Within the CONCILIARE project, research on public space focused on three different countries (Belgium, Italy, and Portugal). What differences and similarities were you able to observe?
Each of these three countries has a distinct colonial past, and each promotes a different narrative about that past in order to sustain an idealized representation of the nation. In Portugal and Italy, for example, the colonial enterprise is often portrayed as “softer” than that of other former colonial powers. In Belgium, although the atrocities committed under Leopold II’s rule in the Congo Free State are well documented, there is still considerable resistance to fully acknowledging the violence of the colonial regime. The moment when colonial references started to be contested also differs from one country to another. In Belgium, contestation emerged from the early 2000s onwards, while in Italy colonial references only started to be contested in the late 2010s. In Portugal, contestation is more visible than in Italy, but positive narratives about Portugal’s “Age of Discoveries” remain deeply ingrained in Portuguese society. The inauguration of the statue of Padre António Vieira in Lisbon as recently as 2017, as well as the proposal to create a “Museum of the Discoveries” in 2020, illustrate these tensions particularly well. In terms of similarities, the contestation of references to colonialism in public space has been driven, in all three countries, by civil society. The strategies used to challenge colonial symbols are also similar, as activists have mainly organized demonstrations, launched petitions, physically intervened on contested traces, or created (ephemeral) artistic interventions. The arguments used to defend these symbols likewise tend to be similar across the three countries, with critics of these protests often presenting them as attacks on national heritage and identity or as attempts to erase history.
Why do you consider such a project important, and why?
CONCILIARE is important because it shows that European colonialism is not just a matter of the past, but something that continues to shape and influence our societies in many different ways. The project highlights how colonial legacies remain embedded in multiple aspects of everyday life — from textbooks and museum exhibitions to public commemorations, cultural practices, and even food consumption. Another aspect that makes the project particularly interesting, in my opinion, is its interdisciplinary approach. By bringing together perspectives from history, social psychology, anthropology, sociology, and cultural geography, CONCILIARE makes it possible to understand these issues in a much more comprehensive way. All these approaches complement one another and show that no single discipline could fully grasp how present and complex these colonial legacies still are today.
As a Brazilian living in the Netherlands, this work gave you the opportunity to discover Belgium. What did you learn about Belgian society over the course of these eighteen months? What surprised you the most?
I was really excited to work in Belgium, because discussions about the coloniality of public space and heritage seem to be much more present here than in the Netherlands, where I currently live. From abroad, it really seemed that Belgium was taking concrete steps to confront and engage with its colonial legacies, and that it could somehow serve as an example for other European countries. It sounds a bit naïve now (and it certainly was), but I had high expectations, especially because of all the parliamentary commissions, working groups, reports, and action plans launched on the subject in recent years. But when I arrived here, I realized that the colonial past is still an extremely sensitive issue, that there is a great deal of social resistance around these questions, and that the implementation of concrete policies is a much slower and more contested process than it may appear from the outside.