Disobedience Archive
(The Agitational Billboard)
Curated by Marco Scotini
Exhibition Display Ângela Ferreira
Curatorial Assistant: Alessia Riva
With: Ege Berensel, Seba Calfuqueo, Simone Cangelosi, Marcelo Expósito & Nuria Vila, Ali Essafi, Maria Galindo & Mujeres Creando, Ruy Guerra, Sara Jordenö, Sarah Maldoror, Angela Melitopoulos, Carlos Motta, Sana Na N'Hada, Pinar Ogrenci, Daniela Ortiz, Güliz Sağlam, Tita Salina & Irwan Ahmett, Sim Chi Yin, Mohanad Yaqubi
Opening: 29 Jun 2026 · Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon)
- 17:30 · Auditório Cardeal Medeiros, UCP:
Artist Talk with Ângela Ferreira and Marco Scotini
- 18:30 · Galeria Fundação Amélia de Mello, UCP:
Exhibition opening
The opening of the exhibition Disobedience Archive (The Agitational Billboard), curated by Marco Scotini and featuring an exhibition display by Ângela Ferreira, on 29 June 2026 at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon. The programme begins at 5:30 pm with an artist talk between Ângela Ferreira and Marco Scotini at the Cardeal Medeiros Auditorium, followed by the exhibition opening at 6:30 pm. Disobedience Archive is presented within the framework of the XVI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture and Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema, both dedicated in 2026 to the theme of Disobedience.
Initiated by the curator and theorist Marco Scotini in 2005, the Disobedience Archive was and is a constantly transforming video archive with no fixed location. It is dedicated to the relationship between artistic practice and political action. Deriving from various parts of the world, the more than 100 documentary and art films are positioned at the intersection between art and activism. The films show various forms of resistance, social struggle and collective self-organisation.
The archive functions as a dynamic device that is perpetually re-organised. Its non-linear juxtapositions reveal an experience of time and history based on multiple voices and the simultaneous existence of different narratives. Unlike the prevailing mode of history writing, which is constructed in a hierarchical and linear way, this approach understands history as a mesh of potential and actual time relationships. As a ‘collecting machine’, the archive places events, voices and gestures in new configurations, thereby favouring different interpretations rather than insisting on one truth.
Through changing forms of presentation and dynamic arrangements, it responds to the collapse of dominant narratives. Like a library, it invites visitors to move freely within it, to decide for themselves what they would like to watch, and to construct their own path through the images and voices of the films.
On display at the UCP Gallery is a presentation of the Disobedience Archive featuring a selection of eighteen film documents organized into two thematic chapters: Gender Disobedience and insurgent Communities and Colonialism. Each presentation of the Disobedience Archive is developed through a dialogue with artists whose practices resonate with the archive’s ongoing investigation into forms of resistance and social transformation. For this iteration, South African artist Angela Ferreira was invited to engage with the archive’s premises and contribute to its spatial and visual articulation. Ferreira’s work has long examined the legacies of colonialism, the circulation of political forms, and the relationship between architecture, memory, and liberation movements. Her intervention provides a framework through which the archive can be re-read from the perspective of transnational solidarities and histories of emancipation.
The conceptual framework of the exhibition draws on the form of the agitational billboard. Historically employed by political movements as a tool for communication, mobilization, and collective education, the billboard functions as a public surface where images, slogans, and narratives converge to address a broad audience. Reinterpreted within the exhibition space, this device becomes both an architectural structure and a political metaphor: a platform for the circulation of dissenting voices, counter-histories, and collective demands.
