Tarrafal

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration campat Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974.

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration campat Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the campis told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined withcorrespondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectivelythese materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and theresistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise.In 1949, Pina’s grandfather Guilherme da Costa Carvalho—a young communist militant— was sentto the camp. Later that year Guilherme’s parents were granted unprecedented permission to visittheir son and using a Rolleiflex camera they photographed all the living prisoners and the graves ofthe ones who had died in the camp. This extensive visual record—the only one ever made inside theconcentration camp—was created with the intent of reporting back to the families of the otherprisoners held in the camp or had died there.Seventy years later, in 2019, Pina began investigating a box in his family archive containing thenegatives, contact sheets, vintage prints of these pictures made inside the camp, along with relatedletters and telegrams sent from his grandfather.