About the project
ReLembrar/UnForgetting is a digital platform that compiles and welcomes testimonies of musical experiences during the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–1974).
Under censorship, songs that were broadcast, recorded, and performed in public could still carry hidden meaning and protest, if listeners knew how to hear it. This platform gathers the memories of those who lived through the dictatorship, as well as those who inherited its memory, to document this political listening and to hear these songs again.
We find ourselves in an epidemic of forgetting, both systematically and culturally. This project is a resistance to that.
An unforgetting.
Museu do fado archive, Lisbon (2025)
Born in Setúbal, Portugal, I moved to the United Kingdom at the age of 6. Music became my way to connect to Portugal, and I began singing fado with my pai. During my undergraduate studies, I examined fado in the diaspora, and for my master’s thesis at Oxford University I investigated fado during the Estado Novo and Amália Rodrigues.
However, it was the conversations with my family, the stories I heard from my godmother, that inspired me to look at how people listened through censorship as the focus of my PhD dissertation.
I'm a PhD Candidate studying music and human rights at the University of California, Davis.