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Panorama of Congo: Unrolling the Past with Virtual Reality (exhibition): curator

Impact: Cultural impacts

Description of impact

The Panorama of Congo, is a huge painting (115 meters long by 14 metres tall) and is one of the most notorious examples of Belgian colonial propaganda. It was the centre piece the World’s Fair in Ghent in 1913, but has been in storage and unseen by the public for almost 90 years, until now. In 2022, a team of 20+ scholars, photographers, videographers, artists, designers, film-makers, sound engineers, and VR specialists from IADT (Dublin), Lusofona University (Lisbon) and LUCA School of Arts (Belgium), came together through the FilmEU consortium to digitise and research this painting. This project has culminated in the exhibition Panorama of Congo: Unrolling the Past with Virtual Reality at the Museum of Natural History and Sciences, Lisbon (Feb 24- June 30), which re-creates this painting in both physical and digital formats. The exhibition will travel to the The African Museum in Tervuren in 2025. I am one of four curators of this exhibition which engages with discourses of digitising heritage and decolonisation of museums.
Category of impactCultural impacts