BY ONYEKA IGWE
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based, moving image artist and researcher.Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task.For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.She has had solo/duo shows at Tate Britain (2025), MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018).Recent group exhibitions have been held at Rockbund Art Museum (2025), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Nigeria Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Lagos Biennial, Lagos (all 2024); The Common Guild, Glasgow and South London Gallery, London; (2023). She was jointly awarded the Film London Jarman Award in 2025.
BY ONYEKA IGWE
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based, moving image artist and researcher.Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task.For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.She has had solo/duo shows at Tate Britain (2025), MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018).Recent group exhibitions have been held at Rockbund Art Museum (2025), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Nigeria Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Lagos Biennial, Lagos (all 2024); The Common Guild, Glasgow and South London Gallery, London; (2023). She was jointly awarded the Film London Jarman Award in 2025.
BY ONYEKA IGWE
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based, moving image artist and researcher.Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task.For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.She has had solo/duo shows at Tate Britain (2025), MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018).Recent group exhibitions have been held at Rockbund Art Museum (2025), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Nigeria Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Lagos Biennial, Lagos (all 2024); The Common Guild, Glasgow and South London Gallery, London; (2023). She was jointly awarded the Film London Jarman Award in 2025.
BY ONYEKA IGWE
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
These experiences are always a little flat and I should know better.
What was I hoping to find — the same kind of experience that H and Y had when we walked along the corniches of Athens and Marseille? A desperate need to touch any part of my body in the water?
Yes, this Lagos and its namesake shared the same ocean, but what do I know of it? I had more in common with the British tourists of the Algarve descending on the coast wishing for heat despite the persistent cloud cover, dressed in their best summer looks. No, I had my Schott jacket on, looking like I have most days of the slow advance to Spring 2026.
Still. I'm not a Lagosian so I can't notice those echoes, even though it now occupies a place in my spatial proprioceptive memory alongside London and Toronto. I had done some work.
Lagos, Portugal is a tourist town, and I frankly only knew of this iteration when I tried to book a hotel in Lagos, Nigeria. The search function always assumes I mean Portugal, which I never did.
I had guessed it meant Lake, but only since being here has the Portuguese beginning of colonialism become clear, and so I understand that the naming of the
Nigerian version is Portuguese in origin. Whether the city was named after the last place from whence they came, or whether it received the nomenclature because it too is a settlement built in, or around, or between lakes.
On arrival I meet a Lagos conquered by tourism. It is of course trite to make the connection, but the English, French and Italian spoken throughout the streets is hard to ignore. And the brunch of it all. Matcha capitalism reigns supreme.
But I was also here on my unofficial tour of failed monuments. Monuments denied.
In 2009, when excavating land for an underground car park, the skeletons of human bodies were found. 158. A mass grave of unmarked bodies dating from the 15th century. After testing, it was revealed that these bodies originated from Sub-Saharan Africa and the only way they could have got there was the trade of enslaved people.
Some were still in chains. I went to the site, passing by the monument to Henry the Navigator — the king who oversaw the beginnings of Portuguese colonialism and slave trading. He stands in a pristine white square that was formerly a slave market. His statue, erected in 1960, looks over the sea as if he were Poseidon. 1960 —during the dictatorship — is perhaps some excuse, but the cleaned-up red splodge at the bottom of the plinth suggests not.
I walk past the small slavery museum, not open on Mondays, established in 2014 as an acknowledgement of the mass grave unearthed in 2009. The existence of the slave market wasn't enough to demand recognition of the presence of slavery here.
I get to the car park that is just beyond the medieval city wall — a prime spot for a park and walkway mandated to all incoming visitors. There is also now a crazy golf attraction atop the car park. It appears closed for renovations and I see workers throughout, mending the thoroughfares. There are also many of those goddess figures in red, blue, yellow, green and pink in many different positions decorating the lawn. I am clueless as to why they chose this as their emblem, and then notice the figures remind me of Sarah Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), but push those thoughts away.
I hear English accents amongst the men supervising the work — the owners, I guess. Everywhere I'm looking for a plaque. I read there was one at the entrance, but when I get to it there are only plaques to the people that built the car park. I wander around some more but find nothing. I press my head against the wall with the plaques and notice the holes that have been filled. Did they take it down?
I emailed a friend last week who had mentioned a very different kind of monument, snatching onto the breadcrumbs. I replied, 'I'm thinking a bit about monuments, feel like they're always quite sad, or maybe something is just off. Always missing some of their parts.' She replied, speech marks: 'sad and smash it down'; Simple. But then I think people don't really know, and I don't know either — and maybe it helps when there's a huge thing blocking their way on the street to explain what was there before.
Walking to find Casa dos Estudantes do Império, I spot a facade. It had green tiles and cement exposed after tiles had been removed. Yesterday I ran my hands over cement like this and added to my collection — to accompany the stones. I had seen them being repaired further down the road and chanced that this one wouldn't be missed because it was to be replaced. I also thought about my habit of collecting paving. I remembered having to hastily repack a bag when leaving Nigeria last year because a woman at the bag scanner shook her head when she saw the shape of a paving slab in my bag.
You can't bring that on the plane — it's a weapon!
In my naivety I just thought it was a precious artifact that I couldn't keep in the hold. The slab had a palm tree embossed on it and I had taken it from the University of Ibadan. It sits atop my bookshelf now. I don't really know what to do with it.
I have seen so many of these facades in Lisbon, sunlight streaming through empty windowpanes. Demolition behind, but these fronts remain standing tall. This one has a sign reading PERIGO, which I learned means DANGER. I suppose anything could fall. No wonder they keep the facades; they are synonymous with Portugal. Like the calçadas — I overhear some tourists talk about the labour involved in the installation, the patterns, the artisanal quality. I've seen them being installed by one man on his own, laying the lime mortar on his knees, and then by a crew of three in municipal green, taking it slow and diligent in the sun. I remember Naky on the tour pondering the race of those who laboured to make the picture postcard version of Portugal.
I get to Casa dos Estudantes do Império. I think about how I know about the existence of the building given the scant lusophone-anglophone historical exchange— when I came to Lisbon with Canadian friends last year, they didn't even know there had been a dictatorship here. Films. I can't remember if it was César, Henderson or Woodberry. I guess if I had been born decades earlier it would be books, but films have truly given me a rich education. The sociologist, anthropologist and historian assure me that the film on Mario is probably the most comprehensive history of Mário Pinto de Andrade ever made. I bet Woodberry is proud of that — I would be.
I don't know why I expect a plaque. Is it because Google labelled the location Heritage Preservation? There isn't one. A tall pale-yellow building with an opticians at the bottom — many things look new: new windows, definitely a new lick of paint, maybe something has been removed. I look at a photograph of the building in its heyday, full of students from Portugal's colonies and Brazil, when it was the home of the seeds of the undoing of the Portuguese empire. It was paid for by the Portuguese government in their beneficence. You must lick your lips at that delicious irony. It lasted twenty years before being closed by PIDE.
The facade of the building remains, even if it was here before it became symbolic of anti-colonial organising. But I think there's something in how it remains. They don't knock down buildings if they want us to forget — these facades remain as historical artifacts of an imagined past. There is a metaphor in a society that keeps the facades of its buildings and demolishes all that's inside.
I don't think I like statues, memorials, or monuments. I don't seek them out often, save the Soviet realist ones, because I love the straight lines they make of the face. The angles of a curved body. The monumentalism of a line. But reading this book on the history of African Lisbon I was looking for something to hold on to. History which usually enlivens was deadening here. It was a book of remove — in part, I'm sure, to display objectivity — but the voice of the text was betraying a liberal equanimity in the face of what it was describing as repression, racism, violence, discrimination and
cruelty. It didn't help that I could hear every word of the conversation of a group of American tourists dreaming about Louboutins for a future imagined wedding, because I couldn't get the Wi-Fi to work to drown them out with my music.
The end of the book, concluding a 600-year history, had a small image of a new monument. The book starts with the Torre de Belém, so this is an appropriate
ending, drawing a line from monument to monument. Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare won a public bid for a monument to the victims of slavery in Portugal. The book said it was situated at Campo das Cebolas and gave 2021 as a date. I look it up on my map — only a two-minute walk away — so I go down there, why not? It's raining, which is a pain, because I was told it was sunny in London, and then I chastise myself: I was literally baking in the sun on a beach just the Sunday before.
I walk down in the rain to Campo das Cebolas. Nothing. I wonder if it was a temporary monument, which would explain the absence. Surely no country makes a temporary monument to slavery. I remember the proposal for a monument in London, awarded in 2024 to an artist accused of sexual assault who has since fled the city. I look it up — it's going to be unveiled in 2027, installed next to the Museum of London Docklands, which is perhaps the only museum I truly enjoy visiting, though maybe that is because of my soft spot for the Docklands. So back to rainy Lisbon and the former dock of the river Tagus. No monument. I look up more articles and scan my surroundings, which are written as though the monument has been built. I look up the monument by its title, Plantation — Prosperity and Nightmare.
Nothing. I look up 'Memorial in tribute to enslaved people in Lisbon'. Nothing. I search for images of the monument and I'm afraid to say I can't tell if they are
renders or real. I look at the pink and yellow buildings and realise I am not at the right spot. So I walk around to the spot I can see in the images, which I now
understand is entirely imagined — a proposed monument, the dream of one. I take a photo of the empty space where it should be.
I finally find my answers when I return to the studio and can search the internet more easily than while shielding my phone from the rain in the street. Portugal Decoded, a paid Substack for English speakers interested in the political goings-on in the country (another expense to be written up in my taxes), reports that the monument hadn't been built because of wranglings over property ownership and preservation. Campo das Cebolas was rejected as a site because of heritage concerns. I wondered what heritage concerns this heritage project was bumping up against. Apparently, it was going to block views of the river Tagus.
The irony here doesn't bear repeating. Or does it? A memorial to enslaved Africans traded on boats travelling on the Atlantic was rejected because it blocks views of a body of water.
The monument is now returning to its first proposed site, Ribeira das Naus, which was initially rejected because it was owned by the Navy. This new site is not owned by the Navy but by the municipality. It is a grassy area that was home to a giant screen showing Portugal winning the 2025 Nations League final against Spain. The memorial and tribute to enslaved people is to find a home in the space that last saw Portugal win the football tournament they have won the most.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based, moving image artist and researcher.Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task.For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.She has had solo/duo shows at Tate Britain (2025), MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018).Recent group exhibitions have been held at Rockbund Art Museum (2025), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Nigeria Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Lagos Biennial, Lagos (all 2024); The Common Guild, Glasgow and South London Gallery, London; (2023). She was jointly awarded the Film London Jarman Award in 2025.