Tarrafal

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