MAXAMBA and Memory-Making Amid Traumatic Displacement

Abstract

In this edited interview, psychologists Eric Greene and Nisha Gupta converse with filmmaker and psychologist Suzanne Barnard about her film MAXAMBA. MAXAMBA was created as a sensory ethnographic memory of inhabitants of Lisbon’s Quinta da Vitória neighborhood as they awaited the neighborhood’s final demolition. The film focuses on the daily life of an Indian Portuguese couple who emigrated from Mozambique (a former colony of Portugal) to Lisbon in the 1970s. The husband and wife both work out of their home in the neighborhood. As tailors, they have a close relationship with the other inhabitants, and they are especially integrated into the Hindu community that lives in this neighborhood. In this dialogue, Suzanne describes the film as constructing a virtual or living memory out of coexisting planes of past, present, and future—a memorial process that seeks to honor the everyday life of the couple prior to their traumatic displacement. She also explores how the film attempts to mobilize an intervention in the neighborhood’s representation in the city, and reflects on opportunities and limitations for art activism through the vehicle of filmmaking.