This thesis focuses on contemporary processes of requalification, musealization, or appropriation of a set of buildings associated with the Portuguese dictatorship, that lasted from 1926 to 1974.
Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2019, Joana Miguel Martins Santos de Almeida analyses the contemporary uses of the former Aljube prison and the subdelegation and prison of the political police in Porto, where the Aljube Museum Resistance and Freedom, and the Military Museum of Porto are currently located, as well as its national headquarters in Lisbon, requalified in democracy as an apartment complex.
The aim of this research is to understand the social and personal impact of the patrimonialisation of the memory of the Portuguese dictatorship, or its absence, and of those who opposed it. It also proposes to understand the meanings woven by those who visit these spaces in democracy and by those who experienced them during the dictatorship.
As a result, this research contributes to an analysis of the trajectory of these spaces in democracy and to the field of Critical Heritage Studies. Ultimately this research scrutinises a concept of heritage which, in addition to its materiality, is defined by the intangibility of the memories, subjectivities and agencies that compose it.
