"Reconfiguring the Archive" draws on the photographic collections of the Digital Tropical Scientific Archive, produced during scientific missions in Portuguese colonial territories (1930–1970). Through the appropriation and reorganization of images depicting fauna, flora and landscapes, the project examines the role of scientific photography and the archive in constructing an idea of “tropicality” and shaping particular ways of seeing colonial territories.

Inspired by Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, the exhibition arranges images into atlases, establishing associations between visual signs across different photographic collections and incorporating postcards as objects of circulation and as vehicles for constructing travel imaginaries. Editing and montage thus become tools for investigation, creating new relationships between images and proposing a critical reinterpretation of the archive and the visual narratives it preserves and reactivates in the present.