Combining oral testimonies of former prisoners and public, political and literary accounts, in this presentation I propose an itinerary through the experiences of confinement and colonial and postcolonial prison torture through the angle of public policies of memory, the processes of public heritagization and the struggles for memory. The empirical site for this research is the Casa de Reclusão Militar in Luanda, an architectural that dates back to the first Portuguese colonization efforts on the Angolan coast and was later used as a political prison. At the end of the colonial period, it became a cornerstone of the liberation wars that led to Angola's independence in 1975, and is part of the itinerary of contemporary Angolan identity politics. Today, the site is in the process of renovation and reuse for the future Museum of the Liberation Struggle, scheduled to open in November 2025, the date of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Angola's independence. Considering the current curatorial process towards a discourse of public memory, what kind of memories will be conveyed within and through the architecture and materiality of the Casa/Museum? Proposing a confrontation between individual accounts of confinement and public narratives, I will explore this space as an illustration of what Federico Rahola (2007) called the ‘camp form’ in the recurrence of institutionalized experiences of confinement across (post/colonial) political regimes.

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