Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal fought a series of colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau against anti-colonial independence movements. Tens of thousands of young men were conscripted into these conflicts, which ended only with the collapse of the Estado Novo dictatorship. This talk offers preliminary reflections on Leonel de Castro’s photobook Despojos de Guerra (2024), which presents portraits of disabled veterans of these wars—both Portuguese soldiers and former combatants from African liberation movements—photographed in Portugal and across the former colonies.

Focusing specifically on portraits of Portuguese veterans with limb loss, I argue that the series articulates a visual politics of abandonment. The collection’s stark aesthetic should not be read as a pessimistic representation of disability; rather, it renders legible the Portuguese state’s long-term neglect of those injured in the Colonial War. This neglect extends beyond welfare provision into the realm of memory, where—in the decades following the Revolution—the stigma attached to the Colonial War contributed to the marginalisation of veterans whose bodies bore its most enduring traces. The photographs thus expose a biopolitical logic in which abandonment operates not only through social and institutional neglect, but also through exclusion from the nation’s historical imagination.

I therefore consider how Despojos de Guerra intervenes in Portuguese collective memory of the Colonial War—a conflict whose visual archive remains comparatively thin and largely unprocessed within national commemorative culture. By foregrounding bodies that the state has been reluctant to acknowledge, the photobook enacts a form of political and memorial labour which reinserts these veterans into a public visual record from which they have long been excluded.