To commemorate the 70th anniversaries of the establishing of Portugal-Canada diplomatic relations (1952) in 2022 and the beginning of Portuguese mass migration to Canada (May 13, 1953) in 2023, the Embassy of Portugal in Canada took the initiative of producing a traveling exhibition and a website, having hired for this purpose Gilberto Fernandes, owner of Tempo Historical Consulting. The project's sponsors are the Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua and the Labourers’ International Union of North America’s Local 183.

The website, titled Movimento Perpétuo: The Portuguese Diaspora in Canada, will be launched tomorrow, June 1st, 2023, coinciding with the beginning of Portuguese Heritage Month in Canada. It contains:

• More than 70 profiles of Portuguese-Canadian individuals and organizations in Ontario and Quebec, representing various sectors of Canadian society, regions of origin, experiences, and intersecting identities;
• Over 80 digitized artifacts (some in 3D) crowdsourced from community members, most of them featuring audio commentary from the participants;
• 15 virtual tours of locations in Toronto, Guelph, Caledon, and Montreal, featuring audio commentary of points of interest provided by the participants;
• 75 short documentaries from Rádio Televisão Portuguesa - Internacional (RTPi), National Film Board, and other sources;
• An illustrated timeline of Portuguese-Canadian, Portuguese, and Canadian history with over 300 entries;
• Several audio recordings from interviews with the participants;
• An interactive business and service map of Toronto's Little Portugal in 2013 & 2018;
• Videos made by community members, including Portuguese-Canadian students;
• Multiple selections of digitized historical records from public archives and personal collections, including photos, newspapers, correspondence, and other documents;
• Infographics on various statistics related to the Portuguese diaspora in Canada

Above all, this website contains informative, intelligent, funny, beautiful, moving stories and reflections shared by the participants, whose interconnected memories, common experiences and individual choices, reveal the intersecting life paths, intentional and accidental interactions, that make up the Portuguese community. Its history is heavy and rich, even if often unknown. The stories it contains deserve to be known.

The many contributions from the individuals and organizations invited to participate in this website and exhibition were essential for its making. The participants were selected from among 100 short documentaries that Gilberto Fernandes co-produced in 2015-17 for the RTPi's show Hora dos Portugueses. All of the artifacts and many of the photos, videos, and records used were sourced from these participants. Many of them participated further by being interviewed for the purpose of producing audio clips to accompany their materials on the website and the exhibition. Other historical records were selected from the archival holdings of the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University, including the collections donated with the help of the Portuguese Canadian History Project.

Many more individuals and organizations could be added. This fact speaks to the richness of the Portuguese diaspora in Canada, which is too vast to be fully encompassed here. We hope that our sample of people, things, places, times, and stories is representative of its diversity and complexity, and invites those interested to seek and offer more. The website is the legacy piece of this project. Its creators intend for it to become a living community-sourced platform going forward, and a reference for researchers, teachers, students, artists, journalists, and anyone interested in the Portuguese diaspora in Canada and around the world.

The project manager, Gilberto Fernandes, is also the curator, lead researcher, graphic and web designer, digital content developer, and copywriter of the website and exhibition. Supporting him were the research assistants and assistant copywriters Alice Franco, Amanda Dinally, Ester-Judit Flores, Madeline Ball, Rui Pascoal. Rui Pimenta is the assistant curator for the exhibition's art section and Tanaaz Bamji the assistant graphic designer for the exhibition's displays.

The exhibition will be shown at the Toronto Metro Hall rotunda between September 11 and 22, 2023. We are grateful to the City of Toronto for offering the space. The date of exhibition's official inauguration will be announced soon.

The URL is: https://movimentoperpetuo.ca/ For further questions or requests for interviews, please contact Gilberto Fernandes at info@tempohc.ca or 647 504 4496. Embaixada de Portugal no Canadá