Participating artists/writers include Welket Bungué, Ana Balona de Oliveira, Joacine Katar Moreira, Mariana Aboim, Sandim Mendes, The singularity of Tchiloli - René Tavares, Mónica de Miranda, Irineu Destourelles
Between Sankofa and janus… the labour of the ‘transterritorialised’artists - Inocência Mata
“People literally need to take a steps backwards to reclaim the past so as to understand the present an why and how they have come to be where they are and who they are today.” - Kofi Poku Quan-Baffour 2012, 3
”(…) proposing to counter the official tendency of “forgetfulness” as a condition for “reconciliation”, through dynamically historical dialogue with the sagacity of the ancestors in the search for solutions to the anxieties of the present.”
”(…) a rhizome ‘does not begin or conclude, it is always in the middle, between things, an inter-being, intermezzo. The tree is affiliation, but the rhizome is alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be”, but the rhizome has as tissues the conjunction: “and…and… and…” In this conjunction there is enough strength to shake and uproot the verb “to be”. (…)’. - Rhizome - Gille Deleuze
”(…) how to transform marginalised communities into a social, historical, cultural presence, neutralising their invisibility - or rather the process of invisibility.”
TO DECOLONISE IS TO D.E.P.R.O.G.R.A.M.M.E. Systemic racism, body, gender and diaspora in arts -Joacine Katar Moreira
”(…) monumentalisation of their imperial history(…)”
“Thus, the countries of the Global North continue to comply with the colonial agenda, from the moment they are held hostage by their imperial history and by the need to preserve and transmit it through the concealment of the atrocities committed against other peoples and, above all, by the way in which this imperial history has formed the basis of their national identity as a community.”
”(…)which coexisted with the Enslavement of peoples and human trafficking, and the consequent dehumanisation of entire peoples, with harmful practices such as epistemicide, which relativised ,erased and destroyed existing local knowledge, but also by the abusive exploitation and spoliation of the wealth of colonised territories.”
”(…) that seeks to render it invisible and silence it through non-recognition or through the devaluation of its importance for the construction of contemporaneity.”
“Deprogramming colonial violence involves returning colonial pain and trauma to its thinkers, through a historical catharsis that restores the traumas of colonial history to European countries, which strategically chose to only commemorate those which are considered the great and heroic feats of colonisation. This commemoration involves the generally abusive exhibition, in the public space, of monuments and statues of an ode to colonialism, considered the Golden Age of European scientific and cultural expression. Transmitting colonial history through the omission of the history of African and indigenous resistance and concealing or relativising the brutality of the colonial enterprise. It also involves the deviation of colonial History – which is essentially European – into the History of colonised countries, whose history is then divided into “pre-colonial”, “colonial” times and a “postcolonial” era.”
“Culture against the phallocentric hierarchies of the system and to promote inclusive horizontalities of the diversity that has always characterised human experiences.”
Contemporary art and the interwoven histories of Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe - Ana Balona de Oliveira
“The mastery of Portuguese, among other requirements, was formalised through successive legislation comprising the Estatuto do Indigenato, which, until 1961, distinguished between indígenas, assimilados and whites. The assimilados were considered civilised and so “almost” Portuguese, while the indígenas were seen as uncivilised and occupied the bottom of the colonial social hierarchy. On the Portuguese so-called civilising mission between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, see Bandeira Jerónimo 2009. On the Portuguese classification of Africans throughout several colonial periods, see Castro Henriques 2019”
“Theorised by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, lusotropicalism was appropriated by the Estado Novo after the Second World War to justify Portugal’s maintenance of its African colonies when other European countries started to decolonise. It propagated the idea that the Portuguese mixed more with the African populations they colonised and were more benevolent towards them than the other European colonisers. These ideas are still pervasive in Portuguese society (Castelo 1998; Anderson et al. 2019).”