Artistic works
Portrait of Teresa Sirgado
Lorena Travassos, 2022
Slavery, prisons ... I know ... my husband's father and brother (my late husband) were killed because they were people already (what did they call?) Assimilated! They were people who liked to study; they were intelligent people! And were killed because of that. Everything that made it ahead... every black man who wanted to learn, if you get a little, they soon cut you off. The PIDE [Portuguese political police] were always there ... and the blacks disappeared! They disappeared! Many were arrested here and taken to Tarrafal, like Agostinho Neto (president of Angola). He was arrested in Coimbra and had to escape to study here, right? Many leaders who managed to escape came to Portugal, and we came here. The others arrived too. Nor could they talk about politics; nothing could be said. What to say: they were the colonisers, but they were also the oppressors. ”
Anthropobiological Mission of Angola
1. Diary of António Marques de Almeida Júnior.
October 10, 1950, in Quipungo, Angola.
Almeida Júnior was an anthropometrist and photographer assistant at the Anthropobiological Mission of Angola.
2. Photographs of observed women in the 1950 campaign, without mentioning their names.
Quipungo, Angola.
3. Dermatoglyphics of Tereza (another Tereza?)
Campaign of 1955. Tômbua, Angola.
Tereza Sirgado's personal archive
4. Personal photo album.
Prints 10x15 cm, coloured.
“I am Teresa Maria do Rosário Sirgado Silva. I am 63 years old and have been a cook for 19 years. I am a native of Angola with Portuguese nationality. When I arrived here, I was 26 years old and had already paid the account. I was born in Luanda; I grew up in Luanda until I was 26, when I came to Portugal. I came here because there was a war; as you know, the war in Angola lasted 40 or so years; there were wars, schools were closed, and we could not create two children. I came here with my little ones to put them in school and try for a better life. ”
5. Photograph of Teresa Sirgado's Grandmother.
Tereza Diniz, Teresa Sirgado's grandmother, was from Luanda.
In the photo, she is with Teresa Sirgado's father.
“My father's father. My father's father had... had my father with a black woman, a black woman from Bessangana (bessangana means a black woman from the island who wore clothes), made the child with her, but married another at a distance, with a Portuguese woman I didn't know. (See?) He could be married to a black woman, but he married a Portuguese woman here (Lisbon). They were married, being the woman here in Portugal.
6. Mukankala woman sculpture
Wood, Luanda, undated.
“At the time, we could not go through (immigration) neither with money nor with images and then we… Angolan crafts didn't go out either, so the people wrapped loads of laundry and stayed so confused looking for things that... it was so many clothes that they missed things in the end. I saw... I saw many people being killed; I saw schoolmates being killed; I saw the worst horrors I wouldn't wish on anyone. I wanted something that reminded me of Africa and my past because the war destroyed my past. Then I wanted to bring something that held me, that let that little bit of my Angola stay there in the corner, that despite everything, I was happy in my childhood.”
Why do we show the light and dark darkness hours in the same circle? (I)
work in progress
Susana de Sousa Dias, 2022
Video installation on a screen and printing on paper
4:3, b&w, sound, 10.’
Camera and image processing: Mário Espada
Production: Ansgar Schaefer | Kintop
In 1920, Louis Lumière presented a technology called “photo-stereo synthèse”. A face, photographed by layers, each corresponding to an image with a small depth of field, is later visible in whole through a reconfiguration in space. By digitally simulating this process on the image of Mussudi Camará's face — one of the rare women photographed in anthropological missions whose name was registered — and reconfiguring it over time, we try to question the colonial anthropometric images and their forms of display. More than constituting a person's portrait, these promote their erasure according to the metric of the body.
ELSE
Elsewhere, Somewhere, Anywhere, Everywhere
Helena Elias, 2022
A book produced from an artistic residency with students at Escola Seomara Costa Primo, a school with a high school drop-out rate and with a community of Afro-descendant students.
The students attending the 10th-grade course on Professional Photography developed a visual composition from image descriptions of landmarks and surrounding flora from the IICT photographic archive. The book contains the reports, the images produced by the students from the descriptions, and reproductions of the original photographs. After viewing the actual photos, they only knew from descriptions, a conversation on colonial pasts and strategies of decolonisation took place.
EMOTIONAL LANDMARKS
ELSE - Elsewhere, Somewhere, Anywhere, Everywhere
Helena Elias, 2022
REconFIGURATIONS at Trafaria.
From an artistic residency with participants from the Social Center of Trafaria, SCMA, inhabitants with different ages, occupations and roles have developed a work around their memories. These stories around personal memories and landmarks resulted in the construction of objects like the beach awning and the raft, both made with trash collected from Trafaria Beach.