BUALA

BUALA (in quimbundo Bwala) means home, village, community, and a meeting place. The project’s “geography” will be shaped according to the origins of the contributions made to it. A landscape carved through nomadic paths, rather than settled ones.

BUALA (www.buala.org) is an open-acess website that provides a digital home for multiple voices from Africa, Brazil, Europe, and beyond. Launched in 2010 by publisher, academic writer and activist Marta Lança, Buala became a reference in the artistic and academic fields, as a multidisciplinary platform exploring the synergies between art, theory, and activism in order to address stimulate public debate about the lasting impact of racism and colonialism across Portuguese-speaking communities.
The open access website maintains an archive of more than 7000 texts, from essays and interviews to manifests and blog posts, as well as multiple virtual exhibitions. Primarily written in Portuguese, it hosts a number of translations into English and French. 
With more than 50 000 visits per month, BUALA reaches audiences across the entire globe and is often used in research and educational activities, particularly, in locations where there is scarcity of bibliographical resources, or a lack of spaces for publishing critical and independent views.

This not only given visibility to issues and perspectives that were rarely discussed beyond academic circles, it has also strengthened processes of cultural exchange, while contributing to democratize the production and access to knowledge in and across Africa, Europe, and Brazil. 
Produced by a multi-continental and decentralized network of  collaborators, the project has reached a stage in which it needs to create financial and infrastrcutural conditions for maintaining and reinforcing its activity.
The lack of critical thinking and postcolonial imagination has profound effects on our societies. Without cultural initiatives that stimulate the capacity to analy

Our editorial line is builded on the urgencies of Southern issues. Among many subjects, we approach the relationship between countries crossed by a common and violent history about whose problematic impacts we are interested, looking at the tensions and singularities of each context. Adding for this counter-historical archive, we indague what it is to make art and how it performs through other fields. Our approach is focused on the postcolonial in Europe, the relation of ex-metropolis with ex-colonies, migrations and hospitality. We address the cultures of the Black Atlantic, colonial and enslaved history in articulation with the resistance and cultural expressions of the black diaspora. We reflect from artistic practices to think about identity disputes, gender and race, indigenous issues or the black movement. We want to proceed our interest in the relationship between art, memory, heritage, reparation, so this project will give input to write  more about memory politics and to make a critical review of the official narratives of national histories. We are interested in discussions about the climate crisis, alterity, citizenship and epistemological diversity. We present theories, visions and perspectives of emerging thinking, often produced outside Europe or beyond ocidental paradigm.

BUALA has created a network of collaborators to provide information, research, ideas and images. We know profoundly the field we are talking about, resulting for a long experience in African countries and Brazil. BUALA moves apart from a curatorial line “from top to bottom”, privileging instead the organic of the exchanges and criticism in the cultural debate on South-South and North-South relations.

The lack of critical thinking and postcolonial imagination has profound effects on our societies. Without widespread capacity to analyze, access, and reconstruct the cultural narratives that shape our lives, we will forever be trapped in a never-ending spiral of prejudice, bigotry, and inequality.

ze, access, and reconstruct the cultural narratives that shape our lives, we will forever be trapped in a never-ending spiral of prejudice, bigotry, and inequality.

The Portuguese language, celebrated in the diversity of its sources – Portugal, Brazil and Africa – in dialogue with the world.

Buala.org wants to make a place for the highly complex and vast field formed by the African culture, which faces a fast paced economical, political and social change. We understand the concept of culture as “system”, “community”, “event”, several sensibilities, their friction and clashes. The existing cultural politics and cultural policies, and what rests in between them. We want to problematize historical as well as ideological questions, crossing times and legacies. In the end we want to create new perspectives, without pretenses or colonial attachments, using as starting points diverse concepts emerging from contemporary Africa.

Buala.org gathers in the same place and makes available, materials, images, projects, intents, affections and memories; it is a platform built for people. A network for culture professionals and thinkers: artists, cultural agents, researchers, journalists, travelers and authors. Everyone can cross paths and reside in this Buala.

 

Buala in numbers:

 

15 year (since May 2010)

13 sections + 1 gallery + 1 Blog
+ de 5000 authors
+ de 8000 articles 
45 exhibitions
Posts  DÁFALA
45 000 monthly visits 
17 000 followers on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

and 3000 in Instagram

 

financial support:

Casa das África - São Paulo - 2010

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian - 2011 

Apoio pontual da DGArtes - 2019 e 2024

Câmara Municipal de Lisboa - 2019 - 2020 / 2021 - 2022 / 2023 / 2024