It's not up to the neo-animists to invent anything or to feel forced to do so. On the contrary it is to insist on the evocation of all knowledges and on the review of all data, documents and materials available. They might reveal other answers, having both time and situation changed, that go beyond those found by former researchers or even by those who collected them or put them in order.
The work presented by Yonamine in this exhibition speaks about the idea of erasure.
Yonamine comes from an erased country, Angola. A country which history, instead of working as a palimpsest – that is, a text over which multiple writings were produced leaving notice of those preceding them – has always worked as an erasing process. History has been erased in the name of a bigger interest. The Portuguese colonial past that Yonamine evokes with a subtle irony in the exhibition's title and in the tobacco boxes series was removed by the sudden decolonization process, which, by its turn, was erased by the war that now is being erased by peace.
I began to feel the painful lack of African history in my curriculum and the absence of Afro-Brazilians amongst my college peers. The way blacks were represented (or absent from) the media had bothered me since I was a child. Now, as a film producer, it made me even more uncomfortable. To escape this dilemma, I felt I had to follow my dream of making my own films, but where to begin?
Dakar became overpopulated towards the beginning of the fifties. A displacement of families away from the inner city neighbourhoods was decided by the colonial state: they were truly "evictions" framed within urban planning projects. The Pikine department was created, regrouping "all of Dakar's excluded". Today it accounts for about one million persons: there is talk about "Pikine-Peking".
To western architects such as me, who have been developing their work as project designers or researchers in Angola, the issue that strikes us the most is the apparent conflict opposing Luanda to the rest of the Angolan territory.
Kiluanji Kia Henda has displayed his art internationally – from Guangzhou to Cape Town, from Nairobi to Venice – which decouples his work from the exclusive legitimacy granted by Western contemporary art capitals. Another unique trait of his trajectory is that so far, his work has not been presented and sanctioned by the “small” world of its former “metropole”, Lisbon. As an Angolan artist, and therefore, from an independent country today and once a Portuguese colony, his art world’s has been extraneous to a set of cultural policies that take Portuguese-as-connection, and which rely on a closed circuit showcasing of art and its artists, traveling between ex-colonies and the ex-metropole.
It's not up to the neo-animists to invent anything or to feel forced to do so. On the contrary it is to insist on the evocation of all knowledges and on the review of all data, documents and materials available. They might reveal other answers, having both time and situation changed, that go beyond those found by former researchers or even by those who collected them or put them in order. 
The work presented by Yonamine in this exhibition speaks about the idea of erasure.
Yonamine comes from an erased country, Angola. A country which history, instead of working as a palimpsest – that is, a text over which multiple writings were produced leaving notice of those preceding them – has always worked as an erasing process. History has been erased in the name of a bigger interest. The Portuguese colonial past that Yonamine evokes with a subtle irony in the exhibition's title and in the tobacco boxes series was removed by the sudden decolonization process, which, by its turn, was erased by the war that now is being erased by peace. 
I began to feel the painful lack of African history in my curriculum and the absence of Afro-Brazilians amongst my college peers. The way blacks were represented (or absent from) the media had bothered me since I was a child. Now, as a film producer, it made me even more uncomfortable. To escape this dilemma, I felt I had to follow my dream of making my own films, but where to begin? 
Dakar became overpopulated towards the beginning of the fifties. A displacement of families away from the inner city neighbourhoods was decided by the colonial state: they were truly "evictions" framed within urban planning projects. The Pikine department was created, regrouping "all of Dakar's excluded". Today it accounts for about one million persons: there is talk about "Pikine-Peking". 
To western architects such as me, who have been developing their work as project designers or researchers in Angola, the issue that strikes us the most is the apparent conflict opposing Luanda to the rest of the Angolan territory. 
Kiluanji Kia Henda has displayed his art internationally – from Guangzhou to Cape Town, from Nairobi to Venice – which decouples his work from the exclusive legitimacy granted by Western contemporary art capitals. Another unique trait of his trajectory is that so far, his work has not been presented and sanctioned by the “small” world of its former “metropole”, Lisbon. As an Angolan artist, and therefore, from an independent country today and once a Portuguese colony, his art world’s has been extraneous to a set of cultural policies that take Portuguese-as-connection, and which rely on a closed circuit showcasing of art and its artists, traveling between ex-colonies and the ex-metropole. 
