Angola is a leading oil producer in Africa and one
might have expected that some of the financial
benefits of this valuable commodity would be passed onto the country’s film industry. Veteran Angolan filmmaker Mariano Bartolomeu provides an insight into the state of the film and television
industry in this Portuguese speaking country.
Afroscreen
14.08.2010 | by Martin Chemhere
Tchiloli is a story of blood and justice that the local people have made their own. They have turned it into a way to raise their voices against opression but also to retie their links with their African ancestors. Behind the colourful spectacle there is a hidden invocation to their ancestors, in references to a cult that was forbidden under colonial rule. Defeat comes, but there emerges an identity in territory that the first players could take for their own as a means of survival.
Stages
12.08.2010 | by Agnela Barros
One of the most important archeological sites in southwest Angola, Tchitundo-hulo, lies in a semi-arid region on the edge of the Namib desert. The site comprises an imposing granite inselberg, with three smaller hills nearby. These smaller inselbergs are known as Tchitundo-hulo Mucai, Pedra da Lagoa (Lake Rock), and Pedra das Zebras (Zebra Rock). The inselbergs all feature carvings engraved upon the rockface.
I'll visit
09.08.2010 | by Dario Melo
Living with Raul is like watching a non-stop show. Gestures, speech patterns, facial expressions, his (…) air, he’s a boy on stage all the time. There’s never any shortage of stories when he is around. His charm never lets go of you. In true Angolan fashion, everything came together – the excitement for life, the wide range of views, his instinct for theatre, and the smile instead of the tear. It all converged to create the talent that is Raul Rosário.
Face to face
31.07.2010 | by Marta Lança
This Angolan poet and musician has captivated European audiences, but the journey has been long and hard. In Lisbon, he was able to show us the rich cultural heritage of sounds emerging from Africa which had hitherto been hidden. He drew on his experience and on sounds from Angola and meshed them with the latest sounds being played in Europe. His music speaks of new trends and of being a global citizen. These are some of the secrets behind his original sound.
Face to face
22.07.2010 | by Marta Lança
...I am skeptical of claims made on behalf of populations, particularly in culturally disenfranchised and economically impoverished locations such as New Orleans or Haiti. I also do think that there can be legitimate concerns about the neo-colonial nature of the worldwide biennial trend, which tends to impose a Western cultural model as mainstream in non-Western locales the artistic practices and cultural heritage of which often belie the notion that contemporary art is a globally shared cultural value.
Face to face
22.07.2010 | by Claire Tancons
Real recognition for her talent came in 1966, when she wins the performance award at the Luanda song contest, with the famous song “Maria Provocação” by Ana Maria de Mascarenhas and Adelino Tavares da Silva. She still has vivid memories: “That night, in September 1966, in the Aviz cinema, there was only typically Angolan music to be heard. It was an overwhelming success and the sadness was also overwhelming when they announced that “Maria Provocação” could not be entered, because the organisers wouldn’t authorise the typical Angolan instruments of Ngola Ritmos to be part of the orchestra.
Stages
18.07.2010 | by Mário Rui Silva
Her compositions were first known only in a small inner circle, but with the Luanda Song Festival, her work became known to a wider public. In the 60s she had formed a duo with the Portuguese journalist Adelino Tavares da Silva, who had just arrived in Angola. They composed four or five songs together and then registered in the Portuguese Writers’ Association, with Adelino as songwriter and Ana Maria as composer. It can be said that the duo revolutionised the Song Festival, when Maria Provocação was performed by Sara Chaves and Mulata é a Noite by Concha de Mascarenhas. They were both accompanied by Ngola Ritmos, the Angolan rhythm group.
Stages
08.07.2010 | by Mário Rui Silva
Congo sends their hottest stars, but Mali is the African country with more representatives in FMM Sines 2010: Tinariwen, Cheick Tidiane Seck feat. Mamani Keita and Founé Diarra Trio (along with Breton Jacky Molard Quartet).
Stages
08.07.2010 | by Câmara Municipal de Sines
Délio Jasse work can be interpreted under the somewhat complex view of the post colonial speeches, in the sense that his images emanate a quality of alterity, which gives them identity. However this simplification can be limiting if it becomes dissonant with the artistic speech where his images belong, obviously.
Face to face
08.07.2010 | by Hugo Dinis
I have decided to act in the symbolic realm. The aim is not to change the world out there but the discourse about the world out there. To sharpen the consciousness about ones proper accountability for global developments. In my artistic and textual work, I try to elaborate on the correlation between high-technologized societies and the production of precarious living conditions. One of my prime concerns is the willingness to recognize that causes and solutions are not always located somewhere on the “outside”.
To read
27.06.2010 | by Ursula Biemann
At the horizon of imagined cities as “transcultural megacities”, music tends to gain agency in the promotion of senses of place and belonging in, and to the city. We attempt to show the ways in which the processes and values associated with the internationalization of culture – which, more generally, are taking place within the context of the “new political economy and its culture”, may be explored under the light of some musical manifestations taking place in the city of Lisbon.
Stages
15.06.2010 | by Jorge de La Barre
Kepha Oiro is a contemporary dancer and choreographer from Nairobi – Kenya. He's the artistic director of a new contemporary performing group: Tuchangamke, which conducts research into movement fusion in ethnic African communities, based at the Kenya National Theatre, Nairobi, and is the artistic director of the Dance Marathon initiative. This encounter with Nadine Siegert took place in Cologne (Germany) during an artist residency until March 2010.
Stages
14.06.2010 | by Nadine Siegert
Kuduro sprang up Luanda's musseques (shanty towns) and spread rapidly through the Kandongueiros (street vendors or hawkers). New music appears on a daily basis, feeding Luanda's vocabulary with new expressions, new beats and new moves. This frenetic creation of urban languages plays an important role in today's Luanda, especially among the younger city dwellers.
Stages
11.06.2010 | by Francisca Bagulho
I hate the idea that African life is simple bare life - the life of an empty stomach and a naked body waiting to be fed, clothed, healed or housed. It is a conception that is embedded in "development" ideology and practice. It radically goes against people's own daily experience with the immaterial world of the spirit, especially as it manifests itself under conditions of extreme precariousness and radical uncertainty. This kind of metaphysical and ontological violence has long been a fundamental aspect of the fiction of development the West seeks to impose on those it has colonized. We must oppose it and resist such surreptitious forms of dehumanization.
Mukanda
09.06.2010 | by Achille Mbembe
"Our Forbidden Places", an extraordinary documentary by Leila Kilani, returns to the political repression in Morocco in the time of Hassan II. Three generations of Moroccans evoke a completely human story of heroism and fortitude. Belying their serenity, all the characters form a perfect picture of Morocco today –they are still frightened by memories of being “buried alive” in Tazmamart prison and of countless cries of despair that few dared even to listen to. "Our Forbidden Places" is not really a film about a particular country, but rather it echoes all human memories of torment by extreme forms of state violence, be it blind or selective.
Afroscreen
06.06.2010 | by Boubacar Boris Diop
In fact, to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At any moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance (indestructible) may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in order fully to contest foreign domination.
Mukanda
02.06.2010 | by Amílcar Cabral
“Geo-archaeological research(GAR)” is a research, held initially in Weimar (Germany), which has indicated several phases of work and diverse areas as fieldwork. This research aims to understand specific intercontinental geological phenomena, proposing the hypothesis of a geological fault, which took place in Europe and had other repercussions.
To read
28.05.2010 | by Tânia da Fonte
José Cabral came to this collective history in a unique way, having trained with his father amateur photographer and filmmaker — he also had a homonymous grandfather, on his father’s side, who was a governor (1910-1938) and who had a park named after him in the old capital Lourenço Marques (Continuadores Park, today). He started in cinematography and he joined his experience as a news photographer to documental programmes of a less urgent nature. Later, he was probably the first to distance himself from the routines of journalism, and he made that challenge very clear with the choice of works in display in the Iluminando Vidas exhibit: instead of war, misery, victims, ruins and promises of reconstruction, that can still be seen yet another face for exoticism, he showed feminine nudes without any ethnographical pretext.
Face to face
28.05.2010 | by Alexandre Pomar
Recent critical readings of Cape Verdean identity and intellectual history highlight the fact that Gilberto Freyre unknowingly destabilized the metanarrative of Euro-centered mestiçagem, by emphasizing instead Cape Verde’s cultural links to Africa (even if those links were impressionistically perceived by him).
To read
26.05.2010 | by Fernando Arenas
