Artists' records› Ana Silva
› Arlinda Frota
› Armanda Alves
› Eduarda Costa Ferraz
› Eugénia Mussa
› Sílvia Moreira
› Teodolinda Varela
Sharing Languages puts together the works of two generations of contemporary female artists living in Lisbon. All these artists figure in Artafrica’s archive but not all of them are African, or perceive themselves as African. Their presence in the exhibition testifies of the inevitable openness of every definition based on identity criteria. Biographies evolutes and new identities are progressively negotiated, and the language of the artistic expression explores alternative ways to tell the experience of the present world.
In a time in which rhetoric discourses about the fear of conflicts based on cultural differences dominate the international debate, contemporary art suggests new languages and creates platforms of encounter through the experimentation of multi-performative actions. When the world of politics tries to instrumentalize reified identities, the world of art subverts the rhetoric construction of these identities proposing new artistic languages.
Thus, throughout this collection of artworks, two generations of women are presented, showing different ways of expressing individual experiences through a common desire of experimentation.
Let’s begin this itinerary with Teodolinda Varela, a young artist born in Cascais from Capoverdian parents and trained in the Maumaus of Lisbon. She expresses a natural balance between different forms of art, passing comfortably from video art to photography, from street performance to artistic tapestry. In her most recent works, she pushes her research in a more radical exploration. In “Narciso on the roof”, a living statue she recently presented in an art festival in Arnhem, she uses her body as a sculpture, interrogating the concepts of individuality and community through the metaphor of the mirror and the legend of Narcissus. In “Tapete castanho”, on the contrary, she works on the juncture between art and design, offering an implicit caricature of the consumerist society. To make “Tapete castanho”, for instance, she recycles fabrics that she collected working for an NGO, transforming what society considers as rubbish into a commodity.
Ana Silva, a young Angolan painter, developed her work exploring the use of different materials (wood, metals, fabrics), articulating it with a deep exploration of the balance between colours and shadows. “When I was in Angola I was forced to paint on any surface – Ana told me during an interview – because it was hard to find a canvas. However, I enjoyed it and now that I can easily find more conventional surfaces to paint upon, I’ve the desire to step back and experiment again”. The works she presents here are painted on sheet metal, using oxidization and acrylic colours to obtain very intriguing effects of light and perspective.
Eduarda Costa Ferraz, born in Angola, but based in Portugal since the late ’70, testifies for the trans-generational character of this experimental will. Mainly formed as a dancer, Eduarda expresses a particular movement in her paintings. The two works presented here are part of her last production, in which a deeply felt memory of her youth in Angola accompanies a reflection on such contemporary issues as ecology and social marginalisation.
Very close to Eduarda, in terms of biographical experience, is Arlinda Frota, who also was born and grew up in Angola, but left the country when the civil war begun. However her artistic training is completely different and deeply original. She started her work as a painter when living in Macao and South Korea, learning local traditional techniques of painting, both on fabrics and ceramic. As the two works presented here show, she brings this heritage with her, creating an original mixture of African biography and Asian aesthetics.
The work of Eugénia Mussa, a young Mozambican painter based in Lisbon since her childhood, offers another interesting perspective to this collection, thanks to her intense effort to confront the classics of modern western art. Her first drawings, much more abstract, deeply differ from her contemporary production, which consists of a personal re-elaboration of the modernist heritage.
As a contrast to Mussa’s production, it is interesting to look at Armanda Alves’ work. Alves is a self taught artist, born in Angola, who works pushing herself to a complete technical freedom. As she told in an interview, she paints on every kind of surface she can find, using every kind of instrument, or directly her body, as brushes.
Finally, the exhibition presents the work of Sílvia Moreira, a young performance and video artist based in Lisbon. Moreira’s work is one of the most conceptually grounded among the ones presented here. Throughout her artistic carrier she focused her production on language and translation. As she explained in an interview, “language is power and we need to understand who controls it to understand how society works”. If language is power, Moreira suggests, then translation and creolisation can be political acts. In the two videos presented here, she develops the same problem from two different sides. In “Afago” a traditional Israeli lullaby has been translated into the Portuguese sign language for deaf-and-dumb, and then it has been choreographed. Words become gestures, and together with music they create an original artistic language, translating text into dance. The second video, “Volapuk”, the most recent of Moreira’s work, is a performance presenting the results of a research that Moreira has made about the Volapuk language. This language was invented in the late 19th century to find a universal tool of communication in order to avoid any culture to prevail. In the video, Moreira gives a lesson in Volapuk explaining the history of this language.
Through its focus on translation and language, Moreira’s work offers us a way of concluding this itinerary. In facts, even if they deeply differ one from another, all the artworks presented in this exhibition implicitly share a specific tendency. Through the experimentation of different techniques and styles, they translate different cultural experiences into a common artistic language, a language that permit us to look at the contemporary world from a different perspective.
Alessandro Jedlowski
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