What can't be reduced to abstract “masses”

What can't be reduced to abstract “masses” Lots of people are beginning to think about politics, learning how to think about the city, relations and institutions. There are people from all over the place, from universities, associations and schools. And the Government is feeling it, they fear our advances. But to say that popular uprisings in Brazil are brainless and devoid of focus is simplistic, because everything is focus. JEUX SANS FRONTIÈRES #2

Games Without Borders

09.04.2016 | by

Social Protests in Morocco and the So-Called “Arab” “Spring”

Social Protests in Morocco and the So-Called “Arab” “Spring” In Morocco, unlike other countries, despite the enormous popular support for the protests, which took place simultaneously in several cities on February 20, 2011, and that re-occurred sometimes on a weekly basis during that year, there were no calls (with some timid exceptions) based on the famous slogan “the people want the fall of the regime.” This would become a somewhat taboo slogan, either for fear of jeopardizing the monarchical regime, whose legitimacy is presented as being unquestionable, or by an apparently sincere devotion of a significant portion of the population towards the Moroccan monarchy. JSF#2

Games Without Borders

28.03.2016 | by Hugo Maia

Nina Simone's face

Nina Simone's face Simone was able to conjure glamour in spite of everything the world said about black women who looked like her. And for that she enjoyed a special place in the pantheon of resistance. That fact doesn’t just have to do with her lyrics or her musicianship, but also how she looked. Simone is something more than a female Bob Marley. It is not simply the voice: It is the world that made that voice, all the hurt and pain of denigration, forged into something otherworldly.

To read

23.03.2016 | by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mare Nostrum

Mare Nostrum i would not be i would not be had i not not i i too but not even at all if. i would not be only not i i too i would not be. i am because. i am i too i because if. i would not be if my mother had not met my father i naturally by the nature of things would not be i would not be.

Games Without Borders

18.03.2016 | by Miriam Cahn

"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... but your kids are gonna love it" - 2

"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... but your kids are gonna love it" -  2 Europe is said to be currently facing the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. In the media, images of people escaping from their home countries devastated by war and misery and arriving to Europe are recurrent. As these pictures spread and instigate different reactions – some of them highly racist and xenophobic – another picture came to my mind: a picture of Lisbon in 1975 by Alfredo Cunha, shortly after the arrival of 6000 people from the Portuguese ex-colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe and Cape Verde. in"Decolonizing Museums", L'Internacionale.

City

14.03.2016 | by Ana Bigotte Vieira

"An Outpost of Progress" - interview with Hugo Vieira da Silva

"An Outpost of Progress" - interview with Hugo Vieira da Silva By systematically deconstructing the travel logs and journals of European explorers, scientists and traders who wandered through tropical Africa in the late 19th century, proves that these documents were often idealized or inaccurate and that, most of the time, these Europeans were in a permanent state of ecstasy caused by the disease, high doses of quinine, alcohol, opiates and other drugs.

Afroscreen

14.03.2016 | by António Pinto Ribeiro

"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... but your kids are gonna love it" -1

"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet... but your kids are gonna love it" -1 The text focuses on three operations – OPENING, REMOVAL and RESTITUTION - having Ana Hatherly’s work "As Ruas de Lisboa", Isabel Brison and Nuno Rodrigues de Sousa’s "O Monumento da Rotunda das Águas Livres", and Ana Bigotte Vieira’s "No Aleph – Notes about a research on Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation ACARTE Service (1984-1989)" as main sources. It is important to note that this text is being written in 2015, at a time when the brutal presence of a succession of absences in Portuguese recent history is felt more than ever. In fact, the current austerity policies point to the removal of a series of I would call ‘openings’ directly related to the Revolution on 25 April 1974 that overthrew António de Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano’s forty-eight year dictatorship and ended thirteen years of colonial wars. in"Decolonizing Museums", L'Internacionale

City

08.03.2016 | by Ana Bigotte Vieira

Games without Borders #2 - Editorial

Games without Borders #2 - Editorial People are fighting today against growing poverty, against mutating forms of capitalist exploitation disguised and administered under the label of “austerity politics” in Europe and elsewhere. But to resist – r/esistere in a somewhat fictional etymology – also means to invent new modes of existence. To invent is not to create something out of nothing, but to aggregate forces that were already present – the invention in this sense is a recomposition of forces. MAGAZINE JSF#2

Games Without Borders

08.03.2016 | by Sandra Lang

The Culture of Coloniality

The Culture of Coloniality Decolonising a cultural institution does not just mean considering the matter and organising exhibitions and seminars. In the current context, decolonising a museum requires a constant effort to take a position in regard to the migratory control system; it requires accepting that it is impossible to continue programming activities and events while there is a total normalisation of the existence of Migrant Detention Centres, forced deportation flights on a mass and individual scale, individuals with semi-rights and anti-rights, and situations of extreme violence in border zones which are the local contexts where these projects are presented. Decolonizing Museums, L'Internationale Online Issue 2, September 2015.

Games Without Borders

27.02.2016 | by Daniela Ortiz

Liberation struggles, the 'Falling of the Empire’ and the birth [through images] of african nations

Liberation struggles, the 'Falling of the Empire’ and the birth [through images] of african nations The fortieth anniversary of Portuguese decolonisation of Africa has acted as a catalyst in discussing how Portugal ‘imagined’ colonial politics through moving images and how these propagandist portrayals began to be questioned by the Portuguese ‘Novo Cinema’. This can be seen in works that were censured and prohibited. Portuguese colonial cinematographic representations were later challenged by films made in the context of the liberation movements and by images that emerged out of the national cinematographic projection (Frodon) of the new Portuguese-speaking African countries.

Afroscreen

14.01.2016 | by Maria do Carmo Piçarra

Ephemeral Landscapes I LISBON

Ephemeral Landscapes I LISBON The exhibition is designed through a long voyage: from Southern Africa to Brazil, from Angola’s post‐independence to the author’s interior exile, from the desert to the sea, from his obsessions to his hesitations, from family commitments to a demanding loneliness, from the long war to the analysis of its implications, from his detailed field diaries to the game of mirrors between observer and observed.

Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

25.11.2015 | by vários

"Cuban Identity and the Angolan Experience"

"Cuban Identity and the Angolan Experience" November 5, 1975 marked the 132nd year anniversary of the slave rebellion at the Triumvirato sugar plantation in Matanzas province, led by an enslaved African woman named Carlota. As one of the first acts in her liberation campaign, Carlota, accompanied by her captains, made her way to another plantation, Arcana, where a number of co-conspirators were being held in captivity following an uprising there in August of that year’s incendiary summer, when Africans and their descendants rose up against their enslavers throughout the province. As word spread of Carlota’s successes, one estate after another erupted in insurrection—San Miguel, Concepción, San Lorenzo, and San Rafael.

To read

15.11.2015 | by Christabelle Peters

It's a knockout!

It's a knockout! The subtitle of this issue works both ways: practices of resistance and spaces of invention, practices of invention and spaces of resistance. Even if we think in terms of productive power relations, we still use the word “resistance” in reference to those practices and spaces that emerge in moments of antagonist tension: e.g., when measures imposed by governmental institutions and the lack of perspectives for the future are individually and collectively felt as being oppressive.

Games Without Borders

29.10.2015 | by vários

An interview with the Zimbabwean gallerist Jimmy Saruchera

An interview with the Zimbabwean gallerist Jimmy Saruchera For other mediums such as sound art and video art to gain traction in Afrika, I think they need to be taken out of the gallery or museum environment and put into the mobile environment where people are. This entails modifying the model of collecting, where alternative commercial models better suited to mobile consumption of content come to the fore. The onus is on these new art platforms in Afrika to look deep within their cultures and societies and innovate the mediums themselves to make art more relevant for their communities.

I'll visit

14.10.2015 | by Inês Valle

Brasil

Brasil BRASIL is a photobook project that is the result of eight years of photographing culture, landscape, architecture and the visual magic I found in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Salvador de Bahia. Made on analog film, the photographs are personal portraits that illuminate a fluid, syncopated, and complex contemporary Brazil, seen through the lens of my Rolleiflex camera.

I'll visit

30.09.2015 | by Kristin Capp

A Producer’s Quest To Free 16 Detained Young Angolan Activists

A Producer’s Quest To Free 16 Detained Young Angolan Activists That same evening, Pedro Coquenão, aka Batida, had a Skype meeting planned with one of the activists to talk about “family stuff.” It obviously didn’t go through– his friend had been arrested. The 40 year-old Angolan-born, Lisboa-raised-and-based musician and creative is also an active voice and mind for an evolved and more equal Angolan society– a facet revealed by Coquenão throughout the years as a radio host in Portugal and a DIY documentary director and a musician, first as DJ Mpula and now as Batida.

Face to face

17.09.2015 | by Ricardo Miguel Vieira

Language and Power: Oppressions within the Word

Language and Power: Oppressions within the Word If we accept that racism, sexism and other forms of oppression exist within language, then we must also recognize that it is through language – or languages – that oppression can be unmasked and combated. How? By allowing its structural, inclusive and persistent appeal to flow within the language towards creation and domesticated plurality. Linguistically created identities are not necessarily impenetrable frontiers or oppressive walls raised against the Other, but rather celebrations of every person’s multicolored singularity.

To read

17.08.2015 | by Hugo Monteiro

Are we real?

Are we real? From a queer perspective, their analysis through the prism of the intersection between different categories of power, such as race, gender, and sexuality is certainly of great interest, as is realizing that both have influenced, and still influence, several queer "black" visual and musical artistic expressions, in the USA and the UK as well as in Jamaica, such as soul, hip hop, rap, bouncing, voguing..

Afroscreen

09.07.2015 | by Ricke Merighi and Pedro Marum

are you for real?

are you for real? We resume our exploration of African queer cinema, thus extending the Queer Focus on Africa cycle featured in the Queer Lisboa festival last year. This time, we’re leaving Africa proper behind for the American and British world, thus reiterating one of our premises... the extension of "African" and "African-ness" that is part of AFRICA.CONT, a cultural force abroad in the world, much as a current in the ocean: integral to the whole but with movements and temperatures all its own - in the beautiful imagery of Achille Mbembe. We are certainly eager to explore the realities that this current embodies in its Central and South American, European and Asian diasporas.

Afroscreen

25.06.2015 | by José António Fernandes Dias

“Luso-Tropicalism” and Portuguese Late Colonialism

“Luso-Tropicalism” and Portuguese Late Colonialism The work of Gilberto Freyre demonstrates his singular conception of time, merging past, present and future. Such conception shows us the ambiguities and contradictions when he speaks of the luso-tropical  community. At times, he presents it as a past reality, dated from the 15th and 16th centuries, other times as a living, present reality, and other times even as future, destiny, idealization. It is mainly as a project that the idea of a luso-tropical  community survived its author after the Portuguese empire ended. And it continues to this day in the Community of Portuguese Language Countries and in the more consensual political and ideological discourse about Portugal’s position in the world.

To read

28.05.2015 | by Cláudia Castelo