Interview carried out by online chat, at various times and on various days, punctuated by continual breaks in the Internet connection that maps out the transatlantic and ex-colonial triangulation between Luanda, Angola – Kiluanji Kia Henda’s home, a city that I have never visited; São Paulo, Brazil – my temporary home and the place where I first met Kiluanji, a place that is close to the origin of the series presented here; Lisbon, Portugal – my permanent home, source of the schedule drawn up by my computer and Kiluanji’s ex-temporary home.
Face to face
08.04.2011 | by Lígia Afonso
Documentary cinema in Africa more or less follows the same trajectory as African Literature. The methodologies and forms of expression are certainly different but the discourse on Africa remains the same, evolving with the continent’s history. In the 1920s, colonial reportage and ethnographic films were already a success. Africa and Africans were filmed subjects.
Afroscreen
08.04.2011 | by Rufin Mbou Mikima
We decided to stick around for a beer at the end of a shooting day for the movie “The Hero” directed by Zezé Gamboa. We were on the Island of Luanda, where we had filmed from two in the afternoon to one in the morning. We stopped the car next to a stand, leaving the door open to keep listening to the pirated cassette playing on the car radio. In the group, the Angolans drink imported beer, Super Bock; the foreigners drink national beer, Cuca, each one savouring the exotic freshness of its own point of view while we talk in the shadow of a tranquil weekday dawn.
I'll visit
03.04.2011 | by Nuno Milagre
The air erodes
Its shadow quivers
My land is lost sand
My skin a black target
A rough weave of laments
How could anyone believe that a mother
is anything but love?
Mukanda
16.03.2011 | by Céléstin Monga
Passando tempo no mercado, a Feira do Ponto da cidade de São Tomé, Olavo pintou várias séries de quadros com vendedoras. Falava com elas enquanto desenhava esboços, retratou-as na sua vida pública de trabalho. Na tela, as mulheres, cestos e bacias à cabeça, crianças nas costas, a luta diária: ganhar a vida, cuidar da família. O confronto com a vivência quotidiana das vendedoras sobrepôs-se ao seu impacto figurativo e os contornos das mulheres emanciparam-se para delinear os estreitos corredores do mercado. As mulheres moldaram-se nos trajectos repisados por elas todos os dias, e mais tarde os trajectos devolveram-se às mulheres na multiplicidade dos seus caminhos interiores, mais extensos e complexos.
Face to face
15.03.2011 | by Nuno Milagre
While it is true that African art largely takes place in the Northern hemisphere, and while its major (political, financial, philosophical, aesthetic etc.) advances have taken place here, it is true that the African continent is increasingly asserting itself as an exceptional relational space for cultural agents.
Face to face
28.02.2011 | by Marta Mestre
Here in Ngorongoro, the flamingos spread across the lake’s low waters, walk erratic steps and peck the mud with greed. Reflections of the flamingos and of the sky, punctuated by clouds, paint the water in blue, rose and white. The wind disperses the clouds ceasing their self-admiration on the mirror; the afternoon is going to heat up.
In northern Tanzania, West of the Kilimanjaro and on the way to the famous Serengeti National Park, exists one of the bigger cauldrons in the world: the Crater of Ngorongoro.
I'll visit
22.02.2011 | by Nuno Milagre
It’s 1943 and Benguela is thriving. As the famous railway heads inland, the town readies itself for a make-over: there is a modern development plan afoot. Progress is the watchword. In one of its streets, an important event is about to occur: Dona Ludovina (a singer of some style, they say), the wife of Sebastião José da Costa, an employee at the Post Office and a former journalist, is about to give birth to a child she will call Carlos Lamartine. Benguela waits, with open arms, to welcome a great son, one who will be a major figure in Angolan music and the author of timeless melodies.
Stages
18.02.2011 | by Mário Rui Silva
“Haïti plus fort avec le jazz”, “Haiti stronger with jazz” is the theme of International Jazz Festival of Port-au-Prince that will take place in this city between the 19th and the 26th of February.
Stages
17.02.2011 | by Sílvia Norte
The saucepan lids turned like records on an imaginary pick-up. If you closed your eyes, you could hear the sounds reverberating everywhere. Then came the sessions when other rhythms were played - mornas and coladeras on the guitar of a cousin who “sort of lived in the house.” The gramophones and the radios had also been sort of living there for a long time. But that was at the start. Aftyer that there was going to be the Clube Marítimo Africano, the final year parties, the focus on a big new star and then recognition as a major figure in Angolan music: Filipe Zau.
Stages
16.02.2011 | by Mário Rui Silva
For the first time in decades, Tunisia is free of one-man rule. The extraordinary events of December 2010 and January 2011 have been nothing less than a political revolution: The consistent pressure of popular fury forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali first to make an unprecedented promise to relinquish power; then pushed him to step down; and finally halted an attempt at unconstitutional transfer of power, setting the stage for elections to be held at an undetermined date in the near to mid-term future.
I'll visit
23.01.2011 | by Nadia Marzouki
Pancho Guedes (born in 1925), architect, painter, sculptor, collector and patron, played an important cultural role during the years he lived in Mozambique. This is true because of his own work, which brought together several worlds, as well as for his role as mediator between artists of all traditions, the wider public (local and international), and the institutional artistic world, which he had access to at the time.
To read
20.01.2011 | by Alda Costa
All Africa is an informal market, from Cape to Cairo, from Maputo to Marrakesh. And everything can be found; no VAT, no paperwork and sometimes even without having to leave the car. Briberies, embezzlements, speculation, benefits, manipulation, corruption. Things which are really handy, or might suddenly become so tomorrow.
I'll visit
15.01.2011 | by Nuno Milagre
The Bar-Stool Edible Worm
I’m against everything
Against war and those against
War. Against whatever diminishes
Th’ individual’s blind impulse.
Mukanda
14.01.2011 | by Dambudzo Marechera
Our interview takes place in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, where Zézé Gamboa and a few members of his team are resting for a few days after the intense shoot for his film “Grande Kilapy”, which tells the story of Joãozinho das Garotas, an Angolan during colonial times who engineered a sting with the colony’s finances. There’s just a week in Luanda left for the film to be ready for editing, following the takes in Portugal and Paraíba in Brazil, so this is the right time to weigh up the experience and bring to public attention some aspects of the work done by someone who is considered to be “the most consistent” of Angolan directors.
Afroscreen
10.01.2011 | by Marta Lança
To interpret what it means to be a traveller – in present day terms – is a multifaceted exercise, put in the spotlight even further by the geography and culture that define the point of departure and that of arrival. Human “latitude” is what you find between the distance travelled from the beginning to the end. For many, it’s an agent provocateur that creates a field of artistic and intellectual experimentation where the force of innocuous space takes us to all sorts of exchanges and the construction of new concepts.
Face to face
02.01.2011 | by Jorge Rocha
fter some back and forth travelling Lisbon-Madrid-Lisbon and some other back and forth travelling Maputo-Johannesburg-Maputo, I started finding linkage points between the voyage in the European Southwest and the voyage in the African Southeast. Both courses are about 375 miles long, from country to country, from capital to capital; syntonizing into another idiom when crossing the border, changing the bank notes for others – a step no longer necessary in the Iberian Peninsula. These are voyages in longitude, to the Orient: Madrid and Maputo; to the Occident: Lisbon and Johannesburg.
I'll visit
17.12.2010 | by Nuno Milagre
In contrast to the context of Francophile Africa, where the main interest was in literary works and an idea of blackness that involved the relatively contentious appropriation of European modernity, certain mediators, located further south, questioned the possible evolution of local cultures and of their own major artistic traditions, free from the subordination of European models, which were viewed in a critical way in terms of the visual arts. Within the framework of the inevitable death of the tribal art which was characteristic of traditional societies (even via tourist reproductions), new and spontaneous forms of artistic production (and also sophisticated forms of syncretism in the case of "natural synthesis" proposed by Uche Okeke in the Zaria School) were being sought without any nativist essentialism (in the cases of Beier, Guedes and Beinart).
To read
17.12.2010 | by Alexandre Pomar
The cinemas in Angola are points of reference in the towns where they found a home. And there are many of them. It’s the kind of infrastructure that you find all over the country, because their heyday started way before independence, allowing the Portuguese colonial authorities to take entertainment – but especially regime propaganda – all over the country. What remains for the telling are the architectural lines, the pleasure for shows and multi-purpose spaces.
City
13.12.2010 | by Miguel Gomes
The beard was long and white and the hair long too but flowing loose. The face was burnt by the sun and an enormous love for the Namibe desert, where he had spent his childhood . He had been enchanted by the dunes, which looked to him like mountains of gold glittering in the distance. Samuel Aço is the main force behind the Centro de Estudos do Deserto (Centre for Desert Studies). This is an association in the heart of Namibe, in southern Angola, delving into the secrets of one of the country's most inhospitable regions.
Face to face
09.12.2010 | by Pedro Cardoso
