Quebra Cabeça Exhibition

(This was first published on Substack on August 23rd, 2023)

I just got back from the 2023 Thomas J. Watson conference at Bowdoin College in Maine. I spent this last week sharing stories and tears with my new friends who also went through this crazy year. Everyone shared a 10-15 minute presentation about their year. Some of my favorite presentations were on folk music traditions, caring for families during child loss, world building through art, and gendered fisheries.

I do wish that everyone who I love and supported me during this year could have been there for my presentation, so to make up for it I thought that I would share a part of it with you all here. I decided to present my findings through the art I experienced, by curating a portable exhibition.

Exhibition Text (Think of when you enter an exhibition and see the first chunk of text on the wall)

This year through the Watson, I traveled to six countries where Portuguese is an official language: Portugal, Brazil, Timor-Leste, Cabo Verde, Angola, and Mozambique to experience and document alternative models for artistic spaces. I documented various expansive and transformative spaces from community centers, libraries, and street art initiatives to free art schools, photography collectives, and contemporary art museums. This documentation process through my digital resource (www.artepratodos.com) (Art is for Everyone) led to many newfound relationships with artists, curators, educators, and leaders and a new relationship with myself and the kind of person I am and strive to be. Each space led to a new question about the global art world and my list could go on forever.

For my presentation, however, I wanted to focus on the art and share some of the work I received, acquired, and made this year through a mini pop-up exhibition titled Quebra Cabeca, Puzzle in Portuguese but can be directly translated into Break Head/Broken Head (also sums up the mental exhaustion of it all). I collected my own objects to create a museum within a suitcase, my own Watson-themed physical and traveling art space.

I believe that sharing art is the best way to try and make sense of this year as well as amplify the creative voices I met. This exhibition is inspired by the pieces that I am continuing to assemble from these countries with diverse visual languages and a shared colonial and linguistic history. I learned so many lessons from these global connections on creativity, accessibility, and transformation, and I am looking forward to connecting the pieces for the rest of my life. 

Overall, I hope that the art presented here brings forward the richness and innovation in each of these countries and provides new ideas and solutions when it comes to fostering accessibility in the global art world. I first started learning Portuguese out of curiosity about a part of the world I knew nothing about, and now I have family and friends in each of these corners of the world. I am honored to share a part of this journey with you all today.

The first work is a photograph by Pauliana Valente Pimental from 2016:

This photograph is from my Portuguese mentor’s series Quel Pedra, which translates to that stone. The picture was made in Sao Vicente, Cabo Verde, and recounts a legend about a specific stone that will make you gay if you sit on it. This story inspired her to cohabitate and document a small circle of friends in the LGBTQ community of Mindelo. I first met Pauliana after seeing her work at the monumental exhibition Europa Oxala at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal. Pauliana quickly became a great mentor for me in my photographic practice and as a solo female traveler. From her, I learned how to better photograph communities outside of my own and use photography as a tool to look deeper into artistic spaces. I participated in her mentorship program which helped me learn to receive constructive criticism and let go of a lot of fear within photography. Her work speaks to me enormously on how to use photography in an ethical and empathetic way and represents my own personal artistic growth during the course of this year.

The second work is two untitled works, pen on paper from 2022 by my dear friend, Alfeo Sanches Pereira. 

I first met Alfeo during a test run for a video mapping installation at the Fundacao Oriente Foundation in Dili, Timor-Leste. This work comments on our increasingly technologically dependent world and looks back to old ways of healing and knowledge in order to move forward in regard to global issues such as climate change and urbanization. 

Alfeo is one of the first-generation members of the infamous Arte Moris free art school, the only fine arts school in the country. I have never met anyone with a mind like him. He knew how to tug at my heartstrings and tell incredible stories about parenthood and modern society. He taught me how an essential space for him has always been his group of friends, just being themselves around each other and playing with ideas. He also would often mention the great danger once we stop asking questions. I took that to heart and believe that in order to move forward, create solutions, and examine space, we can never stop questioning.

Next, are two works by Uolofe titled Ubati lll ( Percurso III), permanent marker with magazine collage from 2020, and Kubeta ( ser mais linda), watercolor on paper, 2022.

Uolofe was one of the first artists I met in Angola through the gallery MOVART and its artist residency program led by visionary curator and dear friend Marcos Jinguba. His work alludes to internal migration within Angola as well as gender inequality. He was always the first to show up at the gallery and I loved seeing his process throughout the program. I then started to notice his work in various spaces, from a national cellphone company store to a suburban community center. His versatility and work ethic really represent my takeaways from Angolan society and culture where I felt that many people have a strong entrepreneurial spirit and radical politics which reflect a lot of the spaces I found as well. I’ve never been anywhere like it. 

Next is There is Talk, pen on paper, 2023, by Parasol (umbrella in Portuguese).

I met Parasol when visiting his gallery in Luanda, This is Not A White Cube. He curated a major exhibition on Angolan contemporary art at the National Bank through the gallery's collection. This is an automatic drawing about breaking the taboo on homoeroticism in Angolan society in order to pave the way for sexual liberation and spiritual freedom. 

I loved Parasol’s background in video game design which heavily influences his curation process. Throughout our time together he was constantly drawing for his handmade bible-like book. He even started to draw with his left hand when he broke his arm during our last week together. If that’s not discipline and passion then I don’t know what is.

Here are two textile works from the collective, Axinene Ari Vava (We are the owners, we are here). When I arrived in Mozambique I started to intentionally seek a more female perspective within the art scene. This led to meeting the Axinene Ari Vava textile women’s collective. This textile flag by Amina da Antonia Daudo is dyed with tree bark from a mangrove and depicts the aftermath of a vicious cyclone in 2021 on Ilha de Mozambique. Meeting the women’s collective and traveling to Ilha was the perfect place to end my Watson year. The island was the first capital of Mozambique in the late 16th century, a UNESCO world heritage site, and the crossroads of Arab, Swahili, Indian, and Portuguese trade routes—so much global world history packed into one tiny island. 

This subsequent work is titled Quebra Cabeça (Puzzle). I’ve been writing, sending, and hoarding postcards this whole year. It’s something I’ve loved since I was a kid. This work is inspired by a mail arts collective in Brazil called Semente Postal. I met one of the founders, Solange, through her store/mini museum in the Mercado Novo Belo Horizonte. Months later we talked over the phone in Mozambique to talk in more detail about the collage postcard collective that she was a part of and their upcoming exhibit which accepts submissions from around the world and that will travel throughout a variety of public and private spaces. 

Later in the year when I got to Angola, I couldn’t find any for sale. So in the spirit of the Brazilian collective, I started to make some from the scraps I’ve gathered from each country and found that the combination really captures the connections I’ve made this year between language, space, and art. For example, I used a mixture of source material such as a letter from a dear Timorese friend, Isabel Ana de Silva, who is my Tetum and Portuguese teacher, and an analog photo from a friend, Tiago Dias, and a member of the Rio Analog Photography Collective.

Lastly my maps/zines. My zines operate in a similar way to my postcards. They are a portable body of work that represents my unique way of processing my travels and the connections and disconnections between each Portuguese-speaking country. My maps use this source material from various spaces to deconstruct hierarchies that infiltrate these spaces partly because of their shared colonial history. Some are more personal and confessional commentating on my struggles as a solo female traveler and lack of spiritual grounding, while others look a bit deeper at decolonization and what that can look like in the art world. 

I also shared this medium with the Arte Moris free school in Timor-Leste and ended up creating maps with them as well. My friend Gorys who first brought me to the school made one of the maps/zines that you see here:

Muito Obrigada, Obrigada Barak, Khanimambo, Obrigadissima!!!!! Thanks y’all!