Os Sonhos do Embondeiro 2012
[ Baobab's Dreams ]
February 5 – June 30, 2016
Highlights: Sight and Sounds: Global Film and video
The Jewish Museum NY, USA
Video (excerpt: 0:51 of 14:14);
Single channel video, 14'14'', sound, colour. Lisbon, Portugal. Life-size projection
Living as a foreigner in Africa, I absorb unknown culture and how society deals with absorbed Western culture without losing their own culture in the area of tension between tradition and modernism. A sponge absorbes water, increases in volume and becomes heavy, becomes a burden. When squeezed out, the water reverts to memory, the sponge dries
and the sponge loses its size again.
This video takes us back to the Baobab as a symbol of antiquity and wisdom, and to the process of cultural production, frequently through contact, violent or otherwise, between peoples, and also to how memory is an essential element in this process of transmitting knowl-
edge and practices. This contact between cul-
tures is represented by sponges, and throughout the video they assume various roles: absorbing, which can also be perceived as appropriation;
or expelling, in a gesture of the reproduction or synthesis of this same contact. The movements of the performer refer to traditional Angolan dances. (Suzana Sousa)
Acknowlegements
Anaísa Lopes
Lothar Heinrich
Natalie Weber
Edith Payer
Nova Imagem Lisboa
Helena Alves