By Wole Soyinka

Dramaturgy: Zia Soares (Teatro Griot)

“I know who the Dead Ones are. They are the guests of the Human Community who are neighbours to us of the Forest. It is their Feast, the Gathering of the Tribes. Their councillors met and said, Our forefathers must be present at this Feast. They asked us for ancestors, for illustrious ancestors, and I said to FOREST HEAD, let me answer their request. And I sent two spirits of the restless dead…”

A Dance of the Forests, Wole Soyinka

Diafragma, international photography and visual arts festival, Covilhã 2021, proposes an alternative view of everything that surrounds us, a place that is a stimulus to diéerent «ways of seeing» (J. Berger), a place of interventions and revelations. Culture is also made of diéerences. A diéerence that time and space, chaos and order seek ceaselessly to understand.

The theme we chose for this year’s festival is “There is only one land”, a theme that refers to multiple readings. More than invoking the need to êght for the protection of the environment, against climate change, it also refers to the reëection on everything that man leaves as a mark on the earth; it demands for you to look at yourself as an
earthly being and think about contributing to a better and more digniêed world which protects life in all its forms and manifestations.

Including work from twenty-two artists and two groups of talented young people, students from Campos de Melo and Quinta das Palmeiras secondary schools, in exhibitions spread over four of the municipality’s cultural spaces: Galeria de Exposiçoes Tinturaria (Tinturaria Art Gallery) Museu de Lanifícios /UBI , Wool Museum /UBI, Biblioteca Municipal (Municipal Library), in Covilhã, and Casa de Cultura José Marmelo e Silva, in Paul.

O Silêncio da Terra problematizes the photographic archive of the Diamond Company of Angola, constituted with the explicit objective of documenting the civilizational mission undertaken in Lunda, between 1917 and 1974.

The ambiguity of the exhibition’s title – O Silêncio da Terra – is combined with the ambiguity of the image of colonial photography.This Exhibition – which unfolds in twospaces, Galeria do Paço and Museu Nogueira da Silva – invites the viewer to broaden one’s gaze and to live dialectically with the diéerent sides of what one sees and what is given to see.

These images of colonial photography are confronted by counter-narratives oéered by post-colonial art, exposing the contradictions of the instituted narratives. Thus, creating tensions and loopholes that resonate with visual artefacts. Creating a dynamic where in the eyes of the present, returns an unênished past full of incomplete relationships and
open questions.

The exhibition at Galeria do Paço is conceived in dialogical and critical terms between the selection of the photographic archive, which are intercepted by a set of art works delving into issues related to memories, colonial and post-colonial narratives and discourses surrounding late Portuguese and European colonialism. Through the proposal of an intercepted reading between photographs in their archival and colonial dimension and contemporary art, the exhibition highlights it’s inspiration of the concept of ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) conducive to the (re) negotiation of meanings creating multiple perspectives and temporalities.

Featured artists:
Alida Rodrigues, Ângela Ferreira, Catarina Simão, Délio Jasse, Filipa César, Francisco
Vidal, Henrique Neves Lopes, Irineu Destourelles, Kiluanji Kia-Henda, Marilu Námoda,
Mónica de Miranda, Nuno Nunes-Ferreira, René Tavares, Rita Rainho / Ângelo Lopes.

Adopting the Deleuzian idea of the fold as a desire of change (1993), The Fold(s) is a curatorial project composed of four books operating as four individual exhibitions by Carolina Grilo Santos, Joana Patrão, Mónica de Miranda, and Rouzbeh Akhbari. Under the artistic direction of Luísa Santos, The Fold(s) was developed in the context of the Seminar in Curatorship by the MA and PhD students in Culture Studies of The Lisbon Consortium, Faculty of Human Sciences, Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Participants
Luísa Santos, Rouzbeh Akhbari, Joana Patrão, Mónica de Miranda, Carolina Grilo Santos, Ilaria Sponda, Jeanne Pasque, Manon Klein, Agustina O’Farrell, Victoria Page , Alexandra Tavares Agostinho, Ana Carvalho, Anaïs Jung, Brian Jay de Lima Ambulo, Denise Wieslhuber, Gloria Adu-Kankam, Joana Flor Rato, João Carvalha