A two-channel video installation conceptualized and created by Janilda Bartolomeu, the two images are exhibited across from each other.
Duration: 14 min.
The fact that Cape Verdean identity and heritage are marked by creolization means that they possesses an inherent hybridity. But this hybridity mixed with the unawareness of our own colonial and dictatorial history has merely left a sense of fragmentation which our immigrant parents brought with them when they migrated and passed down to us.
The visualisation and vocalisation of the covert world of the Cape Verdean migrant, also known as the silent immigrant. The aim of this project is to uncover the connections between our silence (our absence) and our inaccessible Cape Verdean history.
The video installation visualises an intimate conversation between past and present, in order to figure out the future. The past is represented by Cape Verdean poets Ovídio Martins, Osvaldo Alcântara and Onésimo Silveira, whom with their literary work advocated and mobilized movements for the social and cultural autonomy of Cape Verde. While the present specifically lies focus on the contemporary migrant offspring, whom’s parents were enveloped in this characteristic silence and are looking for a way to diverge and move forward from that.
By reprising the past poet’s work for the present a moment of contemplation is created in order assess the progress Cape Verdean descendants have or haven’t made in the wake of not knowing their own history. How previous freedom movements were successful and unsuccessful because of this. Did or did not further perpetuate the fragmentation of our collective memory and identity. And how to move forward from this. At last.
entrance – existence – ambivalence – resistence
multimedia | moving image | poetry
Poems by: Osvaldo Alcântara – Ressaca (from Poesia Caboverdiana, Protesta E Luta by PAIGC.) & Janilda Bartolomeu