A VIDA LONGA DAS LINHAS RETAS

Excerpt from Luisa Santos text that was part of the exhibition.

“A Vida Longa das Linhas retas” once again adopts the title of an existing work, a 1999 essay by the historian African history expert Wolfgang Döpcke. The essay presents itself as a study of borders policies in Black Africa in its historical and current dimensions discussing and proposing a critical analysis of the stereotypical narratives, which the author calls “five myths about the borders in Black Africa”, in popular and academic discourses about borders in Africa, explaining how they were drawn, in all its imperfections and defects, in its narratives of resistance and change. The borders and nationalities that are supposedly divided by borders are constant reasons in practice artistic and personal life of the artist, with dual nationality (Angolan and Portuguese). In societies contemporary, so-called global, this duality has become a growing condition. The bodies that move from one territory to another, between nations, continents, cultures, religions, habits, and legacies, are in constant mutability in a relationship of mutuality with the other bodies and places they encounter. While borders, in the light of geography, are physical or artificial lines that separate geographic areas, political boundaries that separate countries and describe an area controlled by an administrative power or political, the bodies that move between borders demonstrate, on the one hand, that these are organisms living, in a constant process of exchange and transformation. On the other hand, as Jimmie Durham recalls, in his project to become Eurasian, the movements of the bodies are always placed on the sidelines: “the fact that Europe is recognized as a continent and Eurasia, the continent, is not known as continent, means that we are taught to think politically and never physically” (Durham, 1996).

The exhibition was accompanied by a coloring book with illustrations by Pedro Pires.