COLLECTIVE EXHIBITION
Curated by: Ricardo Barbosa Vicente and João Serrão
‘Transatlantic Cartographies’
by Jacira Conceição, Fidel Évora, Amadeu Carvalho and Carlos Noronha Feio
20th June to 19th July > Tuesday to Saturday: 10.00am-01.30pm and 02.30pm-06.00pm
Art Gallery of the Convento do Espírito Santo, Loulé
Transatlantic Cartographies brings together, at the Galeria do Espírito Santo in Loulé, as part of the 21st edition of the MED Festival, four artists whose connection to Cape Verde crosses the distance and is expressed in listening, memory and creation. Through different languages - video, installation, painting, ceramics and sound - this exhibition proposes a sensitive journey between territories, identities and shared narratives. More than representing the archipelago, the artists gathered here propose ways of feeling it, revisiting it and reimagining it.
Living abroad isn't absence, it's extension. It is often in the distance that gestures of belonging are refined. The works presented build affective and political maps, where Cape Verde emerges as a presence in transformation - a space that pulses in the voices, bodies and gestures of those who inhabit it in multiple ways.
Fidel Évora deconstructs the idea of a portrait with ‘Fake Self-Portraits’, where fragmented and camouflaged faces question the ways in which identity is constructed and represented. These works summon up historical silences and displacements, proposing images that don't stare, but question.
Jacira da Conceição presents ‘Oráculo dos Búzios’, a video installation of ritual evocation, accompanied by the sculptures ‘Aruanda’, ‘Abraço II’ and ‘Lundum’. In the centre of the room, these pieces interrelate as if in a dance of bodies. Here, ceramics becomes an ancestral gesture and a living memory, shaped by generations of African women.
Amadeu Carvalho presents ‘50 Faces Incognito - Portraits of Absence’, a series of anonymous faces created with pigments from the volcano of Fogo. They are figures that emerge between the visible and the erased, restoring thickness and dignity to untold stories.
Carlos Noronha Feio closes with ‘A building is made of more than memories of ancestors...’, an immersive installation where sound and image intertwine. Here, the sea becomes a living archive - a space for travelling, listening and imagining between islands, memories and the possibilities of returning.
These Transatlantic Cartographies expand Cape Verdean territory beyond its physical borders, drawing a geography made up of echoes, affections and survivals. A place where art is the language of reunion.
Artists
Fidel Évora
[1984, Cape Verde]
Plastic artist and designer with a master's degree in Graphic Animation from the BAU University Center of Arts and Design in Barcelona. A style clearly influenced by urban art, graffiti and contemporary visual art, which accompanied the artist's evolution. More recently, he has been using screen printing combined with painting a lot. In 2011, he exhibited one of his works for the first time in a collective exhibition, namely, Freedom’s Exhumation. Inspired by the work of Orlando Pantera, in 2022 he presented the exhibition Oxi dretu, manham mariádu, curated by Maria de Brito Matias, at Galeria Movart, which currently represents him.
Jacira da Conceição
[1990, Chão Bom, Santiago Island, Cape Verde]
She is a visual artist and collaborating researcher at CHAIA – University of Évora, where she is pursuing a Master’s in Visual Arts. Her practice, rooted in ceramics and traditional Cape Verdean arts, addresses themes such as identity, expanded insularity, feminism and self-representation. In 2009, she traveled by bicycle through southern Latin America and lived in Quilombo de Itamatatiua (Brazil), deepening her knowledge of Afro-descendant ceramic techniques and the dialogue between art, orality and community. She works with ceramics, textiles and found objects, in a multi-technique approach focused on nature and the immaterial. She has been supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in several projects, including Kabelu na Kordon (2022), which explores dyeing and weaving in dialogue with Cape Verdean cultural practices. In 2023, she presented Tchom Bom at the Cabo Verde Cultural Center, in Lisbon. Her work contributes to a plural rewriting of the history of art based on knowledge that is often marginalized.
Amadeu Carvalho
[1985, Cape Verde]
Cape Verdean plastic artist, graduated in Plastic Arts from the Lisbon School of Fine Arts. In his artistic practice, the artist creates an engaging visual language, combining drawing and painting techniques and exploring the contrast between colors, light and shadow. The artist debuted with individual and collective exhibitions in 2023, with ‘A negrura em mim mancha’, at the Centro Cultural do Mindelo and ‘Mandinga – Uma parodia mal contada’ at the Centro Cultural de Cabo Verde. He has already completed several artistic residencies in Portuguese-speaking countries, including Cape Verde, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe.
Carlos Noronha Feio
[1981, Portugal]
With a PhD in Philosophy from the Royal College of Art in London, he has participated in several collective and individual exhibitions and received several awards, the most recent of which was an artistic residency at CNAD – National Center for Art, Crafts and Design, in Cape Verde (2022). More recent exhibitions include the solo show ‘Arkipélg’, at CNAD (2023), and participation in group exhibitions such as ‘ver no escuro’, in Águeda, Portugal, and ‘uma terna (e política) contemplação do que vive’, at the Museu Bienal de Cerveira. His works reflect his continued exploration and questioning of cultural dynamics through art.