‘Transatlantic Cartographies’ brings together, at the Espírito Santo Gallery in Loulé, within the scope of the XXI edition of the MED Festival, four artists whose connection to Cape Verde is both intimate and displaced. They live outside the archipelago, but build a continuous dialogue with it - sometimes silent, but always present. Their works do not seek to represent the territory, but to map its traces, reverberations and reunions through image, sound, body and matter.

Each artistic gesture traces an Atlantic line of return and re-imagination. An emotional and political map drawn from mobile margins, where belonging is made up of fragments, eavesdropping and survival. In this exhibition, the ‘outside’ is not an absence, but an extension - a space where senses of origin, community and future continue to be constructed.

With the series ‘Fake Self-Portraits’, Fidel Évora proposes a game between identity and fiction, presence and construction. The faces that question us do not seek to define the self, but rather to question the mechanisms by which it becomes visible. The practice affirms multiplicity as a natural condition of those who inhabit the in-between place - where origin is memory, but also choice.

Through ceramics, iron, fabric and video, Jacira da Conceição invokes the strength of the African female lineage. Her pieces - such as Oráculo dos Búzios, Aruanda and Abraço II - turn the exhibition space into ritual territory. The material is memory that resists oblivion, a gesture that crosses time. Ancestry is here a living force, current, in continuous transmutation.

Amadeu Carvalho presents ‘50 Incognito Faces - Portraits of Absence’, a series of nameless portraits marking the 50th anniversary of Cape Verde's independence. Created with pigments from the Fogo volcano, the faces inhabit the border between presence and disappearance. It is in their anonymity that the power of a plural history is inscribed, made up of silences, absences and untold lives.

Carlos Noronha Feio closes this tour with a sound and visual installation in which Cape Verde and the Atlantic listen to each other. ‘A building is made of more than memories of ancestors...’ proposes an immersive experience through sound and image. The sea, the echoes, the noises become the subject of sensitive listening - between islands, journeys and imagined returns.

‘Transatlantic Cartographies’ reveals how the archipelago extends beyond its physical borders, expanding in the voices and practices of those who, from the outside, continue to inhabit it affectively. These artists draw alternative maps, where the territory is experienced as a pulse, language and gesture - in a geography where distance does not diminish belonging, but expands it.

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.