Solo show curated by Cristiana Tejo
Tomorrow is another day is an expression that indicates a present consciousness on the memory of the past looking to an expectant future. In the African context, it brings to the discourse the failures and absences of history and politics and claims for an independence of thought and action in the construction of postcolonial spaces and territories by appropriating the dogmas of forms of power, canons of beauty and Hellenistic aesthetics.
Tomorrow is another day is composed by a series of photographs and a video captured very recently in some African countries, such as Congo and Mozambique. In the first photographic installation, Babel Tower, the subject of the work is the Tour de l'Échangeur, a tower that was once one of the tallest in the world at the time of its construction (1970-1974). It was designed by the Franco-Tunisian architect Olivier- Clément Cacoub at the request of the dictator Mobutu to serve as a tribute to Patrice Emery Lumumba, the main leader in the fight against Belgian colonial domination. Its shape is a mix of architectural signs that crosses between a skyscraper, a pyramid and a citadel and it seems to express a will to power. Cacoub was also the designer of Gbadolite, considered by many as the Versailles of Congo, as well as many other projects in the French-speaking Africa before, during and after the wars for independence. The tower was not completed for several decades and was only recently finished with Chinese funds.
A second photographic series reveals the spaces of academic learning of sculpture in a school of fine arts. Classic models are present both in replicas of Greco-Roman statues as well as in anatomical drawings on the charcoal board. At the same time, we observe the transference of these academic codes and techniques to sculptures with African genetic traits. The two series of work are linked by a woman who appears in the photos of the Tower of L'Échangeur and is the protagonist of the video Beauty. In this one, the body transits through these spaces of construction of representations confronting and resignifying them.
In a third group of works, we find in the figures of twin black women the representation of duality and otherness, in a game of similarities and differences in natural and architectural environments where ruin and resilience project us to a terrain of social reinvention.
The title of the exhibition refers in particular to the will of presenting architectural buildings that break canons in the post-independence moment in Africa, where architecture acquired the capacity to awake utopias and also implied a commitment with democracy, social freedom and freedom of drawing, producing priceless places of inestimable value. Tomorrow is another day is an attempt to reflect on the reconciliation between what already exists, what has never been and what will one day be something different, between old and new, between memory, history and ideological utopia.
Text by Cristiana Tejo
Image views by João Grama
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