Avó (Muidumbe), 2009
DV-CAM, colour, sound. 10’ 49”
Raquel Schefer. Avó (Muidumbe), 2009
Avó (Muidumbe) explores the artist’s own family history as a reflexive appendage to a complex historical moment that needs to be updated from the present. The work is built around the juxtaposition of texts and images taken from letters and Super-8 films in the family archive, and the artist’s mise en scène of these materials. The selected images and texts narrate fragments of the domestic life of a family of Portuguese colonialists in Mozambique in 1960, on the threshold of the outbreak of the struggle for independence. The process of reproduction and later editing by Schefer points to the possibility of finding in visual language a filter for the colonial memory, reinscribing a cultural history cut across by trauma by means of the creation of an alternative memory. The work explores a problematic territory in which personal experience shares the same space as the collective consciousness, positing the complex relationship that exists in the exercise of remembering; between the historical fact and memorised affects, reflecting on the mimetic quality between memory and narrativity.
