Daemonicycles

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10038188

Keywords:

Colonial science, Counter-narrative, Cosmology, Photography, Artistic research

Abstract

The starting point for this visual investigation was an image from the photographic album of the border delimitation mission of a section of the Angolan/Congolese (DRC) frontier. The image shows a lunch at the Portuguese camp on the 5th of October 1914. Sitting at the table are six white men – the three commanding officers from each colonial power, Portugal and Belgium. Standing at the back of the construction that serves as a dining room, is a black servant. His head, merged into the background, is invisible. From the original glass negative of this shot, it was possible to retrieve this man’s features. The image was reprinted, cut up and reworked in various manners including collage and photography, a short animation photo essay – O Festim [the Feast] – and a web-based experiment – Daemonicycles – of which this visual essay is an interpretation. The work intends to reflect upon history and colonialism, considering power dynamics, cosmology and culture and the enduring phantoms that haunt us still today.

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Author Biography

Soraya Vasconcelos, Centre for Other Worlds (COW) - Universidade Lusófona Lisboa

Soraya Vasconcelos is a visual artist, faculty member of Universidade Lusófona's photography department and researcher at Center for Other Worlds (COW). PhD in Communication, Culture and Arts (UAlgarve), she has been involved in projects connected to photography and art. As a full-time researcher (2019-2022) for Photo Impulse (ICNOVA) a project focused on a critical, decolonial analysis of the photographic and film archives produced in the context of Portuguese colonial science, she developped individual and collaborative artistic research and co-curated the project’s final exhibition O Impulso Fotográfico: (des)arrumar o Arquivo Colonial at Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência (Dec.21 – May31, 2023). She collaborated with Propeller Magazine, an editorial project by Hélice, photographers’ collective in Lisbon; co-proposed and co-coordinated, with Susana Gaudêncio, the collective and interdisciplinary project Estação Vernadsky (Sines/Lisbon 2017-18). Her artistic practice includes photography, drawing, book/print-making; she has become increasingly interested in the intersections between fields through collaborative and interdisciplinary methods.

References

BONTINCK, François. “Les deux Bula Matari,” Études Congolaises 12, no. 3 (July–September 1969): 83–97.

FU-KIAU, Bunseki. African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kôngo. New York: Athelia Henrietta Press,1980.

GOMEZ, Michael A.. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

MACGAFFEY, Wyatt. “Oral Tradition in Central Africa,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 7, no. 3 (1974): 417-42.

RICE, Alan. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003.

TONDA, Joseph. Le Souverain moderne. Le corps du pouvoir en Afrique Centrale. Paris: Karthala, 2005.

Additional Files

Published

26.10.2023

How to Cite

Vasconcelos, S. (2023). Daemonicycles. Archivo Papers, 3(2), 101–117. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10038188

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2023): Decolonial Visualities: Indigenising Visual Culture Studies

Section

Visual Essays

License

Copyright (c) 2024 © The Author(s), under license to Archivo Press.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.