Nampula Macua Socialismo

Nampula Macua Socialismo is an exhibition by Manuel Santos Maia that concludes 25 years of research into his family’s history in relation to Mozambique (where the artist was born in 1970) and African cultures, particularly the Macua culture. Since 1999, Manuel Santos Maia’s alheava project has been revisiting the issues of colonialism and post-colonialism in the construction of contemporary Portuguese culture through visual narratives of intimate and domestic history. With dozens of exhibitions, performance actions and publications, allheava illuminates blind spots in the relationship between Mozambican society, the Portuguese who came from Africa, and the critical and constructive perspective of a shared collective past.

An installation curated by João Sousa Cardoso brings together collections of images from albums from the colonial period, photographic records of a recent trip by the artist to Nampula, textile work, a bronze model of the ‘house of first affections,’ objects from private life, sculpture and popular music, and planks of African teak wood, dismantled from crates on the journey back to Europe. In the year in which we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mozambique’s independence, Nampula Macua Socialismo aims to contribute to a reflection on regimes of domination and conflict, cultural transits and hybridisations, the incessant processes of socialisation to which we all are heirs.
At the opening of the exhibition, Manuel Santos Maia will inaugurate a new performance.