Spaces, visibilities and transcultural flows: diasporic strategies in the local worlds by paula roush, text included in catalogue
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The project Local Worlds brings together a range of international contemporary media art and performance works that explore the relationship between the local and the global, looking at how experiences of travel, diaspora and displacement can inform our perceptions of identity, culture and nation. The title Local Worlds refers both to the way the world is part of Lagos local imaginary and the way the local is a form of engagement of the artists with the world they live in. How to approach the ‘local’ is currently – and literally - a locus of intense debate for a range of disciplines and areas of cultural production. In spite of no consensus, there is however, the recognition that migration and travel brought any fixed notion of the local into disarray and there is a need to approach it from a multi-view perspective to account for its complex representations.
THE WORLDS IN THE LOCAL CULTURES
A good place to start is the city of Lagos, where images of the world, mainly references to world journeys and relationships with former Portuguese colonies appear as a strong element of urban culture. This includes the recent Lagos’ branding as ‘City of The Discoveries’[1] and the city’s related heritage, made of monuments and public art which includes as the most visible signs the statues of the twoLagos- based navigators [2] that in the 15th century initiated from Lagos the caravel expeditions into Africa. Henry the Navigator [3] sponsored the first expeditions into Morocco and the western coast of Africa, and Gil Eanes, sailing from Lagos, was the first to go beyond Cape Bojador in 1434 marking the beginning of the Portuguese exploration of Africa [4]. Also in the city centre is the site for the first European slave market[5] - it is known that in the 15th century, Lagos was the first port through which African slaves entered Europe and where the first slave market was held - the building standing on its site having been, meanwhile, converted into an exhibition space.
The ‘world’ of Lagos’ popular culture has the approximate time-space coordinates identified by Peter Sloterdijk in his 2005 philosophical study as the second wave of terrestrial globalisation: “Terrestrial globalisation (actually brought about by the Christian- Capitalist oceanic expansion and politically established by the colonialist policies of Europe’s old Nation States) constructs… the perfectly transparent nuclear part of a three-stage process…which lasted five hundred years, integrating History books as ‘the period of European expansion’. For the majority of historians, it is easy to look at the period between 1492 and 1945 as a closed construct of events – it is the period when the current world system was shaped.” [6] With 1492 the author refers both to the end of the Reconquest [7] and the funding of Columbus’ first voyage [8], but to acknowledge local involvement, one might make a note of 14159, the date when departing from Lagos to occupy Ceuta, the first step in the European colonial expansion was sketched.
This fascination with the ‘lost splendour of the empire,’ more than a mere local interest is in fact a strong component of Portuguese national identity and culture, that crosses into a wide range of daily life discourses and practices as pointed out by João Leal in his 2006 study of the ‘hidden empire’, which the author describes as ‘Imperial nostalgia…and “that seems to rest on a sort of hypermnesia (Roth) for the period of the Discoveries […] In spite of the fact that the 1974 revolution and the birth of new independent States in the Portuguese former colonies have extinguished the Portuguese Imperialist dreams.”[10] In Lagos this is manifested in the city’s ‘territorial marketing campaign’[11], part of a very contemporary fetish of the local, practiced in many other locales, a situation best analysed by critical sociology of cultural globalisation. In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai (2006) [12] describes the culture of the ´local´ as a complex relationship of production and consumption, which we find ourselves alienated from, through the dual fetishism of production and consumption. On one hand, through the creation of the spectacle of the local (the event-city), and on the other, with the use of advertising and media that have a crucial role in the development of campaigns to attract the consumer to the local, offering (in the Baudrillardian sense) a simulacrum of place and experience.
As such, we may point out the prolific production of locality taking place in Lagos through the imaginary of the worldwide colonial expansion [13]. Playing a part in this manufacture of the local spectacle is the use of historic re-enactment. The urban infrastructure- that by itself is already an intense aestheticisation of the colonial imaginary- is every two years animated by the ‘Discoveries Festival’ and the ‘Medieval Market’, each edition marked by the historical re-enactment of episodes of the imperial expansion. In 2008, for example, the focus was the “historic recreation of the arrival of Gil Eanes to the Cape Bojador and Vasco da Gama to India,” which included for the first time in addition to the volunteers and re-enactment groups, the participation of all the school children from Lagos [14]. One of the re-enactment groups describes its participation in the ‘Discoveries Festival’ this way: “To display what our ancestors did and thought, how they dressed, ate and entertained themselves in and around the 15th and 16th centuries, the prosperous period of the Discoveries.”[15] Their concern being to recreate, as accurately as possible, selected episodes of the Portuguese colonial expansion.
In her 2006 study on artistic strategies of re-enactment, curator Inke Arns departs from similar definitions of historic recreation (and practices like living history and live action role play) to outline what they have in common: “They allow access to history or histories, through immersion, embodiment, and empathy in a way that history books cannot” [16] but separates their use of historical memory from its use in contemporary media art. She writes of historical festivals that they “are about imagining oneself away into another time and have nothing (or little) to do with the present, such as playing a totally different role that has nothing (or little) to do with our own reality.”[17] In artistic strategies, on the other hand, “the reference to the past is not history for history’s sake: it is about the relevance of what happened in the past for the here and now.”[18] It is this process that we unpack now.
DIASPORIC STRATEGIES AND MULTI-VIEW WORLDS
Travel, journeys and the relationship to former colonies are also a dominant theme in Local Worlds, where they appear as a drive for a series of intertextual works using photographic media in hybridized formats of performance, installation, drawing and animation. Consider two examples. Berlin-based, Lisbon-born of African descendence Francisco Vidal presents in Again, again and again! 500 outras coisas (2007-2008), a large wall and floor installation of silkscreen printing where he interrogates back the Portuguese empire playing with a serial repetition of faces and patterns, whilst a video recorded documentation of the screen printing performance repeated 500 times – the same years as the history of Portuguese colonisation - echoes with the moot question: how much of the imperial history is a repetition of clichés? Next, London- and Lisbon-based Mónica de Miranda, has created in Back Pack Paradise (2007-2008) a photographic triptych documenting the performative inscription of her own body with maps and landscapes of exotic landscapes, the same maps that represent the imperialist expansion and current transnational movement of people and media. Defying identification by turning her back to the camera, the formal process of admission to a country, which passes by biometric facial recognition, is challenged. As a faceless identity, both artist and migrant, a question arises: will she be allowed in?
Both works represent an engagement with the local and the global from a multicentred perspective that we tentatively suggest is a dominant feature of contemporary media art and performance work in Local Worlds. The process of migration is crucial to this sensibility, yet not fully developed in critical theory, as pointed out by Kobena Mercer in Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (2008): “Migration throws objects, identities and ideas into flux. It has been a defining feature of modernity yet remains only hazily understood as a significant factor in numerous 20th century artistic formations.”[19]
Amidst the studies to ascertain that different types of migrations are key to the emergence of exiled, diasporic and post-colonial ethnic visual work (cinema, video and also cross-media performative projects) is Hamid Naficy in the 2001 study Accented Cinema suggesting that “Diaspora, like exile, often begins with trauma, rupture and coercion, and it involves the scattering of populations to places outside their homeland. Sometimes, however, the scattering is caused by a desire for increased trade, for work, or for colonial and imperial pursuits. Consequently… they can be: victim/refugee diasporas…labour/service diasporas …trade/business diasporas…imperial/colonial diasporas …and cultural hybrid diasporas…” [20] One of the dominating aspects of diasporic video and filmic production is their interstitial character, which arises from the particular type of journeys their authors undertake: “They cross many borders and engage in many deterritorialising and reterritorialising journeys, which take several forms, including home-seeking journeys, journeys of homelessness, and homecoming journeys. However, these journeys are not just physical and territorial but are also deeply psychological and philosophical. Among the most important are journeys of identity, in the course of which old identities are sometimes shed and new ones refashioned….Identity is not a fixed essence but a process of becoming, even a performance of identity.” [21]
In the realm of visual arts, Sieglinde Lemke in the 2008 study of diasporic aesthetic suggests “It often portrays the act of crossing, the process of migration and what it means to live in a state of exile. In some way or another, a diasporic aesthetic is concerned with the dialectic of the ‘home’ and the ‘host land’.” [22] Based on James Clifford’s concepts of roots/routes as forms of community consciousness, Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall’s notions of cultural hybridism, and Nicholas Mirzoeff concept of a multiple viewpoint perspective as the diasporic way of seeing, we can consider along with Lemke that typical of diasporic art is the multiple-view point. As the diasporic condition creates multiple-view perspectives, this is expressed in the diasporic art as a multi-perspective situation. Nevertheless, diasporic works do not limit themselves to represent an author’s shifting perspectives of home, exile or separation. Another important feature is its effect on the viewer’s reception and participation in the work as it invokes the diasporic gaze: “Its attendant mode of reception entices the spectator to grapple with multiplicity and heterogeneity, urging the diasporic gaze to wander between different visual sites.” In summary, the “diasporic Gesamtkunstwerk (holistic artwork) invites a multiple point of view perspective because it sends our gaze en route.” [23]
It is the politics of the diasporic gaze that brings us back into the area of Portuguese post-colonial studies, where a similar perspectival shift is identified as a way of re-reading the past from the present. In the 2005 project Dislocating Europe, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches [24], reads a movement of ‘contextualized dislocating’ [25] in contemporary art practices, bringing together ethnographic approaches with site-specific interventions, that depart from the local to question authoritarian concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘other.’ “The post-colonial approach questions epistemological certainties and disciplinary methodologies, the linearity of a historical time centred on the ‘West’, at the same time
as it appropriates creatively its theory in order to retrieve other subjectivities and narratives that were silenced by Eurocentrism, emphasizing the central role of colonial violence in the composition of the totalities that post-modernism would question and post-colonialism would interpret in an alternative way.” [26]
This has been the latest task of cultural producers in their attempt to bring these issues into debate. Nirun Ratnam in studying the theme of art and globalisation [27], locates the emergence of this interest in Documenta 11 in Kassel, and its curatorial focus on the spatial metaphor of ‘nearness’ that characterizes the post-colonial, as presented by Okwui Enwezor in the 2002 catalogue: “It is a world of nearness, not an elsewhere. Neither is it a vulgar state of endless contestations and anomie, chaos and unsustainability, but rather the very space where the tensions that govern all ethical relationships between citizen and subject converge.” [28] Similarly, Fernandes Dias [29] in his summary of Portuguese post-colonial curatorial activities indicates a triad of Lisbon-based exhibitions (Uma Casa do Mundo, Imagens de Troca e Project Room, besides the New York-Lisbon Looking Both Ways) as influential in the conceptualization of the post-colonial in contemporary art practices. Yet there is an urgency in widening the debate from the centres and quasi-centres of the art word (Kassel, Lisbon) to bring it to the much more peripheral city of Lagos.
To further exemplify how these ideas are explored in the Local Worlds program, we present a selection of paradigmatic projects along the lines of spaces, visibilities and transcultural flows, which is the subtitle of the project and refers to a possible although non-exhaustive typology of diasporic strategies. Whilst space stands for geographical land, landscape or terrain, it is the emotional, lived experience of the land, the home, the local, that makes it into a place. Following Lefebvre’s triad of social space production [30] – lived space (representational space), perceived space (spatial practice), conceived space (representations of space) - visibilities refer to the investment - affective, social, financial - that is always shaping the places we inhabit, and which side by side with displacement and the identity conflicts become the core of diasporic politics. Transcultural (a term that can be traced back to Ortiz’s transculturalism or cultural convergence [31] flows, refers to Arjun Appadurai’s [32] multiplicity of scapes - financial, ideological, mediatic, ethnic - that account for globalization, but whose disjunctions inform the paradoxical character of transcultural flows.
SPACES: HISTORY AND ALLMNESIA
Distinctions between space and place, based on relational attachment to the spaces of daily life, allow an entry point into the feeling of space. Allmnesia (2008), the site-specific concer tinstallation by Lagos-based Tiago Cutileiro and Jorge Pereira, is made out of images and sounds sourced from Lagos. Projected into the patio of the Centro Cultural de Lagos for one hour, the performance evoques the disruption of memory associated with
the rapid spatial mutations happening as a result of a fast paced economic growth dominated by tourism real estate.
Calling it Allmnesia, the piece also comments on semiotic processes of signification associated with space production and commoditisation. Lagos is one of the sixteen towns that form the municipality of Algarve, the southernmost region of mainland Portugal. Up to the mid-12th century, under the Moorish occupation of Iberia, the region was called “Al-Garb Al-Andalus”33, then renamed Algarve, after the Portuguese occupation, and more recently reinvented as Allgarve [34] in the campaign to promote Algarve to the English speaking audiences and under which Local Worlds has been developed. Are we heading towards a new moment of erasure, where local history is rewritten to signify a new commodity for global consumption? Following the mechanical ballet of the cranes dancing to the recorded sounds of sea, one can see the other side of the Algarve, a wrong, dysfunctional, psychopathic side. Challenging the postcard, crystallized, mirror-façade image of a perfect Allgarve, the question is raised: will all this result in another a(ll)mnesia? Or will this contribute towards the total amnesia (allmnesia), that the history of the ‘discoveries’ has become? In this context, this can be a positive contribution to a reflection on space. As pointed out by Miwon Kwon in her 2006 study of site-specific art: “An encounter with a ”wrong“ place is likely to expose the instability of the ”right“ place, and by extension the instability of the self.” [35]
VISIBILITIES: UTOPIAS AND CANNIBALISMS
Portuguese Luanda-born Cláudia Cristóvão, in a diasporic position herself, lives and works between London and Amsterdam, and her work looks at the condition lived by those found between one place and another. In the multi-screen video installation Fata Morgana (My Africa) (2006) she rehearses a polyphonic visualisation of the empire as the project of a nation, and part of a collective imaginary partially interrupted with the 1974 Portuguese
Revolution (which initiated Democracy in the aftermath of the “New State” dictatorship). The work is developed out of interviews conducted with children of the ‘retornados’ (returnees) who were born in Africa before 1974 but had to leave following the decolonization movement. Now adults that grew away from their country of origin, each one speaks about an Africa they hardly experienced, uttering multiple viewpoints of an Africa they own in their
hearts but never really lived. Projecting their visions against the background of a mirage, their accounts attempt to fill in the historical gap provoked by the process of (de) colonisation with a mirage of a utopian Africa.
The assertions by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (1989) defend that a major feature defining post-colonialism is “the concern with place and displacement. It is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place” could aptly apply to the process we see at play in the work. Alienation of vision and linguistic gaps in the construction of place appear as the symptoms of displacement, which can only be apprehended if we “go beyond the usual categories of social alienation such as master/slave; free/bonded; ruler/
ruled, however important and widespread these may be in post-colonial cultures.”[36] In the study on the white Angolans as returnees [37], Ricardo Ovallo-Bahamon (2003) points to the defining features of the “returnees”
caught between the former colonies and the continental Portugal, and their ambiguous positioning as both part of the colonial rule and the wave of African migration arriving into the continent from the mid 1970s onwards.
Like Cláudia Cristóvão, Luanda-born António Ole approaches in Retrato Falado (2007) the colonial encounter but from a radically different perspective. In the photographic triptych António plays with the politics of alterity, as identity performance and empowerment strategy, exploring the limits between fiction and reality. The triple self-portrait, built with a mannequin and props as a surrealist surrogate of the self, explores the mimetism of suspicious, marginal, threatening identities. Positing himself as cannibal, queer, warrior, soldier or chinese militant, it evokes identities in collusion that express the anxiety of the post-colonial subject, in a “post-9/11” climate of fear. In spite of its title, the voice is never heard, as the portraits remain condemned to the absence of written or spoken word. But if they spoke, in which language would they do it: in the language of ”Lusophony” imposed by the process of colonization - or by recourse to other African languages?
The work can be understood as an allegory on the reports of African cannibalism that circulated amongst the colonizers as a rationale for western intervention and other times were used by Africans as a tactic of self-defense,
as explained by Beatrix Heintze in her 2006 study about cannibalism in Angola: ‘Defamation and discrimination of the natives, calling them cannibals,… helped objectify the African people, reducing them to a commodity, commercializing them on a large scale in the transatlantic slave traffic. Later, from the 19th century on, the accusation of cannibalism became an important argument for the Portuguese to impose re-education and forced
labour under the guise of ‘civilization’ through colonial repression. One can understand the extent to which this topos continues to haunt Western minds if we remember how in March 2000 a socialist member of the European
Parliament insulted an Angolan minister calling him ‘cannibal’. ”[38]
TRANSCULTURAL FLOWS: ORANGES AND SATELLITES
The two last projects commented here are Oranges by Inês Amado and Global Positioning System by Melanie Jackson. Both reflect the intricacies of the global flows, following the trajectories of particular objects, relying on an archaeological approach of everyday items that follow the routes of global imperialism/capitalism. Jyotsna G. Singh in her Companion to the Global Renaissance [39], suggests similarly an archaeology of “local “knowledge (following Certeau and Foucault), that relies on “a micro-historical perspective on globalism by tracing the exchange and movement of material objects — artworks, spices, silks, pigments, metals, and cloth — in order to understand the trajectories of the east-west encounters.’
With Laranjas (2008), Portuguese longtime London-based artist Inês Amado fills one of the spaces at the Forte Pau da Bandeira40 with oranges that visitors can take away. Presented on the floor, the oranges are surrounded
by a soundscape of a journey on the river Thames produced in collaboration with London-based artist Dave Lawrence that evokes the long journey of the fruit around the world. In the installation, the orange becomes
a relational object, a fruit that symbolizes the journeys of terrestrial globalization and the cultural hybridization resulting from the food exchanges occurring in colonial journeys.[41]
As Inês reminds us, oranges arrived in Portugal from Arab countries (even if it was the bitter orange), followed by the Chinese orange trees (which resulted in the sweet orange) brought in by Vasco da Gama the navigator, and the third wave of the oranges already exported by the Portuguese into the world. Used to work with food (her long-term project Bread Matters [42] is dedicated to the study of bread), in this project Inês departs from the orange to reflect on the fact that Portuguese culture is not monolithic and results from complex processes of hybridisation. If on one hand, the orange’s spherical shape evokes the globe, it is also a fact that internationally
the orange symbolises Portugal. Several countries that imported orange trees from Portugal, started giving the oranges varied names derived from the word Portugal, such as Portokale (Albania), Portughal (Kurdistan),
Portugaletto (Piemonte) and Portugales (Greece).
The predominance of contemporary panoptic society, with means of controlling borders and people in an uneven way results that paradoxically commodities circulate much more easily than people that are kept in place through tight border regimes. This vision of technology is one the driving forces behind the animation work A Global Positioning System (2006) by American, London-based artist Melanie Jackson.
The animated film charts the journey across the globe of the GPS unit, as a reverse journey from a promotional brochure selling the benefits of the handheld GPS to an urban western audience to the varied components of
its production. Breaking down the GPS manufacturing workflow is made out of two movements: on one hand panning across the world, from the global centres of consumption into the factories in China and further afield into the mines of Democratic Republic of Congo or the rubber trees in Sri Lanka; and on the other hand, a zooming in process, going from the macro-scale of the global economy into the most intimate gestures of manual production and the microscopic components of the GPS unit. Melanie presents this journey as a way of depicting the material process of production and challenges the disjunction that capitalism operates between things and their image. From images of miners working in the sandpits of Congo, she uses drawing as away to develop connections with
the more abstract level of high tech glossy consumer technology.
As the voice over narrates: this GPS contains materials that come from the following places: Guinea, China…India…Germany, England, Zambia…Brazil, Australia, Turkey, Nigeria, Spain, …Mexico, Chile, Philippines, USA, Argentina, Portugal, Japan, Korea…South Africa…Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Venezuela…
CONCLUSION
The works selected for Local Worlds explore the relationship between the local and the global, looking at how experiences of travel and displacement can inform perceptions of identity, culture and nation. To understand
the ideas behind the selection of works, we discussed the themes of travel and world in Lagos popular culture. This placed us in contact with the imaginary of the (Portuguese) ´discoveries´ marked by a ‘nostalgia of the empire’. In contrast, the new media art and performance works in the exhibition explore the themes of migration and travel from a multicentred perspective. The multi-view gaze that is a feature of diasporic strategies, seems to convey the post-colonial moment, a much needed shift of perspective when engaging with the empire.
Bringing in together for the first time, in Lagos, artists from a variety of diasporic positions, creates new signifying juxtapositions that map out the complexity of the spatialities and subjectivities crossed by all those in transit. Lagos, Lisbon, Oporto, Funchal, Malaga, London, Milan, Amesterdam, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Luanda, Benguela, Praia, Mali and Maputo, these are just some of the points of engagement with emotional landscapes that is possible to tease and tear apart. As such, and in response to the official and mediatised history of the place, each work invites the viewer to approach the local - be it personal, social, real or imaginary - as an archaeology of everyday objects and cultural practices.
With Portugal caught in the aftermath of de-colonisation from former colonies and its integration in Europe, there is an emergent need to address the relationship between imperialism, globalisation and the post-colonial condition, and the diasporic strategies presented in Local Worlds allow for this reflexive approach. Departing our readings from the locational specificity of Lagos, we attempt a perceptual shift, asking: do these relational modes
of seeing leads us into a timely conversation with a locale performing its identity in proximity to the ghosts of the nation’s former empire?
REFERENCES
1 The title ‘Lagos of the Discoveries’, being “the label that the region wants to assert to the rest of the country” is part of the Plano Estratégico de Lagos (PEL – Strategic Development Plan for Lagos), which includes other proposals such as the Forum of the Discoveries, the Scholl of the Discoveries and the University of the Oceans. Article 5 ‘Orientations in the Cultural Domain’ on ‘Lagos, Capital City of the Discoveries’ states that its “adoption as symbolic image is contextualized by the rich heritage and history in relation with that period. … The Discoveries motto may also be used as a reason to establish geminations, articulations and international representations in Portuguese speaking countries, recalling the former connection between Lagos and the discovered lands.” More information available at: http://www.cm-lagos.pt/NR/rdonlyres/CB594E70-73C4-4331-B070-
87D89D8E45C2/0/OrientacoesdaCultura.pdf [Accessed May 17, 2008].
2 A third historic icon in Lagos’ town centre is the statue of King Sebastian, who departed from Lagos to fight in a crusade against the kingdom of Fez in 1578, created by sculptor João Cutileiro.
3 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_the_Navigator. [Accessed May 17, 2008]. The abundant references to social media throughout the text, and particularly to wikipedia, represent a deliberate effort to avoid history text books and build on collective, potentially imprecise knowledge of the Portuguese colonial past available online, but no more flawed than official historical accounts which I was taught with in primary school.
4 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Eanes [Accessed May 17, 2008].
5 There is a 17th century building standing on the exact site where one of the first slave markets were held in the 15th century. As the major sponsor of these expeditions, Prince Henry received one fifth of the selling price of the slaves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagos%2C_Portugal
6 The author divides globalisation into three periods: the first being the stage of “spherical conceptualisation” and the third the stage of “electronic globalisation”. Peter Sloterdijk (2005) Palácio de Cristal Para uma Teoria Filosófica da Globalização, Lisboa: Relógio d`Água, p. 19-20
7 The Reconquista (a Spanish and Portuguese word for ‘Reconquest’) was a period of 750 years in which several Christian kingdoms expanded themselves over the Iberian Peninsula at the expense of the Muslim states of Al-Andalus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista [Accessed May 4, 2008].
8 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus [Accessed May 4, 2008].
9 In 1415 King João sailed from the harbour of Lagos, to attack the city of Ceuta. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagos,_Portugal[Accessed May 4, 2008].
10 Leal, J., 2006. O império escondido: camponeses, construção da nação e império na antropologia portuguesa. In M. Ribeiro Sanches (ed.) Portugal não é um país pequeno. Contar o “império” na pós-colonialidade. Lisboa: Edições Cotovia, pp. 63-79.
11 This is part of the PEL, chapter 6 ‘Orientations in Territorial Marketing’: “ The brand ‘Lagos – Land of the Discoveries,’ which should integrate all marketing actions that are specific to the different economical sectors of the town…contributing to establish a single and integrated image of the council, being of interest both for tourism and other economic activities that are to be established.” Ibid. Crucially, this vision is led by the national political plan for cities titled POLIS XXI. Available at: http://sig. snit.pt/pc/documentos/POLISXXI-apresentacao.pdf [Accessed May 17, 2008].
12 Appadurai, A., 1996. Modernity at Large - Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press with the Oxford University Press. Chapter Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy available at: http://www.intcul.tohoku.ac.jp/~holden/MediatedSociety/Readings/2003_04/Appadurai.html [Accessed May 4, 2008].
13 For an abbreviated description of the “Portuguese Empire” see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_empire [Accessed May 4, 2008].
14 For a full programme of the 2008 Festival see the Municipality’s web site: http://www.cm-lagos.pt/portal_autarquico/lagos/v_ pt-PT/v_festival_descobrimentos.htm [Accessed May 4, 2008].
15 In the Company’s website http://vivarte.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/2005/10/index0. Another participating theatre group writes: “The company Grupo Recriar a História (Recreate the History Group) is oriented by ethical principles, dedicated to serve society in that we bring the public closer to its historical heritage and noble moral standards of the medieval knights, in a way the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We adapt this moral conduct to historical recreation as a form of cultural dissemination and citizen education, both for those taking part and those watching.” http://www.recriarhistoria.org [Accessed May 4, 2008].
16 Arns, I., 2007, History Will Repeat Itself. Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance, Dortmund- Berlin: Hartware MedienKunstVerein and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, p. 41
17 ibid.
18 Inke Arns, op. cit., p. 43
19 Mercer, K. ed., 2008. Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers. London and Cambridge: Iniva and the MIT Press, p.7
20 Naficy, H., 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton and Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, p.14
21 Ibid., pp. 5-6.
22 Lemke, S., 2008. Diaspora Aesthetics: Exploring the African Diaspora in The Works Of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Jean- Michel Basquiat. In M. Kobena, ed. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers. London and Cambridge: Iniva and the MIT Press, 2008, p. 140
23 ibid., pp. 132-140
24 Ribeiro Sanches, M. ed, 2005, Deslocalizar a Europa. Antropologia, Arte, Literatura e Historia na Pós-Colonialidade, Lisboa: Edições Cotovia, pp. 7-21
25 ibid., p. 20 [“deslocalizacao contextualisada” in the Portuguese text]
26 ibid., p.8
27 Ratnam, N. 2004. Art and globalization. In G. Perry and P. Wood, Themes in Contemporary Art. Yale University Press. Ch. 7
28 Enwezor, O. 2002. Black Box. In O. Enwezor [et al.], eds. Documenta11_ platform5: exhibition: catalogue. Documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel.
29 Fernandes Dias, J.A.B. 2006. Pós-Colonialismo nas Artes Visuais, ou Talvez Nao. In M. Ribeiro Sanches (ed.) Portugal não é um país pequeno. Contar o “império” na pós-colonialidade. Lisboa: Edições Cotovia, 2006 pp. 317-337.
30 Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space (trans. D. Nicholson- Smith). Oxford: Blackwell
31 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transculturation [Accessed May 4, 2008].
32 Arjun Appadurai, op. cit.
33 Al-Garb means “the west”; Al-Andalus, as the region was known, makes reference to a Germanic tribe (the Vandals) who previously lived south of the peninsula. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Portuguese_history_%28Reconquista%29
[Accessed May 4, 2008].
34 The ‘Allgarve’ brand was launched in March 2007 by the Minister of the Economy, Manuel Pinho, with the aim of developing the range of events on offer to tourists in the region and organising a programme promoting culture in the region. See ‘Allgarve 08 will cost 2 million euros’ in http://www.observatoriodoalgarve.com/cna/noticias_ver.asp?noticia=22440 [Accessed May 30, 2008].
35 Kwon, M., 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p. 164.
36 Ashcroft, B, Griffiths, G & Tiffin, H. , 1998. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge.
37 Ovalle-Bahamón, R.E., 2003, The Wrinkles of Decolonization and Nationness: White Angolans as Retornados in Portugal, in Andrea L. Smith, ed., Europe’s Invisible Migrants, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 147-168.
38 Heintze, B., 2006, Contra as teorias simplificadoras. O ‘canibalismo’ na antropologia e história de Angola., in Manuela Ribeiro Sanches ed, Portugal não é um país pequeno. Contar o “império” na pós-colonialidade. Lisboa: Edições Cotovia, pp. 215-228.
39 Jyotsna G. Singh ed., A Companion to the Global Renaissance– 1550-1660: English Culture and Literature in the Era of Expansion. Michigan State University. Forthcoming, available at: http://www.msu.edu/~jsingh/publications.html [Accessed May 11, 2008].
40 17th century fort built between 1679-1690 (according to the stone inscription over the main door), by the sea, as a defence fortress against naval British, Spanish and pirate attacks, acquired by the municipality of Lagos in 1983, and converted into exhibition space related to the history of the discoveries and local modern and contemporary art. http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortaleza_de_Lagos [Accessed May 4, 2008].
41 For further information on the relationship between the age of ‘the discoveries’ and food cultures, see Gupta, A., 2006, Movimentações globais das colheitas desde a ‘era das descobertas’ e transformações das culturas gastronómicas, in Manuela Ribeiro Sanches ed, Portugal não é um país pequeno. Contar o “império”
na pós-colonialidade. Lisboa: Edições Cotovia, pp. 193-214.
42 For more information visit the project’s site: http://www.breadmatters.org/BM/ [Accessed May 4, 2008].
