Cláudia Cristóvão
Fata Morgana (My Africa), 2006, by Cláudia Cristóvão
In her latest work – Fata Morgana – people who were born in Africa but left as children were asked to describe their memories and projections. An imaginary country emerges from these stories, not any one “real” country but one “global Africa”, as real in each person’s mind as it is impossible to find on any map. Fata Morgana means “mirage”, and that’s also the title and content of the first video of the installation. But mirages are precisely the images we see “because we so strongly want to see them”. Moreover, the closer you reach for a mirage, the sooner it disappears…
Surrounding small, intimate screens with individual stories, a large projection lures the viewer: images from a colonial ghost town from the early 20th century, slowly being swallowed by the desert. This interior space is at once the background and projection of all the memories described. Again, fiction and reality are indistinguishable and intertwined, one feeding off and creating the other. As metaphors of time and irrevocable change, and of the shifting sands of memory, these images are also projections of the multitudes of lives and stories that might have happened, and acquire different meanings according to the discourse of each person.
CLÁUDIA CRISTÓVÃO was born in Luanda in 1973, has Portuguese nationality and lives now in Amsterdam and London. She studied Communication (Cinema) at the New University of Lisbon, graduating from the University of Roskilde (Denmark). In 2000 she started her degree in Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and is now finishing her master’s degree at the Byam Shaw- Central Saint Martins College, in London. Her work explores the intersections between fiction and reality, as well as the limits of acting in the public sphere, departing from issues of identity, geography and belonging. She regularly uses video and photography in large-scale installations, although she has also worked with other media. She has recently published the project Stab a Stick into One’s Heart” in Egoísta Magazine. In addition to participating in several group shows, she has participated in the Dakar and the São Paulo biennales in 2006 and she is represented by the Lumen Travo Gallery in Amsterdam.