BUALA | African Contemporary Culture

The King Who Crossed Backwards

martalanca — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:01:55 +0000

Chinenye Egbuna Ikwuemesi

Portugal did not begin the taking. It widened the road. The desert and the ocean became parallel corridors of the same long project. The Trans-Saharan slave trade would run for twelve centuries in total. It trafficked an estimated ten million people, and yet it is barely spoken of. In the West, it barely exists as a cultural fact at all.

Dance Not Dance? Let’s Dance...

martalanca — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 12:44:02 +0000

Rui Eduardo Paes

Dance Not Dance lets ghosts circulate in their truncated transience, leaving us with the task of tying up loose ends. Another of these ghosts is Valentim de Barros, who was admitted to the Miguel Bombarda Psychiatric Hospital by the fascists with a diagnosis of “homosexual pathology”. It is one of the several disabled bodies that the new dance has recovered in its affirmation of a becoming queer and becoming crip. But in these archaeologies, some absences are also felt.

Colonial famines, archives, and silencing: Colonial Portugal and the (necro)politics of life

martalanca — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:48:38 +0000

Apolo de Carvalho

The famine was, like José Vicente Lopes says, “Cape Verde`s holocaust”. The Portuguese colonial regime orchestrated this horrific crime by abandoning the islanders in various ways, even preventing them from implementing survival strategies. For example, it prohibited boats loaded with food sent by the Cape Verdean diaspora to help the starving people, to reach their destination.

Serbian political uprsing 2024-2026

martalanca — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:14:07 +0000

Marijana Cvetković

For more than 35 years, Serbian society has been in a state of continuous disintegration. Almost nothing functions as it should. The wealth that had been collectively produced during Yugoslav times, was systematically privatized, creating a narrow elite of multimillionaires and billionaires whose power is rooted almost entirely in the capture of public resources and state-funded projects.

Why Do I Need to State the Obvious - Installation by Edgar de Oliveira / Avital Barak

martalanca — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:57:46 +0000

Avital Barak

Amélia’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren speak many languages, have different hair colours, and hold many different passports. They have lived a wide range of experiences. Yet they are all part of the same family. When they meet, they share a sense of belonging to something beyond words, categories, or distinctions. So what is this family identity? Who knows? Even the family members themselves offer many different answers to that question.

A chicken on a donkey wanting to go to the beach

martalanca — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:44:34 +0000

Pedro José-Marcellino aka P.J. Marcellino

The film’s fertile terrain lies in the interstitial spaces between li (here) and lá (there), in the liminal lives and livelihoods, between memory and present, between those who arrived and those born here but carrying another land with them, between a country that calls itself modern and the persistence of underserved informal settlements that persist — despite decades of promises of dignified and universal rehousing — as mirages on the periphery. Rather than an ethnographic outsider’s look, Ali, Aqui proposes a wandering story told from within, a community fiction rather than a docu-drama, based on the rhythms, languages, emotions, textures, pains, and humours of those who inhabit the community.

Zineb Sedira: Standing Here Wondering Which Way To Go

martalanca — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:53:25 +0000

Amanda Tavares

It is this historical context of political exchanges and utopias that inspired Zineb Sedira to develop Standing Here Wondering Which Way To Go, a multimedia project that delves into emancipatory dreams, transnational networks and conviviality. Borrowing its title from a song performed by African-American singer Marion Williams at the Pan African Festival of Algiers, the exhibition pays homage to the spirit of solidarity and resistance of the global 1960s which was so present in newly independent Algeria. Divided into four ‘scenes’, the project also celebrates culture in its diverse forms as a vital tool for social mobilisation and political consciousness.

“See a Black Man on Fire”, Complô by João Miller Guerra

martalanca — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 21:08:37 +0000

Pedro José-Marcellino aka P.J. Marcellino

No seu acto final, Complô não poupa socos, mas vai com luvas de lã. De volta ao estúdio –– esse refúgio improvisado entre blocos de prédios algures na Margem Sul – pressentimos a mudança de tom. A raiva dá lugar à ternura, talvez porque a ternura sejá mais poderosa. Ghoya grava uma faixa para a companheira. A sua voz abranda, amacia. “Baby, nós merecíamos um filme,” ele diz.

Seeing is a slow verb. A (neo)postcolonial essay on time, gaze, and discomfort.

martalanca — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 09:25:52 +0000

Pedro José-Marcellino aka P.J. Marcellino

Cléo Diára signs a historic role here. Not as a token of diversity on a European poster, but because she carries in her the contradiction of her POV, never throwing it back at the viewer as pedagogy. She’s simply magnetic, sensitive, at times insolent, provocative; or as a NYFF text puts it, she “mixes strength, sensuality, and vulnerability” and stands out as the film’s emotional backbone. It’s no surprise she won the Best Actress Award in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, a gesture of resonance for a Capeverdean-Portuguese actress working in a circuit where legitimacy is still a bareknuckle spar. Those New York critics went further: a “fierce” and “star-making” role. All true.

Tales of oblivion (or of our shameless lists)

martalanca — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:33:11 +0000

Inês Beleza Barreiros

These names are part of a list, whose same logic inspired another list composed of the names of several children from a Portuguese public school to be read by the Portuguese (neo) colonial-fascist party in Parliament, which exposed these same children to hatred and violence (in Portugal as in Palestine). The list I have partly copied above is a document, perhaps a list of those arriving in a slave ship, which the Portuguese filmmaker Dulce Fernandes included in her latest film, Tales of Oblivion.