BUALA | African Contemporary Culture

Africa’s climate finance rules are growing, but they’re weakly enforced – new research

martalanca — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:31:17 +0000

Paola D'Orazio

Africa also has the potential to position itself as a hub for renewable energy and sustainable finance. With vast solar and wind resources, expanding urban centres, and an increasingly digital financial sector, the continent could leapfrog towards a greener future if investment and regulation advance together.

Sea, Margins, and Center

martalanca — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:20:40 +0000

Carlotta Pisano

In this continuous movement, between emergence and disappearance, the sea becomes cyclical memory: it brings fragments back to shore, smooths them, disperses them again. Nothing is ever truly lost; everything returns transformed. So too the stories of the island, Taíno, African, Haitian, Dominican, are not erased, but rewritten in a rhythm that is not linear, but circular. Like the waves, advancing and retreating without ever ceasing, history persists. And in their coming and going, they hold what has been, what is, and what has yet to emerge.

Eusébio in Portuguese Racial Discourse: Recent Claims of (Non-)Racism in Football

martalanca — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:30:40 +0000

Andrew Nunes

These practices were serious enough for the newly independent African nation of Ghana to lodge a legal complaint against Portugal before the International Labour Organisation in 1962, helping to expose the fallacy of Portuguese benevolence towards its black population (Wolfson et al., 2009). As such, Eusébio, falsely made into a symbol of a non-racist past, functions to soften colonial realities and to silence the everyday racism experienced by African and Afro-Portuguese figures, who could not speak up at the time, in contrast to the anti-racist activism of Vinícius Jr. today.

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.