On 24 May, Catarina Laranjeiro and Daniel Barroca opened the exhibition “The Floor is Lava!” at Fidelidade Arte in Chiado, Lisbon.

The starting point for the exhibition was the film Fire in the Mud, which they both made in Guinea-Bissau. “We decided to develop a curatorial project that both expanded the film’s research process to more remote areas of our artistic practice, and included objects and people that brought turbulence to the territory that Fire in the Mud configured,” the curators tell us on the exhibition’s description.

But one could state that the point of arrival are Lisbon’s suburbs and the vernacular cinema that Catarina Laranjeiro is investigating: “These are audiovisual works made by filmmakers of Guinean and Cape Verdean origin who, without a budget, generate new artistic flows between the diasporic communities they inhabit and their respective countries of origin”. Comprising video works, drawings, photographs and a blanket map — Symptomatic Blanket, by Sara Santos, where she inscribes a subjective geopolitics of Europe — the exhibition builds several bridges between Europe and Africa.

Besides the above-mentioned Sara Santos, the exhibition features Ana Temudo, Axy Demba, Carlos Andrade, CV-TEP, Inês Sapeta Dias, João Pereira aka Tikai, José Estima, Maria do Carmo Piçarra, Marina Temudo, Mário Oliveira aka Barudju, Mbana Cabra & Samba Tenem, Nelca Lopez, Nos Manera, Ramón Sarró, Rui Lopes, Rui Silva, Sara Santos, Uma Certa falta de Coerência, Umaro Sabali aka Maquina Motor and Victor Bor.

Alongside the exhibition, there will also be a film cycle (programmed by Inês Sapeta Dias, Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Rui Lopes) and a series of talks. The exhibition can be visited until 30 August and admission is free.

Photo: one of the exhibition rooms, where you can watch a variety of short films (© Diana Barbosa)