Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the role of the rural peripheries in the imagination of Angolan artists, both modern and contemporary. Following Said’s idea of the “quest”, I ask how the rural peripheries where imagined by artists from the urban centre of Luanda in order to decolonize the nation in an aesthetic way.

Paper long abstract:

The academic engagement with the urban space has increased in recent years. This is also true for artistic practices that have focused a lot on the urban space as both content and "canvas" for artistic projects but also the space of contemporary art production per se. The African metropolis thus became a collective archive that is represented by artists in very different ways and media (Nuttall and Mbembe 2008), but also as an imaginative space in a form of a utopian blueprint for possible future societies (de Boeck and Plissart 2004). In my paper I want to draw the attention in a similar way to the imaginations of the rural space and its nostalgic dimension. Traveling to the distant provinces of the country was an important practice among the artist of the independence generation such as António Ole or Ruy Duarte de Carvalho - considered to be a decolonizing practice of appropriation of the former colonized territory, nation-building and re-mapping (Said 1994). In a similar way, the contemporary post-civil-war generation of artists such as Kiluanji Kia Henda or Ruy Sérgio Afonso refers to this practice by engaging not only with the peripheral zones of the city but also with the distant provinces such as Lunda in the east or Namibe in the south. This paper presents some exemplary artworks from both generations to analyze how the imagination of the rural periphery can be regarded as a politicized decolonial aesthetic practice.