New Words for Mindelo's Urban Creole

New Words for Mindelo's Urban Creole

Production country: 
fr
Year: 
2014
Duration: 
11
Edition: 
2015
Format: 
film/video

For New Words for Mindelo's Urban Creole, the artist created neologisms, that derive from Greek mythology and names of colonial administrators and military officers related to Portuguese colonial history. These aim to reflect and encapsulate ongoing and recent social practices that have become current in the Portuguese West African ex-colony, Cape Verde, since it became a democracy in 1990. The inhabitants of the country's second city, generally defined as the country's cultural capital, Mindelo, have tried to adapt to the advent of globalisation in order to accommodate or profit from tourism, emigration, immigration, capitalism, and drug trafficking. The neologisms are presented with their meanings, which address Mindelo's class structure based on lingering colonial hierarchies, and a type of tourism that relies on the commodification of the individual. New Words for Mindelo's Urban Creole explores how new social and individual/individual relations, and new concepts related to these permeate a new social context, but are not be entirely present or transparent within its vocabulary.
 

share

Related participants: 
Related events: