c6 angola project

The Angola Project

(part of the larger Cabula6 project series, “Life on Earth” about traveling, immigration, emigration, diasporas and shifting notions of home)

Part I - Lisbon, Portugal

Invited to take part in the European Union project APAP VI - the art of survival by the Portuguese arts organization Transforma (based in Torres Vedras), we’ll spend 6 weeks in Lisbon researching and developing a new film/theater project - The Angola Project.

Focussing on people whose lives and imaginations travel back and forth between Portugal and Angola, The Angola Project will be an investigation of this particular European - African axis.  The first part of the project, to be conducted in Lisbon from May 1st 2008 until June 10th 2008 will be a research phase investigating the ways in which different people imagine or think about that “other” place and what it has to do with “this” place where they are right now.  We’ll conduct formal and informal interviews with people on and off camera - both black and white Angolans living in Lisbon as well as Portuguese of Angolan descent, ex-commandos who fought in the colonial / independence wars of the 1960s, businessmen and women, students, musicians, professionals, hair stylists, athletes, academics, authors and anyone else we come across who has a story to tell and is willing to tell it to us.  Depending on how these conversations and contacts go, we’ll let them lead us to places we can’t even imagine yet while staying on the look-out for stories which both conform to and confound clichés.

For Part I of The Angola Project, we’ll collect materials and at the end of the 6 week residency present our experiences - whether as a performance, set of open conversations or some sort of installation or short film.

Part II of The Angola Project will take place in Angola.

Project Aims : 

The ultimate aim is to eventually write a feature length film script about people traveling back and forth between Portugal and Angola - both physically and imaginatively.

We’ll document the process of researching and writing it and use this as material for possible performance presentations or installations.