Director: João Samões (Portugal)

Africa is transformed into a place of imaginary representations, a huge territory in which all fantasies and ghosts can be idealised. In this play, realities and turbulences from the realm of the exotic and the erotic are created and manipulated; memories and reflections about colonialism and racism are mixed together. The name of the play turns our thoughts to the African diary of Michel Leiris, an exercise in the symbiotic writing of ethnography, psychoanalysis and surrealism. Time will reveal the marks and the unbreakable bonds between colonial expansion and the construction of modernity and the artistic vanguard in Europe. We can begin our journey with a famous painting by Picasso, from 1907, in which the painter projects the impact and the influence of the power of the African masks that he saw at the forgotten Musée du Trocadéro, in Paris, onto the bodies of the women at a brothel in Calle Avinyó, in Barcelona, breaking with the canons of academic realism and revolutionising the possibilities of the body’s representation in western art.

Support: Institut Français du Portugal, Dupla Cena, Teatro São Luiz

Co-production: Próximo Futuro / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian