At independence on 25 June 1975, Mozambique decreed a rule known as 24/20. It was aimed mainly at former Portuguese settlers, landowners and industrialists, who were subject to a rule in the national interest whereby they had 24 hours to leave the country with a suitcase weighing a maximum of 20 kilos.
In the process of creation of my works, the structure of activating systems of perception predominates, where "the spectator" is incited to complete the discourse, these systems aspire to be the one that finally gives shape to the work.
24 horas 20 kilos is a work in progress, part of a series of works that make up the Forward
project. In it I invited several people, artists, critics and intellectual friends to select a text (poem, prose or theory) that represented something fundamental in their lives. Initially, my work consisted in the intervention of these texts. The work selected by the Brazilian critic and curator Ivo Mesquita was the novel Caderno de memórias coloniais
by Isabela Figueiredo, a white Mozambican writer.
As Jorge Rachid puts it: "a dominant culture makes majorities feel minorities in their own spaces, with colonial minorities dominating the scene in the cultural spectrum. This enclosure implies a "dead end" for the future of the peoples, with the colonial hand of the dememorisation of their identity and the loss of their social and communal history" ...
In my proposal I intervene metaphorically in the same way but in the opposite direction, completely eliminating the author's memory and story, by crossing out, deleting the story to create a new text. I keep some words: black, black, white, white, flesh, sex, etc.