Mapping Digital Art Systems in Portuguese-Speaking Africa

• Grant number: 23/07271-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: July 01, 2023
• End date: June 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Interdisciplinary Subjects
• Principal Investigator: Denise Dias Barros
• Grantee: Laura Dias Porto
• Host Institution: Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades (EACH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/05923-9 - From the heart of wars to the poetics of plasticity: creation and engagement in artistic thinking in African contexts from the 1980s till nowadays, AP.TEM

Abstract

This project aims to map the contemporary digital art system in the countries of Lusophone Africa (Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique and São Tomé e Príncipe), using Cauquelin's (2005) conceptualization of the art system. Anne Cauquelin (2005) explains Contemporary Art, situating it based on the rupture with the environment and with the form it acquires in society. This author presents the system in which the art of the vanguards, especially the modernists, was organized with a clear separation between the agents responsible for each role in this system; and in comparison, the contemporary art system, which is immersed in other systems, and in which roles are also less delimited. Gasparetto (2016) adds that even though the Digital Arts at times are in the same spaces as Contemporary Art, the circuits are different, therefore there is a parallel Digital Arts System in Brazil. Still, as in Liberato (2021):"The Portuguese Speaking African Countries (PALOP) will be understood as an internally heterogeneous group, with no intention of taking them as equals or assuming the existence of a cohesive and acquired identity. The choice of this group of countries is related to their common colonization experiences, similar trajectories and historical ties" (Liberato, 2021, p. 2).This research hypothesis is that digital arts systems in the PALOP have points of intersection, mainly due to linguistic, cultural and geographic proximity, as well as the intention of collaboration between these countries. Methodologically, this research will be developed with theoretical and documentary research of scientific and artistic production, with emphasis on those available digitally for identification and mapping. In-depth interviews with agents of this system will also be methodological resources, in order to also approach in a qualitative way, the relationship of agents with the institutions and spaces in which digital arts occur in our times, in the PALOP.This project intends to organize and facilitate access to the work and circulation spaces of artists from certain territories, but who have in their artistic expression a support that allows for ever broader horizons. Still, it aims to understand where it starts and which spaces these artists circulate, until they reach global reach. The research work will involve public dissemination of partial results to promote free access to scientific data, as well as constant contribution to the thematic research group.