TROPICAL MELANCHOLY
Or the island that lost the Equator

By Daniel Blaufuks

Opening: September 18, 2024 at 6 p.m.

Until November 9, 2024

© BLAUFUKS

The new exhibition by Daniel Blaufuks (b. 1963), titled “Melancholia Tropical or the Island that Lost the Equator,” opens on September 18 at 6 PM at Hangar – Artistic Research Center.

While working on the plantations of São Tomé, the visual artist realized that it is necessary to remember and study the long chapter of violent Portuguese colonization in this country, which is still often considered benevolent. “São Tomé and Príncipe was, at the beginning of the 20th century and for a brief year, the world’s largest exporter of cocoa. This apparent success was achieved through the exploitation not only of the plantations themselves but, above all, of the workers, the so-called servants, who were brought from other colonies, mainly from Cape Verde and Angola, with vague promises of return after five years, which rarely, if ever, materialized. Practically all contracts were signed with a cross, due to the workers’ inability to sign them or, obviously, to read them,” says Blaufuks.

Daniel Blaufuks has worked on the relationship between public and private memory, a constant theme of inquiry in his work as a visual artist, pursued chiefly through photography and video and presented in installations, books and films.
In 2007, he published Sob Céus Estranhos (Tinta-da-china) – based on his film Under Strange Skies from 2002 – which earned him the award for best photography book of the year in the international category at PhotoEspaña. He was also awarded a prize in 2007 for his work about a concentration camp in the Czech Republic, additionally presented in the book Terezín (Steidl, 2010) and the film As If (2014). In 2016, he won the AICA/MC/Millennium BCP Visual Arts Award for the exhibitions Attempting Exhaustion and Léxico. More recently, he has published Não Pai (Tinta-da-china, 2019) and Lisboa Clichê (Tinta-da-china, 2021). He has a PhD from the University of Wales, for which he wrote his thesis on the relationship of photography and cinema to the work of W. G. Sebald and Georges Perec and to the themes of memory and the Holocaust.
His films – “expanded photographs” – have been shown at various film festivals and his latest works examine the resistance to German occupation in Brittany and colonialism in São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as Continuing his ongoing non-diary The Days Are Numbered.