Helder Manhique aka Mudungaze was born in Maputo. A lover of arts and literature, he has always worked with communication. After an average course of documentation in Fundo Bibliográfico de Língua Portuguesa (CIDOC), he took a course in Economics and Education at the Pedagogical University. He worked at the National Company of Singing and Dancing in the Documentation and Research sector, having gone through the Department of Production and Marketing and finally co-created a Communication and Image Office. During the period in which he was directly involved with CNCD, he participated in and created several projects, courses and workshops in Mozambique and abroad, most of them connected to Communication, Video, Production and Marketing. At the same time, he always enjoyed collecting objects that were considered wasteful. He began to develop inspiration for the masks through his passion for the arts, especially for the African dance with masks and, logical sequence, dedicated his professional life to carving with scraps of metal and garbage in the last two years.
Self-taught artist, Mudungaze uses his art as a way of expressing himself. Thanks to his background in African dance, he deeply feels the connection between the human world and the spiritual world and works his masks in a way to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity.
