Naír Noronha is trained in sociology, dance and performance. She was born in Maputo during the last years of the Civil War, where she learned to dance between classes and
street games. She studied Sociology in Portugal and Brazil and worked in several provinces in Mozambique. During this period she began to question herself about corporal expression and to understand the importance of the body as a means and a way of communication, and at the same time as an instrument of study.
In her work she confronts her subjectivity and identity with the colonial past. She works on different themes such as: migration, decolonization, silencing of histories, identities and experiences with a special focus on the feminine and family, combining her political vision with a poetic language.
Her main interest is currently focused on the fusion of different artistic expressions such as plastic arts, dance and performance, and crossed by the questions of the crossing of her identity roots (Mozambican, Indian, Portuguese), as well as the places where she lived.
Noronha & Sousa are two Mozambican artists; cousins who share a family history marked by migrations, hybridism, colonialism, and the intertwining of cultures across the Indian Ocean. One coming from cinema and the other from performance, in the visual arts they found a bridge of dialogue between our artistic practices, and how their paths are strongly marked by transits through Europe and Latin America.
They recently collaborated on a project focused on the feminine iconography of the Indian Ocean; exploring together techniques related to cyanotype, and batik, among others.
After that, the desire to explore the universe of collaboration persisted, this time as a duo proposal, where each one chose to explore an affluent of their complex cartography of identity.Therefore “Afluentes” emerges from the idea of the identity search as the cartography of a river & their under-construction identity as a map where they discover new currents of water with different rhythms conforming to the complex identity mosaic that they are made of.