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South Africa

Portable Paradise.

Portable Paradise

The Dikenga cosmogram is a symbol and way of life for the Bakôngo (Bântu-Kôngo) people, in the context of territories that once composed the Kongo Kingdom. It sees the human being’s life as a continuous process of transformation, it indicates the origin and destiny of mankind: human life comes from the heavens where they go back through cycles of life.

The four points of the Dikenga tell of a journey of the community’s accumulation, interpretation, and transmission of knowledge. It marks the phases through which individuals progress as they transition between various stages of life, develop a conscience, take on responsibility, and assume a sense of belonging to religious, political, cultural, familial, and national communities.

When we transition through spaces we leave parts of ourselves and take-on new ones to form a new identity. As beings, we are constantly going through initiations whether they are conscious and in community, or not, that influence our ever-evolving identities. As we move through mind frames, physical spaces, emotional states, we initiate a new way of being every time.

Taking from Roger Robinsons poem, A Portable Paradise (2019), the LAPA residency functioned as a site of dialoguing and mapping, the various life cycles and rites of passage that an individual or community might experience as a kind of Portable Paradise
Portable Paradise © Anita Sambanje Portable Paradise Image Library


 

Anita Sambanje .

Bio
 Anita Sambanje

Anita Sambanje was born in Germany in 1999. After spending the first 2 years of her life there, she moved to Zimbabwe and in 2006 she moved to Luanda, Angola.

For Anita, Art is the best tool to express herself, and explore her inner and outer realities. The artistic language she created for herself gave birth to a safe space for her to express her multiplicity without judgment.

Her artistic practice consists of exploration, the interaction and integration of the body with nature, the search for identity and place in the world, the interpretation and processing of feelings, and internal conflicts.

Wyssolela Moreira .

Bio
 Wyssolela Moreira

Wyssolela Moreira, born in Luanda, lives and works between Toronto, Canada and Luanda, Angola as a multidisciplinary artist, art director, and wellness therapist.

Her artistic and experimental practice uses digital collage, writing, photography, installation, video art, and performance to explore the complexities of a Self influenced by neo- colonial normativity. She works at the intersection of art and spirituality, and centers the decolonization and deconstruction of colonial inheritance pertaining to the body, identity, space, belief, and health. She also uses her work to hold space for marginalized experiences, challenge existing narratives about Africanism/Blackness, and highlight the social realities of gender and human rights inequality.

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