AOJE - Colective Project | raum: residências artísticas online

Catchupa FactoryWithin the Catchupa Factory – New Photographers initiative, launched in May 2016, took place the Photography Project Course, which involved 12 Capeverdian photographers from different islands.
The goal was to encourage the creation of a documentary photography project with an emphasis on the editing and narrative sequencing construction. Everyone replied to the proposed exercise in an almost unified manner: with the Mindelo city as backdrop, the projects presented reflected social, cultural and economic concerns.
Setting off from varying degrees of knowledge about the city (and resorting to different strategies along the way), each author has walked through or inhabited different spaces (isn’t photography, after all, also a performative act?). In some instances the narrative occurs in the most intimate places, while in other cases the photographers were forced to move around unknown territory. Within such a broad scope of approaches, the most visible feature might be related to an attitude of transgression towards the very notions of center and periphery. In a city whose own geography and urban development determines, in such a pronounced manner, the place of different sociabilities, what we can see in these projects is a disruption of borders and centralities.
In shifting the photography projects to this prominently visual and interactive platform, we wanted to emphasize some of these aspects. In which way were the dispersion and location of viewpoints conditioned by each author’s biography, by feelings of belonging, detachment, curiosity or desire?
Catchupa Factory – New Photographers is an initiative of AOJE and it had the support of the Ministry of Culture of Cape Verde and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; the Photography Project Course was directed by António Júlio Duarte and Diogo Bento in conjunction with Pedro dos Reis (of RAUM) and Miguel Rodrigues as participating guests, who conducted a workshop and talk around photography and digital space, between the 16th and 18th of May, in the context of the initiative Raum: in Cape Verde, with the support of Direcção-Geral das Artes.