Guardiãs de Contos

“Guardiãs de Contos” emerges from a lived experience with the Maasai community, one of the oldest tribes in Africa. Their culture preserves ancestral rituals and collective memory, while also reflecting traces of European presence, echoing the broader historical layers of Tanzania.

The exhibition brings together photography, video, and sound to explore the feminine as both a vessel of tradition and a force of transformation. It questions what “evolution” truly means when viewed through different ways of living, inviting the audience to reconsider dominant narratives of progress.

Exhibition

Something that is kept but has no form. Stories.

In an impulse to know more than she knows, Catarina flew to meet new stories kept by people who, like her, live in a vast world that never tires of learning. Everything in the identity of a culture is made up of stories. The act of “telling” is archaic; it appears before the time of the great myths, when humanity was still newly born. Nowadays, we keep part of these stories that have been transforming as they pass from mouth to mouth. Like reading a recipe. We guide ourselves through them, reinterpreting them with our own tools. We add points and the story keeps growing.

- António Leitão, Madalena Bettencourt