Henrique J. Paris
Luso | Phonic Hapticities
Visually explores a conjunction of African rhetorics in Portugal contesting spatial performativities and corporeal archives. The installation draws a connection between a group of practitioners and their forms of socio-political activation and cultural mobilisation in Lisbon. The works in this exhibition call upon the oral legacies carried across historical events and through ancestral lines, continuously and explicitly challenging Portuguese colonial climates. Henrique J. Paris is contemplating around the value systems and interwoven sonic allegories enacted through our bodies.
Term Luso (with a strike through) - prefix used to denote Portugal/Portuguese, in conjunction with another toponym or demonym. A Lusophone (Portuguese: Lusófono/a) is someone who speaks the Portuguese language, either natively or as an additional language.
* The strike-through is a way to draw attention and critical questions around the Portuguese colonial legacy in said Luso-African states - A factor leading to state dysfunctionality.
Term "Phonic" (of, relating to, or producing sound), acoustic or relating to the sounds of speech. In the context of the installation, denoting focus on African diasporas in Lisbon and the sonic practices performed to resist current colonial climate, resuscitating their cultural values and systems.
Term "Haptic" (of or relating to touch), used by Tina Campt in her book A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021). Campt defines the term as follows: "hapticity: the labor of feeling across a shared spatiality; communicating and collaborating across differential, and through one another to create a sense of intimacy."