Mu seke (musseque), title of Renée Gagnon’s exhibition at Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, is a word that comes from Kimbundu, an African language spoken in Angola’s north-west, and which means “red earth”. It refers to the sandy soil surrounding the city and in which, from the eighteenth century onwards, neighbourhoods were established to house old families who have been living there for a long time, as well as those who have come and gone.

This show, consisting of photographs but also documents and a video/documentary, has as its centrepiece the city’s peripheral buildings. These records, taken between 1972 and 1976, are the outcome of the artist’s attraction to the colours and shapes of these houses forming neighbourhoods, her eagerness to trace the meandering streets and affections, paths that are both solid and fragile, reused, transformed and enduring. Gagnon was granted a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1974, but her documentary and artistic research had begun two years earlier with the project entitled “Paliçadas dos Musseques de Luanda”. She returned to Luanda during the Civil War and continued her photographic research, which also had a documentary and sociological nature. These photos portray a history of vulnerability, but also of strength, the history of a suburb, of a community with its own spirit and which can – and perhaps should – offer a reflection on the past, the present and the effects of political, economic and social crises.

“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes”^[1]. Renée Gagnon, through her artistic endeavours, pursues but also preserves, condemns and enshrines. In Mu seke 75, the world goes from being outside to being inside. Using digitised analogue photos, this exhibition reveals a distant reality, a city that has been growing, of expanding neighbourhoods that have been turned into real labyrinths. With no clear boundaries or order, they are intricate compositions in constant transformation and adaptation, with a great range of salvaged materials. They are proof of a pushing, of an exclusion, but also of a profound rhythm of their own, fuelled by the materials that build havens together. A liberating energy that is at once cosmopolitan and an escape from control and oppression.

“The professional photographer’s pre-eminently wilful, avid gaze is one that not only resists the traditional classification and evaluation of subjects but seeks consciously to defy and subvert them”^[2]. With her black and white photographs, melancholic in tone, Gagnon takes us back to memory, survival. The artist and the space form an almost magical connection; the breath of the world is felt, the imprint of a people, of the condition and resourcefulness that the artist is immortalising. Barthes tells us that “every act of capturing and reading a photograph is an implied contact, in a repressed manner, with what no longer exists, that is, with death (…) photography as a fascinating and funereal enigma”^[3]. Each photograph perpetuates a plan, a layout, a composition that disappears, either because the materials themselves are transformed, or through the inevitable growth and adaptation resulting from this ongoing movement, throbbing in an informal, self-produced map that gravitates, with its own blueprint, around the urban centre. “What I find exhilarating about the photographs is the theft – that sudden, protective, defensive theft – from the overwhelming forces of time. I see in them the ultimate centripetal power”^[4].

In this project, Gagnon explores geometric shapes, proportion, chaos and balance: the epidermis of the visible urban fabric. These are photographs of flat sheets, timber, doors and windows forming lines and intersections. These images are the result of the reality of the two universes – local and colonial – and prove a precious, cultural and human space of its own, simmering and expanding. Gagnon is attracted by the “rich structural plasticity of this informal city”^[5], which at the same time has an order of its own. The mass of objects that are piled up, hammered together, re-adapted. Colours that are perceived as worn out, materials that give way to others.

Stories and portraits on the world “and the world in sentences, in phosphorescent lines, in revealed text, just as we say when a photograph or a secret is revealed”^[6]. Mu seke 75 perhaps unveils the secret of setting up a space for the “revolutionary spirit, inspiring a generation of poets, authors and singers”^[7].

^[1] SOTANG, Susan. On Photography, Companhia das Letras, p.33.
^[2] SOTANG, Susan. (2004). On Photography. Companhia das Letras, p. 44.
^[3] BARTHES, Roland. (1981). The Grain of the Voice, On Photography. Brazil.
^[4] HELDER, Herberto. (1968). Apresentação do rosto, poem Os Ritmos 8, p. 67.
^[5] Maria João Teles-Grilo in the text supporting the exhibition, O neoplasticismo da auto-construção nos anos 70, em Luanda, p. 3.
^[6] HELDER, Herberto. (1998). Cinemas. In: Relâmpago: Revista de Poesia, no. 3, pp. 7-8.
^[7] Exhibition text by Renée Gagnon.