Supernatural Forces, Mental Health and Detail from Indoors/
Forças Sobrenaturais, Doença Mental e Detalhe de Interior, 2019
HD file, 16:9, 11 minutes and 18 seconds, silent
A text in English and Portuguese runs over low-opacity footage of a bouquet of artificial flowers — the same flowers that adorned my parents’ living room in my childhood, where Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese cultural codes intertwined. A narrator juxtaposes social attitudes toward mental health and the state of democracy in Cape Verde whilst erroneously attributing details from Portuguese postcolonial history to Cape Verde. The two language versions were written simultaneously but are not literal translations of each other: the English is more rational and the Portuguese more emotional, which attests to my different emotional relationship to both.

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