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Irineu Destourelles

New Words for Mindelo's Urban Creole

Vidéo | hdv | noir et blanc | 10:24 | Cap Vert (Îles du), Cap-Vert | 2014

A text-based video that displays neologisms derived from Greek mythology as well as the names of colonial administrators and military officers who are integral to Portuguese colonial history. These words created by Destourelles propose to encapsulate and reflect current ongoing social practices in the city of Mindelo in Cape Verde (a former Portuguese colony in West Africa), since the advent of democracy and globalization in 1990. `New Words for Mindelo`s Urban Creole` explores how established and emerging social practices propelled by globalization are ambivalently acknowledged, struggling to be written into the local creole language as word concepts.

Born in Cape Verde, Irineu Destourelles trained at the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam and at Central Saint Martins, London. Destourelles makes videos, paintings, photographs and text-based works from found and original material in an attempt to reveal the ambivalence within the montage of personal identity. In particular, his interest in the paradoxical nature of post-colonial and post-imperial identity constructions has drawn him to explore the perpetuation of dominant 19th century desires and fears in contemporary society. His works recirculate these desires and fears in their various guises, highlighting issues of self-loathing and the drive to objectify others by means of images and words. Irineu Destourelles lives and works in Edinburgh.