Discovering the essence of language and the creative process is my new challenge.

In 2013 made a trip to Mozambique, where I was born, with a film director, Philippe Teixeira Tambwe, who, like me, also had ties with Africa, in his case with the Belgian Congo. I later showed the result of some experiences of this trip in an exhibition in the Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon, which I called “Link of the Worlds”, using video and painting to show two worlds: that of reality and that of fiction, and all the ways they are interconnected.

I felt the connection to the land, to nature and to the people through the language of artists. Contact with artists was like a bridge between these two worlds, and is the best way of understanding realities which are at times transformed into fiction and sometimes into spaces from a distant time. In a way it was like travelling through time, with instants within other moments in history which it seemed I had already experienced, in a kind of déjà vu.

I travelled in time, confirming the fact that having spent the first five years of my life in Mozambique will have certainly shaped how I saw nature. The sounds, smells, colours, humidity, heat, space, instinct, culture, music, the people… I rediscovered all of these sensations, and much more, on this journey.

So there are lots of stories to be told until we reach the result of the final work; connecting the work to its history, the former becomes complete with the Work-in-progress. So, in this exhibition I present a series of paintings of different themes with their respective creative processes, almost creating an exhibition – my own and that of my creation – within the exhibition.

Something completely new was that in it I present a large painting painted together with another three plastic artists, Butcheca, Vasco Manhiça, Quehá and the musician Elvis Eloy, who for me was the major revelation in this process of discovery and connection. “Buya Kaya” were words written by the artists on the canvas, which mean “returning home”, in what is an expression of nostalgic longing. Buya means “return” and Kaya” is “home”. With the connection to this painting and to these magical words I found the meaning of a later work of mine on the sea, on a fisherman’s boat, which I called “Kaya”.

I should say that without this complementary aspect of cinema I would not have been able to so authentically record the moments of the Work-in-progress, and it would also not have been possible to make direct contact with the land and the people, a land where I have my roots and where I bridge both of these worlds, reality and fiction. All of this certainly happens through the ease that cinema has of going to hard-to-reach places , recording situations that only it can record, which for me made it a very important tool for being able to make all of these connections that I later transformed into painting.