The IfCAR grant will be dedicated to a trip to Mozambique as a fundamental part of my artistic research project Expanded Spectropoetics, in Search of a Healing Disorder, engaging with the entanglements between colonial and environmental matters through image-making.
The core of this work deals with natural history collections and their ghosts through the specific case of a mozambican lepidopteran named after a swiss missionary. The Graphium Junodi, as most natural history specimens, embodies a double reality: biological, as witness of the diversity of a time and space, and political, imprinted by traces of imperial history. With this trip I will go back to the Junodi’s origin and explore those dimensions.
The fieldwork in Mozambique is a key part of my PhD project. In the first two years, I located my field in western collections, mostly at the museum in Neuchâtel that analyses the specimens context of origin (provenance research). I assisted to, and recorded the team meetings, led interviews with scientists and filmed and photographed numbers of specimen and working processes. The field experience nourished the creation of ghostly images addressing the viewer through sensory perception (cf Malaise I).
Following up, I made a first research trip to Mozambique early this year to prepare the upcoming fieldwork, establishing contacts with the museum of natural history, local institutions, researchers and artists in Maputo. This will be a longer fieldwork trip of six weeks that should take place between mid March and end of April 2026. I will spend one week in Maputo to continue and strengthen the translocal links with local institutions and professionals. The main part of the stay will be spent in the Gaza province where the missionaries once settled and collected natural samples. It is a territory filled with a dense history, known for having been goverened by King Gungunhana, the last local emperor to resist the portuguese colonial power. The swiss converters maintained close ambiguous relationships with him and his people throughout the years, each party being interested in the medicine of the other, each party navigating the world with their own beliefs and systems of knowledge that shapeshifted at the contact of the other. I will bring sound recording material and a bolex (16mm camera), to film only in the last 2 weeks or the stay.
In my PhD project, I explore how to reveal the haunted aspect of colonial and environmental matters through the medium of film and search for image-making techniques that engage with living and dead memories. By going on site and spending time there, I want to find out how the inhabitants of this region – human and non human – continue unfolding and activating memories of the “encounter” with the converters, and which part of it they incorporate in their daily life and conception of the forthcoming. I am questioning what is left from the beliefs that preceeded the arrivals of the settlers, which indigenous system of knowledge existed before the imposition of western natural science classification, how oral tradition passes it on, what importance is given to the non visible, and in which ways the uncanny constitutes a part of contemporary knowledge. I want to see, hear and feel what has become of the biotope where the Junodi was once captured, and of the biotope where it lives nowadays.
Going to this land and spending more time there is a fundamental dimension in the process of decentering, not only for what I might see and hear, but also to be able grasp latent elements imprinted in this land and its people, their memories and cosmologies.
Grantee
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Laurence Favre |
Project partner/ cooperations |
Rafael Mouzinho, curator of the Universidad Eduardo Mondlane’s art gallery (Maputo), Caldino Perema, Projecto Utopia Mafalala, Basilio Muchate, Centro de documentação e formação fotografica de Maputo
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Dates and places
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March to April 2026, Mosambik
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Weblink
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www.lrncfvr.net
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