Selected moving-image works
/ Monster's Walk in Ten Chapters
/ Sketches for Geometric Abstract Paintings and Corrupted Sound from a Visual Arts Lesson
/ Text Concerning a Perverse Hybrid Man and Cleaning Ritual
/ Supernatural Forces, Mental Health and Detail from Indoors (Forças Sobrenaturais, Doença Mental e Detalhe de Interior)
/ One Hundred and Two Houses on Fire
/ Several Ways of Falling Ordered Differently
/ Ex-colonial Landscape with Different Filters
/ Unevenly Spaced and Censored Anonymous Undergraduate Essay (version III)
/ Glossary of Political Words - Almost One-hundred Definitions (version II)
/ Unrelativising - Someone is Adamant that their Sister is not their Sister and Over-and-Underexposed Handheld Images of Familiar Places
/ White Balance Error and Subject with Straight Long Hair
/ Blurred Images of Two People Constrained by Time Fluctuating Between Acceptance and Rejection
/ Parsing (First and Second Half of an Essay, with Blank Spaces and Mistakes, Running in Simultaneous)
/ Emotional Exhibition Review
/ Twenty-five Profiles (Extracts from Interracial Adult Marketing Material with Explicit Words Taken Out)
/ New Words for Mindelo's Urban Creole
/ Metathesiophobia
/ Absence of Movement and Suspension of Time
/ Where I Come From (Beginning and End of a Community Party Running in Simultaneous)
CV
Monster's Walk in Ten Chapters
2022, Digital 4K file: 4:3, 37 minutes, colour, sound
Produced by Deveron Projects, a Culture Collective project funded through Creative Scotland
During the short-film a dark monster walks through the different types of spaces that characterize Huntly, a small Scottish rural town. Whilst this unfolds on-screen, a non-diegetic voice reads a fairytale I wrote in response to the fantasy literature work of Huntly born writer and clergyman, George MacDonald (1824-1905). The fairytale and the on-screen monster are intertwined. Set in a distant reality with colonialist undertones, it tells a story of unbearable loss. This work is the result of a residency I undertook with Deveron Projects in Huntly.
Created, Written, Directed and Performed by Irineu Destourelles/ Featuring Narration by Maureen Ross/ Costume Designer: Zephyr Liddell / Costume Maker: Emily Smit-Dicks/ Director of Photography, Editor and Colourist: Daniel Hughes/ Sound Recordist and Mixer: Mark Readhead/ Story Editor: Lavendhri Arumugam/ Assistants: Anita Krasowska & Zuzana Fryntova
https://vimeo.com/773807409
2020, Digital HD file, 16:9, 4 minutes and 52 seconds, b&w, sound
Commissioned by the Amawal Collection of Contemporary African Art, Madrid, Spain
Displays a succession of b&w geometric abstract drawings at different stages of composition with corrupted sound from a recording of a visual arts and design lesson. When looking online at works included in the Amawal Collection I noticed the absence of abstract works. The process of making this piece took me back to two experiences that underlined distinct modes of thinking; my years as art student in the Netherlands when I followed the western tradition of modernist painting and my experience as lecturer of visual arts in Cape Verde.
https://vimeo.com/513798112
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Text Concerning a Perverse Hybrid Man and Cleaning Ritual
2020 (re-edited in 2021), HD Files, two-channel, 16:9, 8 minutes and 51 seconds, b&w, sound
A text about a psychopathic male and the laws that determine interracial relations in the fictional contemporary slave society where he lives, runs over darkened footage of an individual male cleaning a kitchen. The text elaborates on the history of that society's racial laws and on the life and psychopathic crimes of that individual classified as a subaltern masculinity, an 'hybrid'. In doing so, it references colonialists fears of miscegenation and colonial forced labour policies, whilst the letters placed within box brackets function as racial and social categories that make differences of status between social groups integral to the fabric of language.
https://vimeo.com/559106595
2019, HD File, 16:9, 11 minutes and 18 seconds, color, silent
First exhibited at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 2019
A text written in English and Portuguese versions runs over low opacity footage of a bouquet of plastic flowers. The fake flowers, that once adorned the dinner table in my parents living room, evoke my childhood domestic environment where creole and western cultures collapsed into one. The text produces an hybrid context that juxtaposes references Portuguese historical events, to social attitudes to mental health and to the state of democracy in Cape Verde with. I wrote the text simultaneously in Portuguese and English languages. The English version is somewhat more rational and the Portuguese one more emotional, reflecting my relationship with both languages and power play dynamics between languages.
https://vimeo.com/349513915
2019, Digital HD file, 16:9, 9 minutes and 43 seconds, b&w, silent
First exhibited at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 2019
Displays a series of drawings of houses consumed by fire from the inside. Growing up I was told that in times gone, attesting to their physical strength and sense of responsibility, leading up to their wedding day Cape Verdean built their family house with their own labour. For me, as diaspora, the notion of building a home produces an unsettled and fragile construct.
https://vimeo.com/335738356
2019, Digital HD File, 16:9, 4 minutes and 8 seconds, b&w, silent
First exhibited at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 2019
Displays in simultaneous 35 sequences where I fall to the ground, whereby every sequence is composed of the same shots but which are ordered differently. The shots that constitute the sequences were recorded in my father's vegetable patch, at my parents home in the outskirts of Lisbon. My father uses the space to grow the tropical vegetables that he planted and/or consumed his youth in Cape Verde before emigrating to Europe in the early 1970s.
https://vimeo.com/335429741
2019, MiniDV transferred to digital HD file, 4:3, 4minutes and 30 seconds, colour, silent
First exhibited at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 2019
Manipulated footage of a landscape from my native island of Santo Antao in Cape Verde runs in parallel with phrases composed of quotes from Portuguese pop music and Angolan civil-war leaders. The text interweaves extracts from lyrics from 1980s and 1990s Portuguese well known pop songs with extracts from speeches made by the presidents of MPLA and UNITA, the two opposing factions during the Angolan civil war (1975 to 2002 with interludes). Pop culture and post-colonial civil war coexist in this piece pointing towards two very different and interconnected postcolonial realities. As Portugal moved aways from its problematic colonial past towards a democratic Western identity its former colonies in Africa, including Angola, struggled through political unrest and/or civil war. Representations of these two realities coexisted in Portuguese media during my formative years making it simple to understand Africa as irrational and bloody and Western Europe beyond Portugal as free and fun.
https://vimeo.com/349520635
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2018, Digital HD file, 16:9, 13 minutes and 14 seconds, colour, sound
First exhibited at the Alice R. Rogers & Target Galleries, St John’s Art Centre, Minnesota, USA, 2018
An anonymous essay on the topic of critical reception artwork made by black visual artists runs unevenly spaced over a manipulated photograph of a section of an abstract painting. I commissioned the essay to an online essay mill company specifying the essay's title, that it should be written at undergraduate level, and supplied reference texts, including Charles Gaines' The Theatre of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (1993) and Henry E. Garrett's "The Equalitarian Dogma" (1961) published in the infamous journal Mankind Quarterly, published in Edinburgh when at its most influential. The background footage derives from a heavily darken photograph of a large abstract minimalist-like painting that I made in art school.
https://vimeo.com/248795511
2017, Digital HD file, 16:9, 35 minutes and 39 seconds, colour, silent
First exhibited at Summerhall, Edinburgh 2017
Alternative meanings, often sardonic and suggestive of social-darwinism and works by Nietzsche, are attributed to words found in a glossary of political words. From the 1960s Portuguese colonialism was accused of 'verbal luxury', of constructing colonial representations that had little resemblance with the harsh reality. Similarly, contemporary political discourse often invests anti-ethical practices with democratic concepts.
https://vimeo.com/221405982
2017, Digital HD file, 16:9, 4 minutes and 2 seconds, colour, sound
First exhibited at Transmission, Glasgow, 2017
Interweaves video footage of Edinburgh, Glasgow and the outskirts of Lisbon with manipulated sound appropriated from a popular UK daytime reality TV show.
The majority of the shots in this piece were filmed with varying camera settings often rendering the footage either over or under exposed. There is a crude relationship between the natures of the footage and the reality TV show from which the sound was appropriated - purposeful misrepresentation
https://vimeo.com/194021356
2017, Digital HD file, 16:9, 7 minutes and 48 seconds, colour, sound
First exhibited at Transmission, Glasgow, 2017
A white woman's face is followed with extreme camera close-ups that she systematically rejects conjuring the gaze of an other upon the white feminine and consequently or inconsequentially the woman's rejection of feminine convention. Introducing perceptual error from the onset by not adjusting the camera's white balance function and in a context where the camera's view is the embodiment of an intrusive male gaze, the female character performs an established trope of feminine beauty to then reject it - she combs her long hair and puts on make-up to then remove it.
https://vimeo.com/212415413
2016, Digital HD file, 16:9, 4 minutes and 2 seconds, colour, sound
First exhibited at Transmission, Glasgow, 2017
A couple siting in a public space go through a cyclical range of contradictory actions, moving back and forwards between affection and aggression. Contrary to the stereotype they display emotional range and dept. Two friends perform a wide range of emotions towards towards each-other. The original footage has been blown-up to draw attention away from their faces towards their hands and bodies.
https://vimeo.com/186177241
2016, Digital HD file, 16:9, 13 minutes and 22 seconds, b&w, silent
First exhibited at Transmission, Glasgow, 2017
Runs an essay split into two parts which run concurrently and with words that denote status, time and place removed. The original essay is an informative essay on James VI of Scotland/James I of England and (his son) King Charles I's attitudes to power. When I moved to Scotland from London, during the summer of 2014, in the midst the Scottish independence referendum campaign, the essay I had written in 2007 seemed pertinent to question the ways in which understanding of past and present is intrinsic to social hierarchies in relation to time and place.
https://vimeo.com/125368000
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2016, Digital file from MiniDv tape, 4:3, 13 minutes and 13 seconds, colour, sound
Footage of an African urbanscape with voice-over that reads an unpublished review of a contemporary African arts exhibition. The footage was filmed in Accra from the window of the hotel room where I wrote a draft of a review of the Dak'Art 2010 African Contemporary Art Biennial the day after I saw the exhibition. The voice that reads the text is an open-source text-to-voice software application that makes errors every-time it reads African language based words. Spearheaded by encountering a photograph I had taken of a handwritten message left in the first empty pages of a novel I found hidden in an hotel room in Dakar, I made this piece some six year after visiting the biennale and writing the review. The found message is a Western person's harsh assessment of Dakar. Re-encountering it prompted me to revisit my initial emotional experience of the biennial in Dakar.
https://vimeo.com/170237475
2015, Digital HD file from found text: 16:9, 11 minutes and 55 seconds, b&w, silent
First exhibited at Sprechsaal, Berlin, 2015
Text based video work composed of phrases extracted from profile descriptions of female porn-actors listed on a website specialising on white-female/black-male interracial pornographic content. The phrases have words with explicit content and other offensive meanings removed. Online, the sub-genre of interracial porn often draws on colonialist stereotypes and racial tropes to produce and promote content. This piece asks the extent to which audiences are conversant with such strategies.
https://vimeo.com/125348605
2014, Digital HD file, 16:9, 10 minutes and 26 seconds, b&w, sound
First exhibited at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, 2015
Displaying neologisms, aimed at enriching the vocabulary of the substratum creole language of Cape Verde which is spoken in informal contexts. I refer to my experience of living and working in Mindelo, in my native Cape Verde. The neologisms, made from names of Portuguese colonial administrators and names of Greek mythology characters, propose parallels between colonial history and the social dynamics that have emerged in the country since 1990 with end of a single-party Marxist regime that gave way to parliamentary democracy and free market economy. This work, made three years after I left the country, beyond being a critical reflection on particular social practices it also reflects my outsider on-look as 'returnee' diaspora in that society.
https://vimeo.com/125346710
2011, Digital HD file, 16:9, 100 minutes and 54 seconds, b&w, sound
First exhibited at Videobrasil 19, Sao Paulo
A cropped long single-shot footage of three characters sitting at a table, who pack the white powdery content of plastic containers, runs with and off-screen voice that reads Rene Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). For the sound, an extract from an audiobook of Meditations on First Philosophy was cut into sentences which were then aleatory re-edited. The reading maintains its authoritative tone but at close scrutiny it lacks discernible meaning. From 2009-2011 I lived in the harbour city of Mindelo, in my native Cape Verde. In that context, I witnessed two interconnected issues: the lure that drug-trafficking had upon many poor young men and women towards fulfilling narratives of success; the lure that western values had upon wealthier residents which lead to sections of this group emulating Western life-styles, reconfiguring them into new local practices.
Performers: Elisabete Goncalves, Zenaida Alfama Medina and Irineu Destourelles/ Camera: LuÌs Carlos Fontes de Alencar Filho and Mamadou Diop/ Direct sound: by David Medina
https://vimeo.com/51804614
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2011, Digital file from MiniDv tape: 4:3, 17 minutes and 31 seconds, colour, silent
First exhibited at Mindelo Cultural Center, Sao Vicente Island, 2011
Playing on the understanding of time in relation to movement, when there is no movement within the frame the speed of the footage is drastically diminished without this being perceptible. The footage was shot from my kitchen window in Mindelo that looked onto a street that served as a shortcut between one of the cities notorious periphery neighbourhoods and the city centre.
https://vimeo.com/359584391
2011, two synchronised videos: digital files from MiniDV, 35 minutes 50 seconds, colour, silent
First exhibited at Mindelo Cultural Center, Sao Vicente Island, 2011
Slow motion footage of the celebration of the first anniversary of the set up of a cooperative of small farmers from a remote community in the island of Santo Antao in Cape Verde. The members of the community, similar to the community where I was born also in Santo Antao, move their their bodies to the sound of music in ways that are characteristic creole of that island whilst things listen too, drank and eaten, and dressed are, either by choice or necessity, typically Portuguese and Western.
https://vimeo.com/191310412
(AKA Irineu Rocha da Cruz)
www.irineudestourelles.com
mail@irineudestourelles.com
b. Santo Antão, Cape Verde
Lives and works in Glasgow
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Education
PhD Film Studies, UCL (University College London), London, UK
MA Fine-Arts Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK
BA Fine-Arts Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
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Solo Exhibitions
2022 Videos and Texts, PICTO — Espace de Production Artistique, Geneva, Switzerland
2020 A Batida Que Faz-te Sujo (The Beat That Makes You Dirty), CAPC - Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
2019 Subtitulizar/Subtitling, Project Space, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal
2017 Tainted Verbal, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
2017 Unturning, Summerhall, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
2014 Autoestrangeirismo, Atelier Concorde, Lisbon, Portugal
2011 Thinking According to Rectangular Images, Portuguese Institute - Mindelo, Mindelo, Cape Verde [irdc]
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Group Exhibitions
2023 Sol Sal Brilho Brilhas, Espaço Vaga, Ponta Delgada, AZores, Portugal
2021 O Silêncio da Terra, Galeria do Paço, Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal
2020 History as Fiction, Fiction as History, Hangar Online [Hangar, Lisbon]
2019 Apa Kabar? (What's new?), Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
2019 South-South: Between Land and Sea Film Programme, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2019 Another Country II, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
2018 Another Country, Alice R. Rogers & Target Galleries, St John’s Art Centre, Minnesota, USA
2017 A Glimmer of Freedom (Apexart, New York), Tarrafal Concentration Camp, Santiago, Cape Verde
2016 Being and Becoming: Complexities of the African Identity, UNISA Art Gallery, Pretoria, South Africa
2015 Telling Time Special Exhibition, Rencontres de Bamako Biennale (10th edition), Mémorial Modibo Keïta, Bamako, Mali
2015 Customer Experience, Special Projects, VI Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia
2015 Sex Macht Gut/ Sex Does Good, Sprechsall, Berlin, Germany
2014 Ilha de São Jorge, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, San Giorgio Maggiore island, Venice, Italy
2013 Southern Panoramas, Videobrasil 18, SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil [irdc]
2013 Escena Caboverdiana, Casa Africa, Las Palmas, Spain [irdc]
2011 Variavel Diferencial, Torre do Mindelo, Mindelo, Cape Verde [irdc]
2010 Processo, Centro Cultural do Mindelo, Mindelo, Cape Verde [irdc]
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Group screenings/ Festivals
2023 Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Hawick, Scotland, UK
2018 AfroScots: Glasgow School of Art, Scotland; and Edinburgh School of Art, Scotland, UK
2017 Áfricas Utópicas (selected works from the Associação Cultural Videobrasil Collection), Espaço Transversal da ArtRio 2017, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [irdc]
2017 Bomb Factory Artist Film Festival IV, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London, England, UK
2017 AfroScots, Galerie de l'Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
2015 Ilha de Sao Jorge: ICA London, England; and Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy
2015 Capture All, Transmediale, Berlin, Germany
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Residencies
2021-2022 Deveron Projects, Huntly, Scotland, UK
2015 (July) Hangar, Lisbon, Portugal
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Published writing and works
- Irineu Destourelles, Citações do Antigo Presidente do Conselho de Ministros Traduzidas para Um Crioulo Pessoal, in Língua-Lugar: Literatura História Estudos Culturais (N.02, December, 2020) Université de Genève and Universität Zürich
- Irineu Rocha (AKA Irineu Destourelles), Carlos Schofied (1944-2012) Notes from the Year Before Last [Port /Eng] in 'Ilha de Sao Jorge', Beyond Entrophy, London 2014, pp43-54
- Irineu Rocha (AKA Irineu Destourelles ), Perímetro < Diâmetro: Geometrização, Creolização, Corpos, e Aglutinaçoes [Port/ Spa/ Fren] in 'Horizontes Insulares', Gobierno de Canarias, Las Palmas, pp. 200-217
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Publications (selected)
- Ana Balona de Oliveira, 'Decolonial Imagination and the Unmaking of (Post)Colonial Cities and Tongues: History, Memory, and Futurity in the Work of Angolan, Mozambican, São Tome, Cabo Verdean, and Portuguese Contemporary Artists ' in PLCS, 36-37 (2022) pp. 217-256.
- Alvaro Luis Lima, A House of Fire: the Diaspora of Irineu Destourelles, in Atlantica: Contemporary Art From Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome e Principe and their Diasporas, Hangar Books, Lisboa (2021) pp. 74-86.
- Claudia Sobral, Se o fantasma de João de Sá Panasco Vagueasse por Lisboa, Semanario O Novo, Lisbon (19.11.2021), pp. 60-61.
- Rita Fabiana, I am not here. I am here Notes on an accidental body-place, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2019)
- Neil Cooper, Irineu Destourelles – Unturning, productmagazine.co.uk (2017)
- Ana Nolasco, Entrevista a Irineu Destourelles, IADE, Lisbon (2015)
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Talks/ Panel Discussions/ Symposiums
2021 artist talk with Sofia L. Borges, PICTO — Espace de Production Artistique, Geneva, Switzerland
2021 artist presentation, The Decolonial Artist (17/05/21), Universidade de Geneva, Geneva
2019 artist talk, Irineu Destourelles and Ângela Ferreira, International Meetings Where I (we) Stand, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal
2017 artists presentation and panel discussion, Collective Blackness (artist presentations organised by Black Radical Imagination and LUX Scotland), Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
2017 presentation, A Glimmer of Freedom (research seminar) CITCEM - Transdisciplinar Investigation Centre, University of Porto, Portugal
2017 artist talk with Neil Cooper and Holly Knox Yeoman with Summerhall, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
2017 artist talk with with Tiffany Boyle (Mother Tongue), Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
2015 artist talk with Stefano Rabolli Pansera, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy
2015 artist presentation and talk with Ana Balona de Oliveira and Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Hangar Artistic Research Center, Lisbon, Portugal
2013 artists talk with Tchale Figueira, Leao Lopes and Orlando Britto Jinorio, Casa Africa, Las Palmas, Spain
2011 panel discussions co-chair with Rita Lobo, Mindelo, Do We Have Culture? Series of Public Meetings, Various Venues across Mindelo, Cape Verde
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