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Raul Jorge Gourgel is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher currently working between Luanda and Cape Town. born in Luanda in 1999, 3 years before the end of the Angolan “civil” war, they grew up as the nation reconfigured itself and recovered from decades of conflict. raised by a single mother within a family rooted in revolutionary nationalism, they were immersed in the narratives of nationhood and of the war that shaped the societal memory of their childhood, as Angola grappled with its collective trauma.

their practice emerges from a dialogue between this formative experience and a profound interest in processes that foster collectivised ways of being and knowing. Gourgel is interested in the gap between Land and Nation along with the tensions and constant effort to bridge between them. their work is concerned with understanding trauma, dissecting how the construct of the Nation informs collective identity, and in turn, shapes the individual's existential vocabulary. this entails a continuous revisiting of historical and contemporary moments through both personal and collective experience.