Raul Jorge Gourgel
I am an Angolan multidisciplinary artist and researcher currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. born in Luanda, Angola in 1999, 3 years before the end of the “civil” war, I grew up as Angola made sense of itself and recovered after the long awaited cease fire. I was raised by a single mother within a nationalistic family and I am part of the first generation to grow up in a peaceful Angola. stories of the war built my societal memory in the course of my childhood, as my country was still healing from embedded collective trauma.
my practice stems from the dialogue of such experience along with personal identity-forming processes. furthermore, I am interested in the gaps that lie between the Land and what we call the Nation and the constant effort to bridge between them, as a result of a process I denominate “patrification” of Land. my work is concerned with dismantling and understanding trauma in first person, being interested in dissecting the construct of the Nation and its role in informing collective identity and, in turn, how such comes to shape the individual’s existential vocabulary. this process entails continuous revisiting of historical and current moments through collective, as well as personal and familial experience.