We would like to start by walking through the long journey you have already undertaken in academia. Beginning with your choice of the arts, painting, fine arts, and multimedia, how has your path evolved?
The path taken did not follow any pre-existing guiding sketch but resulted from the ad hoc manner in which crossroads were navigated. After ‘Primary and Preparatory Education,’ I was welcomed by the Soares dos Reis School of Decorative Arts, which enabled my diploma and a professional path related to ‘decorative arts’ and teaching. After completing the Decorative Painting course and the Preparatory Section for Fine Arts, I applied to the School of Fine Arts of Porto (ESBAP), while simultaneously securing financial stability through my entry into the teaching profession as a teacher of ‘Crafts’ and later ‘Visual Arts’ in Secondary Education. My attendance at ESBAP’s course in Fine Arts – Painting, was violently interrupted in the 3rd year due to the imposition of compulsory Military Service by the Portuguese colonial regime. After four years of academic and personal ‘sequestration,’ I returned from Guinea-Bissau to an April Portugal, a soldier of the Carnation Revolution, involved in the leftist political culture rooted in the anti-colonial struggle. Back at ESBAP, I completed the course while resuming my life as a teacher and immersing myself in cultural activity, founding and directing GESTO Cultural Cooperative. Responding to a call for applications, I was hired as an assistant at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP). Entering academia at an already mature age prompted my immediate entry into the academic pathway, first completing the inaugural Master’s in Multimedia Art, promoted by FBAUP and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), and then earning a Doctorate in Painting at FBAUP with a thesis titled “Art/deVELOPMENT.” From that point onward at FBAUP, I focused on pursuing reformative ambitions and persisting in the unattainable, up to my retirement, integrating the founding team of the Research Institute in Art, Design, and Society (i2ADS), where I continue to participate in its direction and Scientific Councill.

You coordinate the IDENTIDADES_Colectivo de Acção/Investigação (ID_CAI), a collective for action-research in intercultural cooperation between Portuguese-speaking countries and Latin America. What projects of the collective, and their resulting consequences for understanding interculturality, would you highlight?
From the beginning, even while teaching at ‘Soares dos Reis,’ I understood the limits of teaching activity due to the insufficient conditions for students to consciously engage in society, facing the catastrophic dilemmas of contemporary globalisation. I decided to leave the school and, together with an engaged school community, explore still poorly known paths (Mértola, Barrancos, Paris, Madrid, Mindelo in Cape Verde, Maputo in Mozambique, Pernambuco in Brazil, …). Europe, which offers us relative well-being and democratic values, often hides or ignores what happens outside its borders, in civilisational and ecological crossroads shaped by the colonisation endured in present-day globalisation. In these contexts, of which Europe is partly responsible, the potential generated by the emerging social movement, especially in the political South, is ignored, enabling other social perspectives that lead to an alternative future. IDENTIDADES, as an intercultural movement and now also as a Collective for Action/Research (ID_CAI/i2ADS/FBAUP), offers, as an organic movement, opportunities for shared reflection on efforts outside Europe to create new paths for social engagement and the rebellious inclusion of Art and Artistic Education in political dilemmas, understood in the urgency of anti-colonial practices that are anti-discriminatory and ecologically efficient in reversing the direction towards the climate and social abyss humanity is heading toward. Over time, a network of lasting complicities is being woven, a diverse and long-lasting action/research, with communities, collectives, and educational institutions, in a geography that speaks, beyond its own languages, in Portuguese (Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe), recently expanding into Latin America and Spain. In the history of this movement, more than the events and occurrences carried out, the key achievement is the incorporation in each participant of the epistemological and cultural sense that the significant experiences they have undergone belong to them, as an identity conflict faced, realising that success lies in the awareness of their own incompleteness.

Could you share concrete examples of how these projects influenced policies or public perceptions regarding intercultural relations?
The European matrix that defines my identity, and that of this collective — regardless of the critical stances adopted and shared — carries with it, before the non-Western world, assistentialist feelings and interpretations of its history as backward, based on comparisons with ‘our’ model of development, which is seen as evolutionary and certain for humanity. Despite the increasing awareness of the frozen future and the amplification of despair brought about by the neoliberal model, we still tend to deceive ourselves and hide the construction of hope offered by political alternatives, social movements, anti-colonial resistances, survival strategies, and community struggles. These offer new possibilities for a ‘coming future.’ The intercultural relations promoted influence their participants, their bodies, and their lives, reinforcing their political perceptions and social involvement. Examples of the conflict generated in the participants that IDENTIDADES has engaged, starting at U.Porto, in intercultural action/research, reveal, in the political dimension, the discomfort faced when confronting what each carries in their European bodies — the residues of cultural arrogance, whether subliminal or visible — and the realities of hope and radical engagement with the communities’ destiny. We are given the pleasure of interacting with practices of real democracy, the cement of belonging to partner communities, openness to new experiences as nourishment for their demands and struggles, breathing the political as a way of being and acting, and understanding the meaning of plural identity as one of us, full of its history, its identity pride, and the hope of becoming.

Research focused on discrimination, racism, and colonialism stands out among the themes you investigate. Could you share with the scientific community of U.Porto why this particular interest is so strongly marked?
The anguish that sustains my action/research, and all the movement of my tired yet tireless body in hope, corresponds to my perception that humanity is heading towards its end — and that what is most lacking in the West is trust in the world. The legacy of colonial arrogance that conceptualised the existence of ‘inferior races’ in the West cannot be ignored, as it instituted and legalised racist practices and naturalised discriminatory relationships even within its own society. This legacy inscribed cruel invasions, the practice of slavery, the exodus of peoples, and wars in favour of geo-strategic interests in human history. In the full century of Enlightenment, there was the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and today the West tends to act with indifference to the genocide of the Palestinian people and the many cruelties occurring. It is not a thing of the past, as today the comfort of some and the dominant political-financial interests still consider part of humanity as non-humans, ‘faceless,’ ‘nameless,’ ‘landless,’ ‘without bread’ and ‘without peace.’ This political perception cannot disguise the presence of these vast contingents of people, without dreams and without shadow, nor blur the crossroads we live in, without hope and without a collective dream in the face of the announced ecological and climate catastrophe. However, we are offered the illusion that, in our artistic action, teaching, and research, we can pursue and construct artificial moments of happiness, fostering the seductive mechanisms of illusion and sharing social strategies of collective numbness towards what exists, although only perceptible from a critical and radical stance towards the ‘constructed information’ provided to us. We are also invited to search for a more enlightened contribution to strengthen ‘critical thinking,’ integrating the academic and intellectual elite, which, while fully understanding the dilemmas of humanity, does so little to act upon them. The interest and purpose of my research lie in the sharing of bodies and affections, moved by the anti-colonial complicity fields, aware of the failure of what I do, of what we do collectively, and the incompleteness of the counter-current effort to promote sharing, defying neo-individualism, as an attempt to alert to what, in truth, are impossible collectives. The winds of time defeat us, but stubbornness resists.

What are the main challenges in studying different cultural perspectives, and what solutions would you share as methods to overcome these challenges?
The relentless pursuit of perfection, a supreme illusion promoted by neoliberal religiosity, nullifies and blames the incompleteness of the human being, installing the supremacy of consumption, which turns into waste that which technology perfects, redirecting our social interference capacities to a new divinity, known as Artificial Intelligence, which will finish everything. Conditioned by the sacrifice of effective performance, we accept stress and meet deadlines, chasing success rankings, at ease before the divinities of information, and no longer identify the warnings of ecological, climate, and social catastrophes, nor recognise the signals of what could be an alternative future. Disbelieving in the existence of miracles and refusing to accept the primacy of perfection and total success, I find comfort in acknowledging the failure of stubbornness, in persistently resisting submission to what is established, so well supported by strategies of social sleepiness and the legitimised mechanisms of usurped power in participatory democracy by representative practices. Outside of us, other modes of ‘buen vivir’ are being rehearsed, other political construction processes are unfolding, imperfect resistances and insistences are being assumed. We can bring these invisible searches to the surface and listen to their voices. “What’s missing is letting people know,” even if we consider these methods fragile or unsuccessful in the face of the established and dominant forces.

How does art, in its most primal and abstract sense, stand out as a powerful tool in building bridges, dialogue, and understanding interculturality?
Art – as an expression of life – can and must assume itself as an instrument for change. It embodies the beauty of life in all its manifestations and, therefore, becomes an organic instrument that can transform the world, if we understand it as a way of behaving and feeling. Its power and influence come from its immediate and untranslatable impact on the sensory, emotional, and conceptual levels. As an embodiment of identity, art assumes a privileged position in the struggle against oppression and exploitation, a force against the ‘totality’ of hegemonic narratives. In this way, art contributes to the recognition of difference and generates critical thought that, when combined with a critical perspective on the world, allows for the possibility of transforming relationships of power. This is why artistic production and its education are central to the possibility of challenging colonial processes, in a transversal manner. From this perspective, the contribution of art to intercultural dialogue is undeniable.

Looking towards the future, what are the main challenges and opportunities for advancing intercultural cooperation through art and research?
In the uncertainty of the future, there is a recognition of the urgency to create networks of epistemological sharing and resistance. This is an essential step in the face of the landscape of dissatisfaction, unease, and resistance to the winds and tsunamis that persist in the paths of unchecked development, accommodating the greed of the wealthy while sweeping all that is discordant under the rug of dominant geo-strategic interests. This framework is marked by a necropolitics of absolute disregard for the ‘shadowless,’ attempting to dominate a Nature that increasingly grows angry and reacts against disrespectful human actions.
There is a need for networks that intertwine ideas and actions, associating artistic practices, research, and teaching with the possibilities of reversing the pre-configured routes for humanity, heading towards climate misalignment, the exhaustion of natural resources, the explosion of the climate crisis, and, ultimately, the ‘end of humanity,’ acting, at the very least, to ‘postpone the end of the world’.

What message would you like to share with the younger generations involved in academic and artistic spaces today?
ID_CAI (IDENTIDADES Collective for Action/Research) has always situated itself in the awareness that there is no singular identity, but multiple identities, as a concept that inhabits inevitable diversity, as well as the essential bond with interculturality and the recognition of the otherness. We share experiences, cautioning against offering advice because of the fragility of what we understand. Let us challenge our certainties and comforts, and make ourselves available to listen to the dissonant, not to counter it with our own stubbornness, nor to confine it within the limits of our wisdom, but simply to savour the dissonance, its flavours and wisdom. The radical respect and defence of otherness might be what we need. Radicalism coexists well with its failure and the incompleteness of its presence, sowing the hope that we so desperately need.

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