Fall. Action nº1. Luanda, 2013

A series of performances for photography, carried out in the city of Luanda, Angola, during the time I lived there.
Each image captures a critical instant: the moment just before the fall. The body, suspended in mid-air, inhabits a threshold—caught between verticality and collapse, between presence and absence, between the now and what is about to unfold.
The represented body—a white, female, Portuguese figure—is placed within a landscape marked by war and its lingering ruins. The chosen locations are sites heavy with history: buildings destroyed by conflict, ground that once served as a battlefield—first during the colonial war, then the civil war. By situating this foreign body within these charged spaces, the work interrogates the complexities of identity, belonging, and collective memory.
Yet, the fall never fully materializes. What remains is the imminence of impact, a suspension in time, a vulnerable body hovering in the void of uncertainty. Through this performative gesture, captured in photography, the work evokes not only the history of bodies that have fallen in these same places but also a broader reflection on fragility, displacement, and the persistence of colonial narratives in contemporary imagination.

Rita GT, 2013