from creatures to creators.
Na Caminhu Pa Acácia (2025)
Nieuwe Instituut
Another Island
4 December 2025 - 3 May 2026
A diptych film-installation about the dreams and collective imaginations of the Cape Verdean diasporas of harbour cities Rotterdam and Dakar. This film is based on the archipelagic community’s wishful Saint John The Baptist folklore. Now, the collective figurehead of this population’s global migration.
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in the belly (2025)
New Bedford Whaling Museum
Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art
13 June 2025 - 7 December 2025
in the belly commemorates the complex relationship the Cape Verdean diaspora has had with the idol of ‘the ship’. ‘The ship’ and its hierarchy have long been the ultimate symbol of Modernity, and this work takes us through the diaspora’s historical, material and spiritual connections to this construction. As a spatio-temporal matrix ‘the ship’ has shape shifted over the centuries, yet remained all the same. We are collectively still stuck on it.
1/3 of Bartolomeu’s ‘whaling trilogy’ consisting of artworks situated in the triangular territory between the United States (in the belly), The Azores (learning how to breathe) and Cabo Verde (t.b.a.).
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islands traced, cities foreseen (2024)
RAW Material Company
Archipelagoes of Bond
May 2024
* islands traced, cities foreseen (2024) is the first sketch for the film-installation Na Caminhu Pa Acácia (2025) set for Janilda Bartolomeu‘s first solo-exhibition in Rotterdam. This film will also be on show.
islands traced, cities foreseen is an essay film about the creation and current transition of the Cape Verdian diaspora’s proverbial Eleventh Island (Rotterdam). It flags the urgencies of this spectral immigrant island that shares its geography with the city of Rotterdam, and represents its people, its knowledges and this island’s imminent first death. This all plays out against the background of rapid gentrification, which threatens to rip apart a previously close-knit community while their first generation dies without transposing their knowledges and stories to the next generations.
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_when_scrolling_becomes_scrying (2023)
Nieuwe Instituut & LI-MA
REBOOT
7 October 2023 - 12 May 2024
In her desktop film, _when_scrolling_becomes_scrying, Bartolomeu reflects on the idea of the Internet as graveyard. In this desktop film she reflects on her digital identity and what would remain of it after death. The film was influenced by the sudden death of father, the grief of this turning point became a conduit to reflect on her own remains carelessly strewn across the Web. The remains that will likely ontinue to churn and work in various algorithms, long after she’s passed. Is there a question of desecration here?
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