janilda bartolomeu.



As a filmmaker, artist and researcher, Janilda Bartolomeu engages with (post)colonial hauntings, collective memories and diasporic cinema across various contexts – through the means of researching, (film)making and film curating.


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view previous projects.


  1. Na Caminhu Pa Acácia (2025)
  2. learning how to breathe (2025)
  3. in the belly (2025)
  4. islands traced, cities foreseen (2024)
  5. _when_scrolling_becomes_scrying (2023)
  6. Black Atlantic Visions (2023)
  7. Haunted (2021)
  8. If The Walls Could Speak (2020)
  9. The Criolo Lens: agua’d chor, agua’d mar (2018)
  10. evocations & lamentations (2016)

The Criolo Lens: agua’d chor, agua’d mar.


The Criolo Lens: agua’d chor, agua’d mar (2018)
1/2 of The Guide. 
The Criolo Lens: agua’d chor, agua’d mar (2018)
The installation view.




agua’d chor, agua’d mar (2018)
14:08 min

*EARLY WORK*


At the start of her practice, Bartolomeu created a guide for utilizing video as a means to interact with immaterial Cape Verdean heritages. This project was based on the creole philosophies of Édouard Glissant, and the realisation that poetry is an important carrier of histories and knowledges within Cape Verdean diaspora’s and decolonial histories.

Poetic knowledge is born out of the great absence of material and scientific knowledge.  Just because something was not extensively written about does not mean it does not exist. During the research process into the immaterial heritages of the Cape Verdean community Bartolomeu had to learn and create a lens that was attuned to even perceive them in the first place. Her epiphany came when she realised that the Western lens she was taught to read History with a capital H with as documented in books, monuments and skyscrapers was not going to apply to Cape Verdean histories barred from self-actualised material documentation by the violent Portuguese colonial regime.

The Criolo Lens is a strategy, a practice and sometimes an actual lens which she has been fine-tuning and creating art work from since then.  Using this lens consisting of eight guides,  Bartolomeu created the essay film agua’d chor, agua’d mar (2018), which was projected throughout the exhibition space as an immaterial echo.
Still from agua’d chor, agua’d mar (2018)


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