Opens ‘Botânica’ in Maputo

Photographer and visual artist Filipe Branquinho today opens a one-man exhibition called ‘Botânica’ at the Fernando Leite Couto Foundation in Maputo. The show is a series that singles out emotions and the colours and shades that pass through the seasons of the year from earth to sky. These seasons are represented by trees, the flight of birds and the creeping along of snakes and pangolins.According to Mia Couto, writing in the exhibition catalog, to find the soul of the tree the artist has moved away from what he previously did as a painter, photographer and architect.

“He left everything he had in his luggage. His gaze emigrated from the city to a territory that seemed distant and rural. To discover that this other world lived, after all, within himself,” writes Couto.

Mia Couto states that Branquinho brings to the exhibition feelings, sensations, images of beautiful and frightening creatures. “Not only do they reveal themselves as amazing creatures, true filigrees made with beauty, precision and rigour. What these works reveal is time itself. As the centuries infinitely carve the trunks, so too the painter’s material is the endless cycle of the seasons,” he notes.In the show the artist seeks to bring the mysteries and beauty of the tree. They “solve what no human man has achieved: they have deciphered the secret of immortality. Every trunk devoid of life is dead only by pretense. The tree died for a lie,” the catalog reads. Filipe Branquinho was born in Maputo, Mozambique, where he lives and works. Growing up during the civil war in an environment closely linked to the worlds of journalism and the arts, he became particularly involved in the field of photography through contact with some of the biggest names in Mozambican photography, such as Ricardo Rangel, Kok Nam and José Cabral. A self-taught photographer, he studied architecture at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and at the State University of Londrina, Brazil.

He is the author of the following photographic series: Occupations (2011-2014); Showtime (2012-2013); Chapa-100 (2013); Vila Algarve (2013 – ongoing project); Ungulani (2014); Gúruè (2014 – current project); and Interior Landscapes (2011-2015).

Besides photography, Branquinho paints, draws and illustrates.