Thomas Waller is a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham, researching Portuguese-language African literatures and cinemas with a particular focus on the cultural production of Angola and Mozambique. Working within the analytical framework of the world-systems tradition, his research looks at the ways in which cultural production from Portuguese-speaking Africa registers a tension between ‘the local’ and ‘the global’, for example in the conflict between local social conditions and global cultural and economic agendas.
This article explores the coexistence of artistic paradigms in the work of Mozambican contemporary artists Gemuce and Félix Mula. Comprising a coming together of cultural forms from different social contexts, this coexistence indicates a process of ‘translatability’ that tracks patterns of interference across the cultural cartography of global capital and postcolonial geopolitics.