Canvas Adrift: Vamona Navelcar and the Unframed Ocean

Canvas Adrift: Vamona Navelcar and the Unframed Ocean

by Dr. Rodney Benedito Ferrao (The College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA)

Thu 21 January 2021, 12-14, Zoom 931 4120 3142, Passcode: 154421  (RS Arts & Aesthetics meeting)

Abstract

Born in Portuguese Goa in 1929, trained in art in metropolitan Portugal while the empire was being decolonized in the 1960s, and then exiled in postcolonial Mozambique in the 1970s, Vamona Navelcar became the artist of three continents not solely by choice. At the same time as his work chronicles these diverse locations, these very transits have made Navelcar’s legacy verge on disappearance. As this article argues, it is the politics of nationalism at the three continental sites that constitute Navelcar’s life-cartography that have defined this artist’s trajectory and obscured his oeuvre. Even as Navelcar’s life and artistic connections across the Lusophonic Indien Ocean-world demonstrate the multiplicities and convergences of the region, it is the fixity of nation(s) that has undermined the complexity of such heritage and the artist’s legacy.