Gonçalo Mabunda was selected to be featured in the Africa Present: SUPPORT section
Drawing from his heritage centralized in the political locus of Maputo, Gonçalo Mabunda underlines the iconographic essence of transforming arms into art in the context of post-independence Mozambique. Mabunda was born in 1975, during the same period when the country experienced freedom from Portugal, and a civil war that would last a decade and a half. At the age of seven, he first gained contact with the AK-47 belonging to his uncle, a Frelimo soldier. Later he trained in Durban, becoming a select one of 10 Nucléo artists to participate in a church-organized project to creatively transform weaponry. The combination of these formative moments, coupled with the violence of concurrent battle in his nation, drove the influences behind Mabunda’s modernist sculptures forward. Executed with both metal remnants and decommissioned arms, his pieces additionally capture the spirit of liberation close to p