Life In Maputo By Jose Ferreira, Mozambique, Africa

Jose Ferreira was born in Mozambique in 1967 and grew up in South Africa. He lived in London for several years, and in 2005 returned to Johannesburg to initiate a new body of research. He is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His artistic practice incorporates various media in which he engages debates about the self, technology, history and post-colonialism. The works often critique cultural generalizations of stereotyping and fetishism implicit in established cinematic genres. In performances, he experiments with the temporal qualities of psychological capacity, stressing the limits of physical situations in relation to his body.
Ferreira has lectured internationally on media and post colonialism. He was Research Fellow in Digital Media at Sunderland University in the UK, and has taught in media and cultural studies departments in various universities, including the University of East London, Winchester School of Art and the University of Portsmouth. He has curated several exhibitions, including sulSouth, voyages into mutant technologies, an exhibition and film project in Maputo, Mozambique in 2001. For that project he invited filmmakers from various countries previously colonized by Portugal, to exhibit in specific contexts in and around the city. Many of the works on the exhibition interrogated the notion of contested histories.