From March to May 2023, Mozambican artist Euridice Zaituna Kala (born 1987) was in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, conducting research on her compatriot, the painter Bertina Lopes (1924–2012).
Born in Maputo (then Lourenço Marques), Mozambique—at the time a Portuguese territory—Bertina Lopes grew up in a context marked by colonial repression. After studying art in Lisbon, she returned to Mozambique, where she taught and became close to anti-colonial intellectuals and poets, key figures of the future resistance movement. Because of her political activities, she was harassed by the Salazar regime. In 1964, she went into exile in Rome, where she lived for the rest of her life with her husband, the Italian painter Francesco Confaloni. From the 1960s to the 1980s, her work was characterized by a vibrant expressionism and deeply political themes — critiques of Portuguese colonialism, war, exile, and suffering, but also resistance and hope. Euridice Zaituna Kala will share her reflections on her residency in Rome — undertaken while she was pregnant — during which she explored Bertina Lopes’s archives, as well as the series of works that emerged from this experience.