Jogo Duplo is a piece that starts with a photograph showing guerrillas from the PAIGC visiting Portuguese troops in Guinea after the 25th of April revolution. The account of one of the Portuguese soldiers portrayed in the picture speaks of how part of the population at the time was playing a double game, with family members belonging to the PAIGC, but also maintaining relationships with the Portuguese who supported them.
The piece explores a situation of ambiguity or increasing ambivalence, accumulating several parallel layers of meaning in a permanent process of transfer between the photographed scene and the scene present on the stage, placing the listener in a dubious position of constructing meaning.
Composing different sound and semantic games in relation to the image, its hory, but also with the musicians themselves, the play unfolds in double meanings that invite a broader reflection on action, autonomy, and emancipation.
Piece commissioned in the context of the exhibition “A Guerra Guardada – Photographs of Portuguese Soldiers in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique (1961-74)”, curated by Maria José Lobo Antunes and Inês Ponte. The exhibition explores personal collections of men who were once soldiers, most of which were collected through face-to-face interviews as part of an ethnographic investigation at ICS-ULisboa.
