The work of Mozambican photographer Yassmin Forte is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the Portuguese capital, in the exhibition entitled “Emotional Encounters,” as part of the seventh edition of the Imago Lisboa photography festival, 2025.
Open since November 20th, the exhibition presents the series “This is a story of my family” (2022-2024), with photographs that reconstruct the memory of Yassmin Forte’s family, a love story between a Portuguese soldier and a Mozambican woman.
The result of this work goes beyond a personal story. Using family archives and portraits, the photography explores the other side of the history of colonialism in Mozambique, reflects on the effects of migration, and contributes to showing miscegenation and the complexity of identities that were shaped by the colonial process.
“My images attempt to dissect and navigate the effects of colonialism and migration from my family history. They address three aspects: family, migration, and the history of Africans, using family archives and my own images. I try to investigate how Africans became the result of mixtures, migrations, and colonization, mixed histories and repeated patterns, and in this way, unravel my own African identity,” Yassmin Forte describes her work.
As for the technique, it is based on collage using family photographic archives, bringing them a touch of contemporary Mozambican society. “The use of collage exaggerates and emphasizes this history with conflicts; sometimes family images are literally placed on top of scenes of modern Mozambique and remembered in a juxtaposition of past and present. I used collage as a way to construct a past and the perception of my own identity.”
This collection about Yassmin Forte’s family won the International Contemporary African Photography Award in 2023.
Along with Yassmin Forte (Mozambique) are photographers Aline Mota (Brazil) and Sofia Yala (Angola), whose works also explore family stories as if searching for a collective past that shaped the present.
Regarding the work of the three artists, curator Elina Heikka writes: “When Brazilian artist Aline Motta learned that her grandmother’s unknown father was a young white teenager, the son of the employer, she decided to thoroughly investigate her family history. As a metaphor for the times of the slave trade, Motta symbolically takes photographs of her relatives back to their origins in Portugal and Sierra Leone. Sofia Yala’s photographic series symbolically documents the artist’s investigative process, as she sought to uncover the history of her own Angolan family. Yassmin Forte’s work portrays the complicated love story between a father who served in the Portuguese army and a Mozambican mother, marked by the legacy of the colonial wars.”
Written by: Eduardo Quive
Photo: Yassmin Forte
