Another Island
4 December 2025 - 2 May 2026
With Another Island, researcher and audiovisual artist Janilda Bartolomeu presents a film installation that depicts the dreams of the Cape Verdean diaspora. Through this piece, Bartolomeu offers a personal and poetic reflection on the shared heritage and potential future of the Cape Verdean archipelago and its diaspora communities in Rotterdam and Dakar.
Bartolomeu suggests that a new island emerges wherever the diaspora settles. Due to their sizeable Cape Verdean communities, both Rotterdam and Dakar in Senegal are referred to as the 'other islands' of the archipelago. The installation focuses on the dreams and imagination that connect the twelve islands.
Survival strategy
The Cape Verdean community first settled in Rotterdam in the early 1960s. Although Cape Verdeans are often praised for their adaptability, Bartolomeu argues that assimilation as a survival strategy threatens the imagination. When you are forced to conform to someone else’s standards, you lose part of your identity and potential. In order to imagine a future on your own terms, it is important to build on your own unique dreams, rituals and visual language.
Fifty years of independence
As Cape Verde celebrates its fifty years of independence in 2025, Bartolomeu reflects on the past half-century and anticipates the next half-century. She finds an embodiment of the unique Cape Verdean imagination in the figure of San Jon (Saint John the Baptist). In the film installation, she explores four aspects of the folklore surrounding San Jon in Cape Verde. Historical, social and cultural meanings intertwine in an associative way. This creates space for visions of the future based on notions of survival, togetherness, and the inner world of outsiders and their dreams.
Another Island: As We Surrender to the Tides
The film installation is part of the long-term research project Another Island: As We Surrender to the Tides. Bartolomeu is working on this project as part of her residency at the RAW Material Company in Dakar, where her work previously featured in the public programme Archipelagoes of Bond.
In 2020, she created the film The Eleventh Island: How Video Activates Silent Histories. In an essay of the same name, she explains how, as a video maker, she arrived at the method of ‘the Creole lens’. Inspired by philosophers like Édouard Glissant, she proposes alternative solutions for communities seeking to transmit their original language, culture and histories. With Another Island, Bartolomeu offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the cultural heritage and collective spirit of the Cape Verdean community.
Janilda Bartolomeu’s work has been made possible with support from the Creative Industries Fund NL, the Amarte Foundation, and the City of Rotterdam.