A Batida Que Faz-te Sujo, an exhibition that gathers videos and texts by Irineu Destourelles, will be open from February 22 to April 4, 2020, at Círculo Sede of the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra. The exhibition includes a video, featured in its most recent showcase at CalousteGulbenkian Museum, and other works that emerge as a response to space and the need to create it. Works thematically related to the psychological condition of the post-colonial individual are presented in six rooms in the building. However, they are constructed according to diverse strategies and address identity in the face of collective memory, the body, and writing sun-regulating elements.

In 1952, Frantz Fanonre referenced the ambivalent situation of the colonized — who, by assimilating to the language and culture of the colonizer, end up realizing they will never be accepted as an equal — and the psychological problems that affect them because of the different kinds of colonial violence. To Destourelles, the scenery described by Fanon continues to manifest itself in different ways in the present day, seeing as the «outro» [other] is not immune to constituent discursive violence from culturally dominant narratives. Based on Destourelles’ experiences as a Cape Verdean and African raised in Lisbon and living in Europe, the emotional and psychological instability of the foreigner and the individual characterized as an outsider in social contexts, can be found at the center of his artistic practice.

Writing, which allows him to question knowledge according to formalized binary oppositions and structures, with no clear logic at times, is the structuring element of many of his works, including text work and two of the videos at the exhibition. The 2020 exhibition How To Think, Feel and Act in this Space consists of a set of sentences written directly on the walls of two venue rooms and revisits the need for the CAPC creation, which emerged as a place where avant-garde Portuguese artists developed alternative concepts. Through sentences, Destourelles questions his position as an individual who, similarly to the assimilated colonized, finds himself simultaneously between complicity with and contestation of the social norms, proposing new ways of self-perception and the relationship with space.

The 2020 Person Tumbling, Voice and Text Concerning a Perverted Hybrid Man, includes Destourelles’ voice in Portuguese as a narrator, in the first person, and has English subtitles in the third person. The narrative references an individual characterized as a hybrid in a contemporary context, presenting similarities with a slave-like society in which the hierarchization and categorization of people are integral to making language. The 2020 exhibition The BeatLyrics and Building Site, combines what is proposed to be four beats to lyrics of electropop songs and a beat of a Trepiche electronic song. The lyrics have ideological content that requires the individual who consumes them to condition themselves before a society that subalterns them.

Such matters related to identity in the face of the collective memory and the body mark his artistic practice and are referred to in two videos based on appropriated material and performance. The 2020 Self-portrait, Newsreel, and Family Holidays in Leopoldville and Kinshasa, (2017), questions how colonial memory contributes to the identity processes, by including scenes appropriated from a domestic film of a Portuguese family on vacation in Léopoldville and Kinshasa, possibly before and during the Portuguese Colonial War (1962–1974); sound appropriated from the first report made from the war front of the Guinea-Bissau War, in 1969, by aFrench news-channel; and, the image digitized from a drawing by Destourelles.The 2019 Several Ways of Falling OrderedDifferently was filmed at the vegetable garden of Destourelles’ father in the suburbs of Lisbon, where he plants tropical vegetables. In the video, Destourelles falls toward the camera several times and those falls are presented in mosaic form, repeatedly and simultaneously. The character takes each fall as something inevitable beyond his design; however, he tries to control how he falls by doing micro-resistance acts, invisible acts that highlight a conditioned subjectivity. He comprehends performance space both as a reference to the post-colonial and the post-Salazarism context in which he grew up and as the place his father exercises nostalgia for the colonial and Salazarist context of Cape Verde in his youth.