Weaving and gluing Cape Verde: “portraits of the people” in Mindelo handicrafts

Abstract

Introduced into Cape Verde in the late 1970s, tapestry was nationalised by the drawings of the cartoons, now called “portraits of the people’s day-to-day life”. These images have been incorporated into other artifacts such as pictures with collages, turning handicrafts into a fertile field of analysis regarding the country’s visual construction processes. Starting with a survey of the main lines and points of inflection of the evolution of tapestry in Europe that favoured its advent in Cape Verde, the present paper examines the drawings seen on the 46 tapestries and 282 pictures with collages exhibited in November 2019 in Mindelo’s souvenir shops, putting forward a set of hypotheses resulting from a first attempt at articulating these images and the leading propositions about the Cape Verdian identity.