Djam Neguin, a multidisciplinary Cape Verdean artist, brings the history of Funaná to the Dias da Dança Festival. One version of the origin of this musical style tells the story of Funa playing the gaita and his companion Na-Ná playing the ferrinho. However, there is no record of Na-Ná. Throughout this performance, Djam Neguin will explore the history of Funaná, which is crystallized in an iconoclastic view of Santiago's masculinity and rural identity.

Na-Ná reminds us of the omission that women have been subjected to throughout history in the writing of history. What might be at the heart of this omission, this erasure? 

There is an African proverb that says, "Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Whoever controls the narratives controls the world. And we know that we live in a world that is steeped in a colonial, heteropatriarchal, and sexist logic that has placed the feminine in a subjugated, objectified position. These historical omissions and erasures are strategies for making a world dominated by men predominate in the collective imagination.

Does the future hold the solution? How so? 

The future holds the solution insofar as it is being constructed now. The Western linear perception of time (also of Judeo-Christian heritage) has shaped our understanding of time as a straight line. However, there are other temporal possibilities (much more interesting, in my view). Perhaps understanding time as a continuous vortex in which the present, past, and future are absolutely intersected and interchangeable. 

The future is also the non-time. It is the only place we can inhabit with absolute imagination. And so, the narratives that we want to prevail need to be told now. 

And it is not possible to tell stories without knowing History (what has already happened) and being able to interrupt the fictions that have dominated archetypes and collective unconsciousness and have made our experiences based on oppressions and silences.

Your art is closely tied to your origins. How have you built your career between inevitability and awareness of that choice? 

It has been one of my ontological and autopoietic imperatives - the search for myself through the recovery of my cultural ancestry and then, anthropologically, bringing forth my own fictions. This trajectory has materialized in the form of various artistic materials that result from these investigations, which are usually permeated by a desire for the crossing of languages and multisensorialities. It has been an interesting journey that has allowed me to find a place of extreme self-enjoyment and at the same time an interface with the issues that traverse my time and context of existence, as a black artist who needs to constantly face the machinery of decoloniality.