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拍品專文
Potently demonstrating photography’s political potential, Stan Douglas’s A Luta Continua, 1974 is one of eight images comprising the Canadian artist’s influential Disco Angola series. Douglas, adopting the personage of a fictitious photojournalist, juxtaposes the emergence of disco with the rapid decolonization of Angola in the wake of the Carnation Revolution. Each large, panoramic photograph is carefully constructed from found source imagery, four works devoted to disco and four depicting Angolan subjects. With this series, Douglas “leaves the images to be deciphered via echoes that are ephemeral, unstable, and charged with meanings that become more apparent in retrospect” (R. Kushner, “Close-Up: Rebel Movement” in Artforum, vol. 50, no. 8, April 2012, online [accessed: 3/25/2025]).
A Luta Continua, 1974 was inspired by an image of a white colonist standing in front of the initials MPLA—standing for the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola—emblazoned across a cinder-block wall. The title, meaning “the struggle continues” in Portuguese, was a revolutionary slogan during Mozambique’s war for independence from Portugal, and remains culturally significant both in Mozambique and as an adopted slogan taken up by activist movements worldwide. For his recreation, Douglas found a near-identical cinder-block hut, painted the façade to mimic his source, and positioned his model in the exact pose as the original, the only difference being that his model is a Black woman. Writer and critic Rachel Kushner notes how here, “the complicating shades of class and skin tone are reinflected in the color scheme of her outfit: pure green, so that she forms, with the black and red behind her, the color trio of the pan-African flag, especially freighted with significance in the early 1970s, at the apex of national-liberation movements” (ibid.).
A Luta Continua, 1974 was inspired by an image of a white colonist standing in front of the initials MPLA—standing for the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola—emblazoned across a cinder-block wall. The title, meaning “the struggle continues” in Portuguese, was a revolutionary slogan during Mozambique’s war for independence from Portugal, and remains culturally significant both in Mozambique and as an adopted slogan taken up by activist movements worldwide. For his recreation, Douglas found a near-identical cinder-block hut, painted the façade to mimic his source, and positioned his model in the exact pose as the original, the only difference being that his model is a Black woman. Writer and critic Rachel Kushner notes how here, “the complicating shades of class and skin tone are reinflected in the color scheme of her outfit: pure green, so that she forms, with the black and red behind her, the color trio of the pan-African flag, especially freighted with significance in the early 1970s, at the apex of national-liberation movements” (ibid.).