Hi, my name is Diogo Bento (b. Portugal, 1984); I live and work in beautiful São Vicente, Cabo Verde.
As a photographer-artist, my projects are always driven by a particular or subjective social and political concern.
In pursuing my artistic work, I am often drawn to “the troubled land” – which I consider to be sites that are “contested”, and are so either by appropriation, domestication or transformation of the landscape – this is where I engage with themes of ecology, nature, architecture, urbanism and science to arrive at discussions involving decoloniality and social justice.
During field and studio work, and through research, I seek to grasp some of the historical and cultural entanglements of a given territory, while maintaining a continuous questioning of reality and the present time. This allows me to develop a visual vocabulary that sets the tone for the narrative.
In my projects, some of which are collaborations, I have mainly experimented with photography and installation.
I have been involved in several artistic and educational projects since 2013 as a photographer, trainer, curator and founding member of AOJE, an organisation dedicated to photography.