Smiling Lions, Dragons and Other Revolutions

The City of Maputo owns a very special heritage of colonial architecture. While in Portugal cultural development was oppressed under the Salazar regime, in Mozambique artistical freedom could unfold. The African colony became a laboratory of modernism.
As an encounter with the Maputo of today, the photographic series Smiling Lions, Dragons and Other Revolutions follows the tracks of Amancio d‘Alpoim Miranda Guedes, an architect who has coined the image of the capital in the period from 1952 to 1975. Against a background of corporate, social and political transformations these momentary records unsheathe traces of Mozambican history. And reflect a metropolis which in the local language Shangaan is refered to as 'Xilunguíne - the place where you live like white people‘, a laboratory of African urbanism.
By; Annett Bourquin (Berlin)