The work is part of the project A ferida colonial ainda dói, in which Mombaça intervenes with inscriptions made with his own blood in representations related to colonial history and geopolitics, such as maps of the European Union and of the smuggling of enslaved Africans, books of the colonial library, and magazines. In the video projection, we see the sentence “vocês nos devem” [you owe us] being written with blood on the floor next to Padrão dos Descobrimentos, the monument in Lisbon that pays homage to the invaders involved in the self-proclaimed Portuguese discoveries. In an inscription on the floor is written the sentence’s continuation: “Vocês nos devem até a alma. E, assim como nós, os nossos fantasmas estão vindo cobrar” [You owe us up to your souls. And, just like us, our ghosts are coming to charge]. Mombaça’s performative inscription aims to dissolve the linearity of the colonial narratives by exposing the erasure of the memory, the amount of the debt and the sores, still open, left by the Portuguese invasions.
