Euridice Zaituna Kala: “In Rome, all roads lead to the story of Bertina Lopes – and to our own, that of Mozambique.” — AWARE Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions

Euridice Zaituna Kala: “In Rome, all roads lead to the story of Bertina Lopes – and to our own, that of Mozambique.” - AWARE Artistes femmes / women artists

Bertina Lopes, Raiz antica [Ancient root], 1964, Collage and oil on canvas, 130 x 150 cm, © Photo: Frankie Tyska, Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Bertina Lopes, Io so mistero che madre soffre [I know the mystery that mother suffers], 1960, Oil on canvas, 118 x 97.5 cm, © Photo: Frankie Tyska, Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Bertina Lopes, Grido grande [Big Cry], 1970, Oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, © Photo: Frankie Tyska, Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Bertina Lopes, Acrobazia 1 [Stunt 1], 1972, Mixed media on canvas, 150 x 130 cm, © Photo: Frankie Tyska, Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Exhibition view, Bertina Lopes: I know the mystery that mother suffers, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, January 13 – February 18, 2023, © Photo: Frankie Tyska, Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

From March to May 2023, Mozambican artist Euridice Zaituna Kala (1987–), based in the Paris region, undertook a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome. There, she conducted research on her compatriot, the painter Bertina Lopes (1924–2012). Born in Maputo (then Lourenço Marques) when Mozambique was still under Portuguese colonial rule, B. Lopes grew up in a context shaped by repression and resistance. Her African mother and her father, of mixed Portuguese descent, instilled in her a dual cultural heritage that would profoundly influence her artistic vision. After studying art in Lisbon, B. Lopes returned to Mozambique and began to teach. In the 1950s, her paintings began to express a veiled critique of Portuguese colonialism. She aligned herself with anticolonial intellectuals and poets such as Marcelino dos Santos and Noémia de Sousa – figures who would later become central to the resistance movement. Harassed by the Salazarist regime due to her political activity and proximity to FRELIMO (the Mozambique Liberation Front) militants, in 1964 she moved to Rome, where she lived in exile for the rest of her life alongside her husband, Italian painter Francesco Confaloni (1934–2023). Though Italy became her place of residence, Africa remained at the heart of her work. From the 1960s to the 1980s, her painting was defined by a vibrant expressionism and politically charged themes – war, exile, suffering, but also resistance and hope, producing series inspired by African liberation struggles, anti-Apartheid and the condition of women. Following Mozambique’s independence in 1975, she was recognised by the Marxist government of Samora Machel and appointed cultural attaché at the Mozambican embassy in Rome. During her lifetime, B. Lopes exhibited internationally: at the FAO headquarters in Rome (1996), the Italian Cultural Institute in Jeddah (1995), the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad (1981), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon (1972) and the National Museum of Maputo (1982 and 2012). She was also honoured with two major retrospectives in Rome (1986 and 2002). Until her passing in 2012, B. Lopes remained a cultural bridge between Africa and Europe.

Following the death of F. Confaloni in 2023, the couple’s apartment at 98 Via XX Settembre in Rome began to be gradually emptied, after being photographed by Giorgio Benni. In June 2024, a substantial portion of B. Lopes’s studio contents – including seventy-four oil paintings, drawings and sculptures – was auctioned by Bonhams¹. Although Lopes’s work received some degree of recognition during her lifetime, particularly through a sustained presence in exhibitions, it remains underrepresented in public collections in 2025. In the 2010s and 2020s, her visibility has been maintained posthumously through two appearances at the Venice Biennale (2015, 2024), as well as through the art market, thanks to the efforts of galleries such as Richard Saltoun and Andrew Kreps, and her regular presence in auctions dedicated to modern and contemporary African art.

In the following text, E. Zaituna Kala shares her reflections on her residency in Rome, where – pregnant at the time – she immersed herself in the archives of B. Lopes, as well as the series of works which came out of her research.

At the entrance …
“Piacere, Onore, Privilegio,
15.07.2007
Massimo Giordani” ²

View of Bertina Lopes’ studio-apartment, © Photo: Francesco Ciccone

Further along, down the hallway leading to the kitchen …
“Carissimi Bertina e Franco
Grazie mille pour una serra simpatico
e por la bacalau straordinario
tua vita e una capolavoro
0032 27329656
Frances et Amel Blair
xoxo
01.01.05”³

View of Bertina Lopes’ studio-apartment, © Photo: Francesco Ciccone

And finally, her studio – set up in a living room transformed into a workspace. Her paintings still hang on the walls, after all these years.

I arrived in Rome with a single purpose: to visit the apartment-studio of Bertina Lopes at 98 Via XX Settembre. I wanted to step inside – not only to trace the remnants of her work and writings, but also to meet her widower, Francesco Confaloni, to speak with those close to her, to gaze at the landscape from her window, to switch on a light – to be where she once was, in the very place where a fragment of Mozambique’s history, a history we share, was written.

Exhibition view, Bertina Lopes. Via XX Settembre 98, la casa come luogo di resistenza [Via XX Settembre 98, the house as a place of resistance], Museo delle Civiltà, Rome, June 6, 2023 – January 14, 2024, © Photo: Giorgio Benni, Courtesy of the Museo delle Civiltà and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

In Rome, all roads lead to the story of B. Lopes – and to our own, that of Mozambique. The apartment at 98 Via XX Settembre was a nerve centre of her life: a place of encounters, debates, political engagement, negotiations – and, tirelessly, a space of creation, experimentation and art in motion. It wasn’t just in Rome, but in resonance with the city’s very essence that B. Lopes shaped this complex space: like the city itself, it was dense, layered and multifaceted. There, she built a paradoxical agora – at once a place of deep intimacy and a centre open to the world, where the present was in constant dialogue with memory, of here or elsewhere. Over time, this home became a document. A canvas, a living archive. B. Lopes’s prolific and multifaceted body of work – spanning painting, bronze and wood sculpture – unfolded there in countless forms, each expressing the complexity of her life. Every wall of the studio bears innumerable traces: graffiti, objects, memories, mementos left by visitors from all walks of life – artists, activists, friends, anonymous people, passers-by, political figures. A convergence of presences, of voices left behind within those walls – voices that time has not erased.

A few days after I arrived in Rome in March 2023, F. Confaloni – whom everyone called Franco, the widower of B. Lopes – passed away after a short illness. Despite being pregnant, I attended his funeral. Back home in Mozambique, this would have been frowned upon: a wake is not considered a place for a pregnant woman. One avoids mixing those who are entering the world with those who are leaving it. It is time – not presence – that deals with death. Still, I went without hesitation: all things considered, it was a rare chance to witness and feel the world that had once surrounded “Mama B”.

At his funeral, a crowd of faces appeared – figures who would go on to populate the months of research ahead. These final witnesses to the life of F. Confaloni – and, by extension, to that of B. Lopes – seemed almost unreal, ghostlike: his friends Paola Roletta, a journalist, and Mary Angela Schroth, director of Sala 1 – Centro Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea; the team from the Richard Saltoun Gallery in Rome, which now represents her work … We were all connected, in one way or another, to this woman. Franca, F. Confaloni’s last wife – now a widow herself – was also part of this posthumous circle around the artist, as though the aura of B. Lopes refused to vanish, as though she refused to let them – to let us – go. In that moment, I felt close to home, close to Maputo. The Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs was striking. Yet in that vast space, I felt an uncanny closeness to B. Lopes. Something in the prayers spoken echoed the rituals my grandfather used to perform back home.

View of Bertina Lopes’ studio-apartment in 2021, a handwritten note from Portuguese President Mário Soares, along with one of his cigars, taped to the wall, © Photo: Nancy Dantas

View of Bertina Lopes’ studio-apartment in 2021, © Photo: Nancy Dantas

Presentation of Euridice Zaituna Kala’s residency at the Villa Medici, Rome, 2023

In the end, I never crossed the threshold of that apartment-studio. I inhabited it in dreams, wandered through it in my imagination, sketched it mentally, read it through stories, and scrutinised it through countless images gathered not by me, but by others – namely, the art historians Alicia Knock and Nancy Dantas.⁴ The death of F. Confaloni had sealed its doors, at least for the duration of my time in Rome.

It was in another apartment, in the suburbs of Rome, that I finally found entry – the home of Francesco Ciccone, a collector of B. Lopes’s work. He shared a slice of life with me: he spoke about his job, his wife – also pregnant – and their children. The new walls, almost still fresh, were covered with B. Lopes’s paintings. The living room, barely more than 20 square metres, the bedrooms, the office, even the basement – all served as repositories for a career he had learned with time to recount. Over the course of an entire afternoon, F. Ciccone told me the story and provenance of each work, its place in time. Like a historian, he situated each painting within the life of the artist. Despite never having had the chance to meet her during her lifetime, he had grown close to her widower, F. Confaloni, and to his new wife, Franca. Immersed in some of B. Lopes’s major works and the catalogues from her many exhibitions, I gained another perspective on her life – on her close family in Portugal, whom F. Ciccone had also contacted. It was then that I became fully aware of an absence in this story: her two children, born from a first marriage to the Mozambican poet and journalist Virgílio de Lemos (1929–2013), were not included.

View of Bertina Lopes’ studio-apartment, © Photo: Francesco Ciccone

“Pour Mama Bertina
Avec tendresse
Avec amour
Pour Haïti, Pour l’Afrique,
Toujours.
Rome <3
le 3 mai 2010
Florence Alexis
Stéphen Ndiaye <3” ⁵

Euridice Zaituna Kala, Bertina, Series Postcard, 2023, © Euridice Zaituna Kala

Euridice Zaituna Kala, BL + =ZK, Series Postcard, 2023, © Euridice Zaituna Kala

I returned to Paris – a city B. Lopes held dear, and to which she might have fled instead of Rome, had the Salazar regime not forced her into a hastily prepared exile – with a troubled feeling, shaped by interwoven memories: of sharing, of struggle, of pain. My own memories, and those of others. The present, meanwhile, felt uncertain, fragmented, already on the verge of fading from the memories of those who had lived through it.

The apartment-studio, once a festive household, has become a place of death, bitterness and grief. It was there that she built her own network – one rooted in loyalty and commitment – and created a body of work grounded, above all, in a political context. She dedicated her life there to anticolonial militant practice. It was in Rome that I arrived with the first fragments of a project that sought to deepen the question of the archive – an archive centred on homage: the tributes B. Lopes paid, in her work, to political figures and fellow artists, including Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), whom she met in Paris in 1964, and those she received in return, particularly within her home, which she envisioned as a space of welcome. The walls bore witness to that constant circulation of gestures, of presences, of love.

As stated, upon B. Lopes’s death, much of her major work, her archives and her studio became the inheritance of her widower, F. Confaloni, and then, following his passing, of his wife, Franca. She remained, for me, an enigma: a late-in-life spouse, custodian of a national history – Mozambican, in this case – that was not her own. B. Lopes’s work, detached from its context, now seems to have veered onto another trajectory. How can such a prolific life – a home, a body of work, a personal and collective memory – one day be entrusted to someone who, to all appearances, has no connection to that history? It all struck me as deeply tragic.

Euridice Zaituna Kala, A Mother, Series We are the Ghost We are the Archive, 2023, Digital Rendering, © Euridice Zaituna Kala & René d’Amour Hitimana

Euridice Zaituna Kala, A Father, Series We are the Ghost We are the Archive, 2023, Digital Rendering, © Euridice Zaituna Kala & René d’Amour Hitimana

Euridice Zaituna Kala, A Residence, Series We are the Ghost We are the Archive, 2023, Digital Rendering, © Euridice Zaituna Kala & René d’Amour Hitimana

Euridice Zaituna Kala, A Son, Series We are the Ghost We are the Archive, 2023, Digital Rendering, © Euridice Zaituna Kala & René d’Amour Hitimana

To whom does this legacy belong? I asked myself this question as an artist, as a mother – at the time, an expectant one. I imagined myself in that apartment, as if I too were meant to leave a mark there; to inscribe my own dedication on a wall already dense with messages of love, hastily scribbled phone numbers, oddly shaped hearts, improbable signatures – a barrier erected against oblivion, to draw a line against illegibility.

It was through the archives made public by F. Confaloni during his lifetime, those held by the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome – which commissioned extensive photographic documentation of her apartment-studio by photographer G. Benni on the occasion of a B. Lopes retrospective in 2023 – and through what F. Ciccone generously agreed to share with me – that I began to reconstruct the informal institution that was B. Lopes’s world. But everything now seems to exist in negative. My own presence in that space – denied, absent – registers only in the void it left behind. Through the work born out of this research, I sought, among other things, to topograph and digitally replicate that space, to turn it into a refuge. A refuge which, it seems to me, we so desperately need.

As I write this, one thing is certain: there will be no museum in that apartment. The writings on the walls will be erased beneath a coat of paint. The archive, though documented, will fade away. Will Rome one day forget Mama B?

“Roma 01.04.1994
A Bertina
A INTELIGÊNCIA É ALGO DE VULGAR
Mais do que isso, a imaginação que é para poucos mortais criam, pertencem a raridade, pelo conjunto da: inteligência, a emoção, espiritualidade, e intelectualidade. Bertina, ‘tu’ pertences a todos os tempos, o passado, o presente e o futuro. Tuas obras, tua simplicidade e coragem, representam o símbolo da mulher do universo, mas ‘nossa’ moçambicana.
J.Jamal, piloto da Lam (Linhas aereas de Mocambique)
tél: 74.26.90, 49.35.10, 46.59.83, 46.59.54, 42.58.24, 42.58.25
Maputo Rua Dar-El-Salam n° 141⁶

Translated from the French by Flora Hibberd.

1
Link to the auction on Bonhams’s website : https://www.bonhams.com/stories/38353/video-the-studio-of-bertina-lopes-1924-2012/
2
Translation from the Italian: “Pleasure, honour, privilege”
3
Grammar and spelling faults are faithful to the original inscription. Translation from the Italian: “Very dear Bertina and Franco. Many thanks for this lovely evening and for your extraordinary bacalhau. Your life is a masterpiece”.
4
Dantas, Nancy, “Bertina Lopes: (Counter)Modernist in Arms”, in Reclaim: Narratives of African Women Artists, Paris, AWARE : Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions, 2024.
5
Translation from the French: “For Mama Bertina. With tenderness. With love. For Haiti, for Africa, Always. Rome <3 3 May 2010. Florence Alexis. Stéphen Ndiaye <3”
6
Translated from Portuguese: “Intelligence is common. But beyond it, imagination – only possessed by a few mortals – is a rare thing, for it is the result of a whole: intelligence, emotion, spirituality and intellectuality. Bertina, ‘you’ belong to all time: past, present and future. Your works, your simplicity and your courage represent the symbol of the woman of the universe, but above all, of ‘our’ woman of Mozambique”.

A
W A
R
E

AWARE

AWARE

Research