Inhambane, a city in south Mozambique facing the Indian ocean, is the place where Vasco da Gama and his crew will have arrived at over 500 years ago, naming it “Land of Good People”. This is an epithet that the city continues to proudly evoke to this day, describing in detail the rainy day in which a people grew closer to another people, and when the tired travellers were welcomed with great hospitality.
Inhambane, which is also the hometown of Panaíbra’s father, was and still is a “land of good people”, although that great kindness did not prevent it from becoming a colony and other things that humans decided to do to each other.
“Memory is rooted in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects”, wrote Pierre Nora. The creators are interested in thinking history based on that landscape, and on a crossed thinking that juxtaposes past, present and future. They are interested in proceeding with the research about what Paul Carter called “politics of the ground”, or “a new step that does not repress and flatten the land, but that lets the ground climb the body, determine its gestures, movements, reinventing a new social choreography”.
“When a body ‘finds’ another body – an idea, another idea – it may be that the two relations assemble to form a more powerful whole.” The idea of good meetings and the transformative power of good conversations is among the first principles of the project, and the creators of OU wish, above all, that it constitutes a compliment of the complete encounter.