Rui Catalão has been developing a theatrical project which he titled “At the shelter of the distance”. Having started out as a set of chronicles from the confinement experience, the artist realized that in the community where he has worked for the past six years – Vale da Amoreira – more than two thirds of the population grew up in a family context in which one of the parents, or even both, is absent. For the artist residency in Vouzela Rui Catalão decided to keep the same target of study: interviewing local population, and trying to understand what kind of stories occur, with regard to experiences in which parents (the mother, the father, both) were absent, even if episodically: The cause of the separation, the way of life it provided and the consequences of this separation, both in family relationships and in the relationship with the community… The project will have the collaboration of journalist Madiu Furtado in conducting interviews.
Rui Catalão has a degree in social communication from UAL, has been a film critic since his adolescence at Jornal de Sintra and was a music journalist and literature critic at Público, where he still episodically collaborates. He also writes a monthly section in GQ magazine. As a playwright, he collaborated with João Fiadeiro, Ana Borralho and João Galante, Miguel Pereira, Tonan Quito, Elmano Sancho, Diana Niepce, Mihai Mihalcea, Eduard Gabia, Manuel Pelmus, Mihaela Dancs, Brynjar Bandlien, Madalina Dan among other, raising awareness and creating narratives based on personal experiences, which he called “The game of difficult questions”, which resulted, for example, in the theater workshops “Now you do it”, as well as the several plays he created in Vale da Amoreira with a group of young people of African origin who interpret their own stories, with narratives of war, life in the suburbs and the African diaspora: “And now we”, “Adriano no longer lives here”, “Fear on the way” and “The Mandjako Girl”.
Madiu Furtado Embaló (Bubaque, Guinea-Bissau, 1992). He left Guinea-Bissau during the civil war, when he was eight, and settled with his mother and brothers in Vale da Amoreira, where he lived for 16 years. His father stayed in Guinea. He was a journalist for the regional daily newspaper “O Setubalense” and collaborated with “Observador” newspaper. He has a degree in Social Communication and Marketing at the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal. He wrote the novel “One of Us”, about the African community on the south bank of the Tagus river. He is the author of the texts for “Under the distance”, the new play by Rui Catalão.