There’s a certain irony in talking about “belonging” in Portuguese. The language that once crossed oceans to colonize half the world now tries to stitch itself back together through art talks, Zoom rooms, and collective self-therapy sessions. That’s exactly where Identidades em Trânsito — the new online course led by curator and researcher Cristiana Tejo — lands: somewhere between a séance for colonial ghosts and a speculative lab for future diasporas.

Over four evenings, Tejo — cofounder of Lisbon’s NowHere and one of the most lucid voices on decolonial art in the Lusophone world — will guide participants through the tangled circuits of Brazil, Portugal, and Africa. The sessions weave through the invention of “brasilidade,” the seductive myth of luso-tropicalismo, and the messy politics of migration that now flow the other way: Brazilians settling in Lisbon, Cape Verdeans rewriting Europe’s nightlife, Africans remixing the sound of the metropole that once claimed to own them.

“Identity,” Tejo reminds, “isn’t a flag — it’s a negotiation.”

The course dismantles the comfortable clichés of harmony and cultural mixing that Portuguese colonialism sold so well. Luso-tropicalismo, that soft-power fairytale of racial democracy, gets exposed as the PR campaign it always was: a fantasy of coexistence that masked violence, hierarchy, and extraction. But Tejo doesn’t stop at critique — she connects those colonial imaginaries to today’s symbolic economies: the Lisbon art scene’s tokenism, the new digital migration flows, the algorithmic hierarchies that decide whose story trends and whose disappears.

Each class reads like a time warp:

• The invention of brasilidade — how “racial harmony” was marketed while real conflict was silenced.
• Colonialism and the Lusophone world — the afterlives of empire embedded in everyday speech and aesthetics.
• Luso-tropicalism and its affects — the emotional grammar of domination, affection as ideology.
• After the return — migration as a mirror flipped, Portugal as destination, Brazil as departure point of new global narratives.

Tejo’s approach, as always, is sensual and rigorous. She doesn’t preach theory; she stages it. Every topic moves like a conversation between archives and feelings, between Frantz Fanon and Anitta, between the colonial map and the digital feed. For her, history isn’t an old museum room — it’s a group chat still pinging at midnight.

And maybe that’s the point: to turn belonging into a verb again. To imagine identity not as a border but as an echo — moving, negotiating, remixing itself across continents.

Identidades em Trânsito isn’t about closure. It’s about motion. A poetic resistance to the static idea of who we are supposed to be.

Course: Identidades em Trânsito: Brasil, Portugal e as Poéticas do Pertencimento
With: Cristiana Tejo
When: November 24, 26, 28 and December 1, 18h30–20h30 (Brasília)
Where: Online via Zoom
Organized by: NowHere Lisboa