TELA
The concept of TELA was born in 2020, when the cultural centres and main art galleries in Mozambique came together to form a collective of promoters of Mozambican visual arts, designing a digital platform to catalogue, archive and publicise the country's visual artists, exhibitions and promoters. This was followed by the opportunity to obtain a fund supporting this type of initiative provided by the European Union, at which point UX joined the project, supporting it with the technical proposal for creating the digital platform. The platform's development took place in 2021, as did, on 9 December, at the Fernando Leite Couto Foundation in the city of Maputo, the gathering of the initial content for its launch.
TELA is a dynamic platform, available in desktop and mobile versions, to which promoters contribute new content on artists and exhibitions every month
The structure of the platform is quite simple: there are 3 types of repository: artists, exhibitions and promoters. As regards artists and exhibitions, there are content categories according to the types of visual art, that is, drawing, photography, sculpture, digital, among others. The artists' repository already has 25 profiles (for each artist, a biography, their artistic career, a list of exhibitions held and a wide range of additional information). The exhibitions repository, in turn, presents 19 exhibitions (including photos of the works, a description of each exhibition and other information about them). The artists featured on the platform also have a published exhibition, the idea being that users can get to know the artist better before appreciating their works during their visit to the platform. Finally, the promoters' repository contains profile pages for each cultural centre or gallery that is part of the TELA collective, namely the following: Fernando Leite Couto Foundation, Kulungwana Gallery, 16Neto Gallery, Franco-Mozambican Cultural Centre, Mozambican-German Cultural Centre, Camões - Portuguese Cultural Centre and the Embassy of Spain/Spanish Cooperation.
TELA is a dynamic platform, available in desktop and mobile versions, to which promoters contribute new content on artists and exhibitions every month, which is made publicly available on the internet and free of charge to all. The aim is to create a public archive of the best of what is being done in the country in the visual arts, in order to promote the national creative industry locally and internationally. Over time, the aim is also to encourage the discovery of new talent and to create a way of channelling the best emerging artists towards those who can help them promote their work on the world art scene.
The platform has content-sharing features, which allow users to make the artists and exhibitions they like most go “viral”. It also presents image galleries of the exhibitions, and will make it possible to capture information on the most visited content and the most shared categories, so as to build up information on the supply of and demand for visual arts in the country, which can help in decision-making for the promotion of the arts and the training of artists.
Go to www.tela.org.mz and let yourself be enchanted by the Mozambican world of the arts.
