Her beautiful brown eyes are like a shop window onto the soul, displaying the beauty of a woman-child while demystifying the origins of her art. The first seconds of conversation are significant for grasping the power and magic of Thandi Pinto’s gaze. Whether through her camera lens or through the “natural” observation of the life stories that cross her daily experiences, this young artist communicates with and for the world in a highly expressive way, just like her gaze. Thandy Lúcia Pinto, or simply Thandi Pinto, as she is known in the art world, is a rising young artist who uses photographs in striking works created through collage. The DNA of art has always lived in her. Sometimes a little dormant and sometimes more vividly, but always showing that Thandi was born for art. “I think I have been an artist since I was born. My mother, besides being a visual artist, does many other things connected with art. She has done interior decoration and fashion. My mother’s brothers are also visual artists, and my sisters are all artists,” she explained. Despite living surrounded by artists, Thandi needed time to find herself in that world. “My three sisters were connected with art. I was the only one in the family who did not fit into drawing or painting, yet I was always making little things: I decorated family parties, for example, and made handmade earrings. It was a little frustrating in a way, because I also wanted to be an artist, like everyone else.” Her mother tried to help her by arranging an encounter with music, in the hope that it would be the discipline that would blossom in her. At the start of her teens, she enrolled her in music school. However, Thandi ended up giving up. “I actually liked making music, but I did not like following musical rules, following the scale. I prefer intuitive things. I ended up giving up music.”
“I draw inspiration from my dreams. Since I was very little, I have liked surrealism, improbable scenarios, scenarios that do not exist but are very likely to happen. I mix what I see in my dreams with everyday life”
The art of creating narratives through collage
Still in the process of finding her artistic self, in 2017 Thandi Pinto took part in a walk around the city of Maputo with a photography group called “VêSó”, at the invitation of Neide Tsenane. This experience fired her love of photography. “We walked around the Railway Station. At the time, I did not even have a camera. I was using my nephew’s tablet. We took the photos, and I really liked it. They encouraged me to buy a camera.”
Two years later, the young artist bought a camera and began to give photography a more special place in her life. She took a course led by the Mozambican photographer Mário Macilau, but soon felt that photography alone could not tell the stories her artistic mind wanted to convey. Curious, Thandi had always been keen to understand the work done by one of her sisters, a professional graphic designer. When her sister stepped away from the computer, Thandi tried to understand Photoshop better and, little by little, learnt to use the program. One fine day, while browsing her social networks, Thandi saw a collage on Instagram and was fascinated. “When I saw it, I noticed that it looked like Photoshop. So I turned to the program to do something similar. And that is how I made my first collage, but it did not come out very well. Then I tried a few more times with photographs I took from the internet and saw that it was well received by the public on social media. But I felt that many people were doing that and I did not think it was extraordinary.”
In 2020, with the pandemic dominating the country and the world, Thandi began to go out more to take photographs; it was like therapy. Her participation in the “DemocraSEE” workshop, organised that year by the South African platform “Phototool”, gave her more confidence in her photographic work and encouraged her to use her own photos in her collages, instead of photos taken from the internet as she had done before, as well as giving her validation and genuine recognition of her work.
A graduate in linguistics from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Eduardo Mondlane University, the 31-year-old artist is a lover of surrealism, and it is not hard to see in her works a rejection of standardised images of reality and a construction of narratives that go beyond the limits of the imagination. “I draw inspiration from my dreams. Since I was very little I have liked surrealism, improbable scenarios, scenarios that do not exist but are very likely to happen. I mix what I see in my dreams with everyday life.” The artist saw in collage the best way of telling stories, bringing a set of photographs together in a single image. “Collages give more freedom. In collage I can do whatever I want. Tell a complete story with one image. Collage gives me even more flexibility to tell stories and create narratives.”
Fruit, flowers and cheerful colours contrast with the black-and-white photographs in the artist’s work. “I tell people’s stories, and those people usually carry painful stories. As I really like contrasts, the colours, fruit, flowers and nature help to contrast with the sad reality of the characters.”
An artist who is already drawing her trajectory in colour
Despite the short time she has spent in the arts, Thandi Pinto is already taking considerable steps in her professional growth. Her first photography exhibition took place in 2017 at the Brazil-Mozambique Cultural Centre. Since then, several works, both solo and collective, have marked her career. She recently took part in the group exhibition entitled “Visão do Paraíso” (Vision of Paradise) with the work “I love Maputo”, on show at the same cultural centre. Thandi Pinto also has her work displayed on Artsy, the largest online platform for the visual arts, which she finds very exciting. “It is being a very good experience. Apparently I am being well received. Of six works exhibited, three were sold to three collectors.” The artist has an artistic residency in Tofo, in Inhambane, next month, and several other projects, both national and international, that fill her with expectations about the growth of her work. And because she does not want to be the only one growing in the art world, Thandi Pinto has dreams that are not just about herself. “I would very much like to serve, in some way, as an inspiration to other women artists who lack the courage to show their work or who have been silenced in some way. I want to be able to help so that other artists have the same opportunities I have to exhibit their art,” she concluded.
