A woman stands, her gaze deepened by the odd makeup, the white powder of the m’siro2 standing out on her face, leaning against a poorly whitewashed wall.She seems to be gazing at the half broken mirror – almost a half moon – but she is staring straight at the lenses as she controls with a graceful gesture the scarf that wraps around her head.The painted nails, the jewelry – earrings, necklaces and a ring in Indo-Portuguese filigree – the scarf, the typical traditional quimão macúa, its bright colours contrasting with the grey walls and the faded blue of a wooden door, standing out so sharply that it looks like a 3D picture. She is Janina Momade, the cover of Islanders, Moira Forjaz’s latest book about the Island of Mozambique, whose portraits are the protagonists of this exhibit. Along with Janina there are other Islanders, placed throughout the alleys, in their homes, on the steps, on the mats, people of the Island of Mozambique, bathed, surrounded, licked, fed, beloved and sometimes unloved by the Indian Ocean, the sea responsible for “so many names and so many crossings of so much diversity” (João Paulo Borges Coelho). The protagonists are elderly islanders that have allowed the photographer to come into their intimacy, telling their lives in the first person. It was probably the first time someone asked them to talk about themselves, their dreams, the life they have lived and the life they wished they could have lived.Their frustrations, their disappointments and their satisfactions. Their lives. Islanders is a project about life, about the fact that everything is under a single great sky and everyone has the right to have a name. There is nothing more important than our name: we only exist with it.Many of the islanders don’t have any documents, gone astray with the cyclones, lost in the comings and goings between Island and continent, poverty and squalor, illusion, and wishful hopes for another future. Moira Forjaz has known the Island for a long time. She made her first trip to Mozambique right after its independence. She created a book, Muipiti, that flown around the world. A long time has passed since then, and in 2012 she decided to settle on the island of Mozambique.At 70 years old, she wanted to be an islander. She made friends with the islanders, on this island where the bright colours intertwine with the brownish sepia of stone and sand. Moira is able to bring out those colours through people, through the islanders that tell her their stories. She is not looking for a beautiful picture, she is not bound to the intellectual construction that induces the observation of the subject from a mainly aesthetic point of view. Instead, Moira’s intent is to capture of the spirit of the person. And the spirit is life itself and its dignity.For that reason, the architectures, the walls, the steps, the streets and the human bodies are all subjects that contain a breath of spirituality from which an archaic sacredness can be rechannelled.Her photographs reveal how the beauty of life can transmute into decay and how it remains being “beautiful”; of how much beauty is held in the complexity of “the satin that is under the m’siro” (Alexandre Lobato).(…) We understand the empathy that guided Moira’s hand, far from the speed with which a lot of digital photography is taken nowadays, made to be consumed, as it has been shown. In these 44 portrayals, colour is used as the ultimate goal, as an ethic: we look at them, and we are being looked back by the inert matter from which the light of the colours stands out, reaching our eyes.(...) These Islanders are the last testimonies of that time.