Virginia Chihota. Kupinduka

“I was born into the conditions of a restless spirit,
with the obligation to dream awake.”
Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet (1913-1935, published in 1982)

“I was born with a scream.”
Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger (1978)

In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa renders existence as a state of suspension,
where identity splinters and certainty drift out of reach. His words pulse with unease
yet also with clarity: the awareness that incompleteness forms the very condition
of being. This atmosphere of disquiet, not as paralysis but as vital force, provides a
resonant framework for the work of Virginia Chihota (Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe, 1983).

In her first major solo institutional exhibition in Europe, Kupinduka, presented at the
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC, Seville), Chihota brings together
paintings, drawings, prints, and large-scale works on paper, including a new series
shown for the first time. Her practice is profoundly introspective, shaped by every day
and transformative experiences: motherhood and kinship, loss and displacement,
memory and faith.

Chihota fuses painting, drawing and screen-printing into intricate layers of pattern,
colour, and line. The female body, often her own, recurs as fragment and silhouette,
dissolving into abstraction, multiplying across the surface, or folding inward as if
in retreat. These figures carry vulnerability and endurance in equal measure, their
fragile contours sheltering memory while opening toward transformation. At the
core of her practice lies the notion of Kupinduka. In Shona (the main languages of
Zimbabwe), the word suggests a turning, a shift of state, often understood as moving
into the spiritual realm to carry a message. It is not merely change, but a passage, a
rupture in which the self-unsettles, transforms, and speaks from another register. In
Chihota’s work, this act of turning becomes visible in the way her figures fold, double,
or dissolve; in the way lines repeat like echoes; in the way absence itself becomes a
presence on the page. Her drawings and prints do not present the body as fixed or
whole, but as a site of continuous passage, charged with the possibility of conveying
something beyond the visible. Kupinduka, in this sense, gives her visual language both
its fragility and its force: an art of threshold, where the intimate body becomes a
messenger of the unseen.

The new works reveal a heightened delicacy: translucent lines, vegetal motifs, and
spiritual signs that drift between interiority and transcendence. Here the body is not
a stable form but a shifting terrain, generative and open, where silence becomes
rhythm and instability gives rise to renewal. Pessoa (Portugal, 1888-1935) wrote: “To
exist is to drift between what I dreamed and what I lived.” Chihota’s practice inhabits
precisely this drift. Her figures oscillate between protection and openness, silence
and rhythm, disappearance and return. They embody the sense that life unfolds in
motion, suspended between inner vision and lived experience.

If Pessoa lends the echo of metaphysical unease, Dambudzo Marechera (Zimbabwe,
1952-1987), Zimbabwe’s incendiary poet and novelist, shadows her work with the
urgency of fracture and survival. Marechera’s writing confronts dislocation, exile, and
the volatility of identity with a raw intensity that refuses containment. His declaration
that “to write is to burn and to emerge as ash” resonates with the way Chihota’s
forms seem to dissolve only to reconstitute themselves, fragile yet insistent. Where
Marechera’s words tear open the fabric of belonging, Chihota’s images mend and
unmake simultaneously, balancing fracture with tenderness, refusal with hope.

Chihota’s universe ultimately turns restlessness into vision. Her paintings and works
on paper are not depictions but meditations, where pigment and line open into
states of passage. At their heart is Kupinduka: the turning through which the body
unsettles itself, crosses thresholds, and speaks in new forms. Figures emerge and
retreat, bodies collapse into pattern, colour trembles against absence. She builds a
visual language in which fragility is not a weakness but a source of renewal. What
is incomplete becomes fertile ground, what is fractured becomes a path toward
imagining otherwise. In this sense, Chihota’s work invites us to see painting as both
shelter and threshold, a place where the body enacts its own turning, dreaming of
what it might yet become.

Jimena Blázquez Abascal