Villages 

Original BD boards, studies and documentation 

Francisco Sousa Lobo 

July 18 - September 5, 2026 

An architectural research team and a comic book author got together to interview people who had been in the settlements created by the Portuguese army in Africa. The researchers conducted interviews in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil, and one of the results of these interviews is the book Aldeamentos de Guerra (ed. Chili com Carne, 2026). A reflection on what happened before and after the 25th of April 1974 in African rurality.  

 "There is something here that makes me think of Miguel de Unamuno's concept of 'intrahistory': that subterranean and almost invisible life that subsists beneath great historical events. Because this book is not primarily interested in military operations or the official narratives of empire and independence. Rather, he is interested in the texture of daily life within the war: in the improvised kitchens, in the open schools under the trees, in the paths between the village and the barracks, in the vegetable gardens, in the silences, in the migrations, in the difficult returns. He is interested in the way in which the great historical events were lived, suffered, improvised and remembered by those who normally remain outside the central archives of history!",  says Ramon Sarró in the book's afterword. 

Another contribution to this reflection is the exhibition that Francisco Sousa Lobo presents at Tinta nos Nervos, with the original plates and scans that significantly enlarge the pages of the book, involving the spectator-reader in the thought and process of construction of the narrative device. Organized in tripartite columns in the gallery, it continuously reveals three distinct stages of the artist's work, three layers that allow us to see, separately, the original drawings, traced in black paint, the plates with stains for the introduction of color  and the final result, where text and image are articulated in the recomposition of the edited art. In the showcases, the sketchbooks and reference books that served as the basis for the project are shown. 

At the same time, and in the same way, the plates of Palácio #5 are available, the most recent publication of the self-edited series by Francisco Sousa Lobo (2020-2026).  

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- Francisco Sousa Lobo (b.1973) -  

"I am a comic book author with a degree in fine arts, comics and architecture, and I teach critical theory, comics and illustration in London and Lisbon.  

My work, which now has twenty publications, fluctuates between documentary, autobiography and fiction. Aldeamentos is part of the essayistic and documentary side of my work. 

My work has been published and disseminated, with critical reception, in Portugal, the United Kingdom, Spain, French-speaking countries, Italy, Croatia, Latvia and Latin America. 

I am concerned about the overlapping and conjugality between form and concept in comics, the relationship between image and text, and an intuitive narratology, which is not fixed in rigid models but rather explores hybrid terrains.  

My comics come from life and reality, from reading and from the practice of comics itself. It is simple in its accessibility and relationship with previous and contemporary forms of comics, but complex in the very references it absorbs or reveals. 

It is common for me to choose a theme that is strong or close to any human radicality, to a limit of human experience. Comics, as I understand it, are something other than a literary subgenre, it is a form of visual storytelling with specific properties and codes, in which the virgin terrain, from an authorial point of view, is clearly present and visible. There is a lot to do."