About

Research Context

Cabo Verde (and diaspora)

Research Interests

Heritage | Diaspora | Sociolinguistics | Identity

Institutional Subunit

NOVA FCSH

Biographical Note

André “Xina” Coelho is a portuguese composer and producer. Descendant of cape verdeans, he lived in Macau as a child, where he began his musical research through guitar and piano lessons and traveling mainly in Asia, Africa and Europe. With a master's degree in Anthropology and Visual Culture, his academic research revolves around cases of neighborhood noise collected in the city of Lisbon, while also discussing aspects related to the portuguese noise abatement law. This project sparked André's interest in acoustic ecology, and so in 2010 he carried out a three-month journey through West Africa, with the aim of collecting the sound heritage of the different locations between Dakar and Timbuktu, in northern Mali. From that trip he created the project Sontato, a platform where he share the different soundscapes that he has documented so far. In 2012 André immigrated to Brazil, being the founder of musical projects such as Imidiwan, XAFU, Rickshaw and the Radio Tamashek, releasing several records and collaborating mainly with portuguese, brazilian and mozambican artists. In 2018, he created the solo project Há Kwai, which means "black ghost" in the cantonese language, a chinese derogatory term given to dark-skinned people. He released the EP Gweilo in 2017, and in the following year he produced the EP São Paulo and the EP Songhai. In 2020 he produced the EP Luaty, in collaboration with the mozambican singer TRKZ and released by Kongoloti Records. In 2021 André releases Nzungu ("white" in the Quimuane language spoken in northern Mozambique), produced between Italy and Portugal, with the debut album Dark Night of the Soul. In 2022, he is admitted to the PhD in Politics and Images of Culture and Museology, trough a project that proposes the mapping of the creole dialects in Cape Verde and in the diaspora, in order to reflect the importance of language in the negotiation of identity constructions and kinship, and how this distinguishes language as the basis of the intangible heritage of Cape Verdean culture.