FORTIA is a project that uses the art of handmade recycled masks and photography to poetically exhibit deficiency and make its observers aware of our implicit bias regarding disability. FORTIA is about how disability can be depicted and exhibited in a way that empowers vulnerable groups, by using art as a manifestation that affirms their human dignity through art.
Lola Keyezua, a daughter of a disabled man uses a female body to portray the stories of a group of disabled men that are alienated from their own society. The project FORTIA is based on personal experiences that explore sorrow, lost and survival exhibited in audio conversations between the artist and Tito Cruz, a disabled man that works as an artisan in Luanda, Angola. Each mask gives a sense of a time´s passage. The design contains patterns from tribal drawings using it as a language with its motifs, shape and colours revealing in each mask Keyezua´s identity as an Angolan but also as a Dutch woman. In a photographic portrait of an empress in a long red dress that romanticise the existence of disability through the female body the observer is invited to visualize how our society portraits disability emotionally and physically in the arts.