Join us at Printed Matter Chelsea for a talk exploring José Sarmento Matos’ JAMAIKA, as well as a screening of his documentary short by the same name. Both follow the story of Bairro da Jamaica—a community in Seixal of around 700 inhabitants, often racialised and marginalised—in its fight for the right to decent housing.

The documentary, developed over three years (2020-2023), portrays the life of the community made up of immigrants from former Portuguese colonies—Angola, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe—and Portuguese people of African descent. Between 2022 and 2023, all of the Jamaica neighborhood was demolished. The families that lived there were relocated to decent housing, but their community prevails beyond Vale de Chicaros the place that has been home to so many since the mid-1980s. JAMAIKA not only captures life in the neighborhood; the relocation of some families as well as the demolition of buildings.

The project includes many collaborations within the community, one of which is with local rapper, Kid Robinn. Kid wrote his song “Perspectiva” for the short film, launched in 2021.

JAMAIKA aims to act as an intimate visual memory of Bairro da Jamaica, also representing many other racialized communities and others living in similar housing conditions in the metropolitan area of Lisbon and Porto. Many of these families continue to suffer daily stigmatization based on their ethnicity, marginalization by city councils and harassment by the police.

José Sarmento Matos is a 35 year old Portuguese documentary photographer. He is currently based between London and Lisbon. Sarmento Matos focuses his work on medium/long term projects on themes related to identity and social inequality. He has published his work in media outlets such as The New York Times, New Yorker, Newsweek, Washington Post, among others. And he also collaborates with Bloomberg, Le Monde, HBO and HISTORY. After receiving an emergency grant from the National Geographic Society to work on a collaboration with the Jamaica community, in Seixal, on racial and housing inequality in times of pandemic, JSM produced the film JAMAIKA, shown at Doc Lisboa 2021 and exhibited in a exhibition at MAAT, in the same year.

In 2024, after 3 and a half years of accompanying families from Bairro da Jamaica in their struggle for decent housing, José published the book JAMAIKA which tells the story of the community, serving as a memory of these families, also telling the process of rehousing the families and the demolition of the neighbourhood.

In 2014 JSM completed his master’s degree in documentary photography and photojournalism at the London College of Communication, where he taught documentary photography between 2016 and 2021. In 2015, JSM was considered by Magnum Photos as one of the 30 best photographers in the world under 30, with his work “The Turn of the Page”. And in 2020, with the project “Where do I belong? Abandoning the Venezuelan Dream.”, won the Estação Imagem award.