Do you think freedom exists? 1
What are the (Black) geographies of freedom that are still to be imagined?2
What are the infrastructures of hope?
The advancement and proliferation of technologies of surveillance and the control of movements is a growing violation of individual and collective freedom — for many, borders are a geopolitical construct of physical and mental entrapments.
In the exhibition The Sun Does Not Rise in the North, de Miranda proposes one-person tales navigating between fictional and non-fictional narratives in the affective space of the border. The exhibition investigates the landscapes that witness hope, from the journeys of migration between Africa and Europe, set within a duality of existence and citizenship: one contemplating Europe and the other a return to Africa.
We are immersed within the contested border of Ceuta in Spain and Melilla between Spain and Morocco, in these spaces of transition where the artist spent time with the territory and gathered testimonies. De Miranda gives a nuanced gaze into the familiar scenario of the ‘migration crisis’ and its relationships with the fortress of Europe, in underpinning the ongoing colonial politics of violent rejection of people that attempt to reach its soil every day.
The Sun Does Not Rise in the North examines the complex diversity of personal and collective histories interconnected between the migrant and the diasporic experience in Europe. It is a continuous relational praxis that de Miranda depicts and deconstructs through counter-narratives of belonging, as well as on the (re)elaboration of memory in post-colonial discourses.
The African liberation struggles, and revolutionary movements fuel the artist’s imaginaries. The building of an archive of transnational political efforts — one that reminds us to look onto the past for our current reflections, as a continuous entity in our horizons, and where liberation sits within the ongoing narratives of strength, resilience, and vulnerability. In the film o sol não nasce a norte (the sun does not rise in the north) and photographic works, the visual narratives give (back) dignity and grace to the characters through the poetics of (body) languages.
Here, and generally within de Miranda’s cinematographic geographies of affection3, the main characters are in deep connections with the ecosystems and the landscapes: the sea, the forest, the mountains, the desert, the sand, and palm trees are mothering the fugitive and disposable bodies, waves are caressing the ears amongst ethereal soundscapes, symbolic spiritual colours of the sun, blood, water and trees. Clad in white clothing, they are calling for the sun. The bodies are aligned with its cyclical movement. The landscapes alternate between crisp blue skies, natural fog and blurry haze depicting the start and end of the day — and of journeys leading to freedom, alienation, loss or slow spiritual death.
In the film, the man says that the body has no end, but life does. In Bakongo philosophy, at sunset and sunrise, “the living and the dead exchange day and night. The setting of the sun signifies man’s death and its rising, his rebirth, or the continuity of his life. Bakongo believe and hold it true that man’s life has no end, that it constitutes a cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change.”4 The movements and itinerant passages of those that have arrived, but only to leave, are captured in the memory of the soil, of the land that is archiving each of their steps. In the film, the archaeological digging of the land, what was once there and now buried, interrogates what else is left of our bodies without the earth?
Now you’re this, what is left. Your body turns into pieces that the wind carries away.
Whether it is in the film or exhibition space, the solar panels become sculptures of dominance and empowerment bouncing the light on the bodies to rise anew within new temporality and potential forms of being and living, until a final rupture. The visitors become active participants, navigating amongst the screens. They roam around amongst shadows and reflections — their own stories mirroring or in tandem with the main characters. The sun is represented in the metaphor of the mirror as what controls and sustains us all. The reflective light and sun are giving the rhythm of navigation, oflandmarks and human footprints. The source of light is saturated and blinding, the eyes remain shut or resist a direct gaze — a regenerative moment surfaces where the knowledge of our double co-existence is virulent and unforgivable at the core of the character’s questions and provocations in which our acts of extraction to the land is laid bare for the viewers.
But how much sun must we store and sell? How many greenhouses must we produce in
order to live in a land that sees no sunlight?
The Sun Does Not Rise in the North exhibition gives way to the monumentality of the landscape of hope and freedom, the infrastructure that are markers of state violence, and the architecture of surveillance such as the metallic gated border, fences that are to rip the skin, the overwhelming visions of capitalist accumulation through extractive mechanisms as a violation of the soil, sun, water are in parallel with the ever so present technologies of renewable energies to counterbalance the damages of the land that the same politics of rejection are encompassing every day. The mirrors are an ongoing metaphor of this reflection and our contemporary interrogation on the psychological and physical damages of a systemic nature.
The Sun Does Not Rise in the North is a moment for us all to belong within their existence and continuation to resist against the distant feeling of their alienation, confusion and estrangement, and a part of the journey that liberates us from the borders of our mental and spiritual prisons in understanding the ongoing relationship that the land and our bodies are just one.
Cindy Sissokho
May 2023
Notes
1 Quotes from the film are written in italics throughout the text, unless annotated and stated otherwise.
2 A term taken from Saidiya Hartman’s introductory words in The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition by William C. Anderson (2021).
3 A key term coined by De Miranda that has come to represent the deep interdependencies between the architectural and sonic landscapes, the body, and personal/collective emotional cartographies that are predominant in her practice.
4 A quote taken from Chapter 2, The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art and Religion in the Americas from Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson (1984), originally drawn from An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire by John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey (1974).
Produced within the programme of ”la Caixa” Foundation, Support for Creation’22. Production.
¿Crees que la libertad existe?1
¿Cuáles son las geografías (Negras) de la libertad que todavía están por imaginar?2
¿Cuáles son las infraestructuras de la esperanza?
El avance y la proliferación de tecnologías de vigilancia y control de movimientos es una violación creciente de la libertad individual y colectiva: para muchos, las fronteras son una construcción geopolítica de trampas físicas y mentales.
En la exposición The Sun Does Not Rise in the North de Miranda propone relatos unipersonales que navegan entre narrativas ficticias y no ficticias en el espacio afectivo de la frontera. La exposición indaga en los paisajes testigos de la esperanza, a partir de los viajes migratorios entre África y Europa, enmarcados en una dualidad de existencia y ciudadanía: uno contemplando Europa y el otro un regreso a África.
Nos hallamos inmersos dentro de las disputadas fronteras de Ceuta y Melilla entre España y Marruecos, lugares de transición en los que la artista pasó tiempo sobre el terreno, recopilando testimonios. De Miranda ofrece una mirada matizada al escenario familiar de la "crisis migratoria" y sus relaciones con la Europa-Fortaleza, evidenciando la actual política colonial de rechazo violento de las personas que intentan llegar a su suelo todos los días.
The Sun Does Not Rise in the North examina la compleja diversidad de historias personales y colectivas interconectadas entre el migrante y la experiencia de la diáspora en Europa. Es una praxis relacional continua que de Miranda retrata y deconstruye a través de contrarrelatos de pertenencia, así como sobre la (re)elaboración de la memoria en los discursos poscoloniales.
Las luchas de liberación africanas y los movimientos revolucionarios alimentan los imaginarios del artista: la construcción de un archivo de esfuerzos políticos transnacionales -uno que nos recuerda mirar hacia el pasado para nuestras reflexiones actuales, como una entidad continua en nuestros horizontes, y donde la liberación se encuentra dentro de las narrativas en curso de fuerza, resiliencia y vulnerabilidad-. En la película o sol não nasce a norte (el sol no sale por el norte) y en las obras fotográficas, las narrativas visuales dan (de vuelta) dignidad y gracia a los personajes a través de la poética de los lenguajes (corporales).
Aquí, y en general dentro de las geografías cinematográficas de afecto3 de la artista, los personajes principales están en profundas conexiones con los ecosistemas y los paisajes: el mar, el bosque, la montaña, el desierto, la arena y las palmeras son madres de los cuerpos fugitivos y desechables, las olas acarician los oídos entre paisajes sonoros etéreos, colores espirituales simbólicos del sol, la sangre, el agua y los árboles.Vestidos con ropa blanca, están llamando al sol. Los cuerpos se alinean con su movimiento cíclico. Los paisajes alternan entre cielos azules nítidos, niebla natural y neblina borrosa que representan el comienzo y el final del día, así como de viajes que conducen a la libertad, la alienación, la pérdida o la lenta muerte espiritual.
En la película, un hombre dice que el cuerpo no tiene fin, pero la vida sí. En la filosofía Bakongo, al atardecer y al amanecer, “los vivos y los muertos intercambian el día y la noche. La puesta del sol significa la muerte del hombre y su salida, su renacimiento o la continuidad de su vida. Los bakongo creen y sostienen que la vida del hombre no tiene fin, que constituye un ciclo, y la muerte es meramente una transición en el proceso de cambio”4. Los movimientos y pasajes itinerantes de los que han llegado, pero sólo para partir, son plasmado en la memoria del suelo, de la tierra que va archivando cada uno de
sus pasos. En la película, la excavación arqueológica de la tierra, lo que una vez estuvo allí y ahora está enterrado, interroga qué más queda de nuestros cuerpos sin la tierra.
Ahora eres esto, lo que queda. Tu cuerpo se convierte en pedazos que se lleva el viento.
Ya sea en la película o en el espacio de exhibición, los paneles solares se convierten en esculturas de dominio y empoderamiento haciendo rebotar la luz sobre los cuerpos para resurgir dentro de una nueva temporalidad y formas potenciales de ser y vivir, hasta una ruptura final. Los visitantes se convierten en participantes activos, navegando entre las pantallas. Deambulan entre sombras y reflejos — sus propias historias se reflejan o en conjunto con los personajes principales. El sol está representado en la metáfora del espejo como lo que nos controla y sostiene a todos. La luz reflejada y el sol van marcando el ritmo de la navegación, de los hitos y de las huellas humanas. La fuente de luz se satura y se hace cegadora, los ojos permanecen cerrados o sostienen la mirada directa, un momento regenerador aflora donde el conocimiento de nuestra doble convivencia es virulento e imperdonable en el seno de las preguntas y provocaciones del personaje en las que nuestros actos de extracción a la tierra queda al descubierto para los espectadores.
Pero, ¿cuánto sol debemos almacenar y vender? ¿Cuántos invernaderos debemos
producir para vivir en una tierra que no ve la luz del sol?
La exposición The Sun Does Not Rise in the North in the North da paso a la monumentalidad del paisaje de esperanza y libertad, la infraestructura que son marcadores de la violencia estatal, y la arquitectura de vigilancia como la frontera con portones metálicos, vallas que van a desgarrar la piel, las visiones abrumadoras de la acumulación capitalista a través
de mecanismos extractivos como la violación del suelo, el sol, el agua van en paralelo con las siempre tan presentes tecnologías de las energías renovables para contrarrestar los daños a la tierra que las mismas políticas de rechazo están englobando todos los días. Los espejos son una metáfora permanente de esta reflexión y de nuestro interrogatorio contemporáneo sobre los daños psicológicos y físicos de carácter sistémico.
The Sun Does Not Rise in the North es un momento para que todos nosotros pertenezcamos a su existencia y continuación para resistir contra el sentimiento distante de su alienación, confusión y extrañamiento, y una parte del viaje que nos libera de las fronteras de nuestras prisiones mentales y espirituales en la comprensión de la relación en curso que la tierra y nuestros cuerpos son uno solo.
Cindy Sissokho
Mayo 2023
Notas
1 Las citas de la película están escritas en cursiva en todo el texto, a menos que se indique lo contrario.
2 Un término tomado de las palabras introductorias de Saidiya Hartman en La nación en ningún mapa: anarquismo negro y abolición de William C. Anderson (2021).
3 Un término clave acuñado por De Miranda que ha llegado a representar las profundas interdependencias entre los paisajes arquitectónicos y sonoros, el cuerpo y las cartografías emocionales personales/colectivas que predominan en su práctica.
4 Una cita tomada del Capítulo 2, El signo de los cuatro momentos del sol: arte y religión de Kongo en las Américas de Flash of the Spirit de Robert Farris Thompson (1984), originalmente extraído deAntología de la religión Kongo: Textos primarios del Bajo Zairepor John M. Janzen y Wyatt MacGaffey (1974).
Producido en el marco de programa de Fundación “la Caixa”, Apoyo a la creación’22. Producción.
This is my home
this fine line of
barbed wire
Gloria Anzaldúa
The Red Thread of Destiny is an ancient Asian legend that can be found in both Chinese (红线) and Japanese (赤い糸) mythology, which relates to the idea that a thin and invisible red thread emotionally connects people. Beyond the place, context or circumstances that one might have to live through, they will end up meeting at some point, for they are bound by an unbreakable bond. Although this belief has been appropriated by the fantasy of romantic love, the myth actually alludes to the force of destiny tying our lives together, regardless of the nature of the union. On a deeper level, it relates to trust, and to the faith that something beyond our actions sustains us, invoking a red thread tied to the pinkie as a symbol of a constellation of infinite connections; an amorous web that is able to contain the solitary existence of an individual. It is, no doubt, a charming belief. Oh, if only all persons, regardless of their origin, could trust in destiny like this.
Many artists, mostly non-European women, have made use of red strands or lines as a vindication, as a political and emotional gesture that touches on another aspect of this Asian myth: its counter-narrative. At times, it has been a path, a seam, a stain, a red cascade that falls to the ground. At others, it was blood traced over a surface, as in Teresa Margolles’s shrouds, Ana Mendieta’s bloody face or her silhouette outlined in the sand. But it is also in Cecilia Vicuña’s quipus, in the seams of Catalina Parra’s dismembered bodies, in Mona Hatoum’s undercurrents, and in the photos embroidered with red thread of the series, A Fine Line (2022), presented by Mónica de Miranda in this show. This collection juxtaposes a variety of artists’ works, practices and aesthetics, that communicate with each other across time and space in an almost spectral manner, as part of a web of irrevocable connections. The ghostly matters are important Avery F. Gordon affirms when she states that apparitions of past forces come to the present time and time again in various and complex forms. It is also the red thread of destiny that, in this case, underlines a universal unlove.
Mónica de Miranda (Porto, 1976) has developed a strong body of work around the African diaspora in Europe, specifically within the context of Portugal. Using photography and video as her main media, her work has explored the memory of the earth and of the landscape as a result of the colonial processes that were initiated by Europeans in the XVI century. In the collaborative format that her works often assume (her practice always dialogues with other creators) the artist delves into the colonial wounds of oppressed territories. However, the visual composition is diametrically opposed to an image of disgrace. “Her images are lyrical, performative, contemplative: they show moments of calm that offer a kind of comfort,” writes curator Mark Sealy about Mónica’s photos. Indeed, there is a duality, a contrast of representation apparent in her works: they allude to tensions in history that operate as a form of cryptography, and deciphering them offers an opportunity for reparation.
For the project Shadows Fall Behind, De Miranda realized deep research on the border between Spain and Morocco on the North African coast. She traveled to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla in an attempt to understand this other form of warp that intertwines— always tragically—a border fence and the promised land dreams of the migrant. The photos depict the landscape that these dreams look in. Might there be someone on the other side, with a red knot tied to my pinkie? Might the strand that kept us safe, be broken? Those could be the questions of someone who is no longer here to be answered. Like a subtle decoration, the artist overlays traditional Islamic patterns upon the horizon of the Spanish coast. And there it is once more, the phantasmal, the spectre of a denied cultural hybridization. Here, the red thread symbolizes an imaginary cartography that transgresses the geopolitical outline of this border, giving it texture and warmth; a pattern, as though it were something that could function as a sort of refuge.
Alongside the photos, the artist presents the video piece, Border Song (2022), made in collaboration with the afro-Portuguese musician Xullaji. The video follows the border of Ceuta and Melilla—a contour of no more than 20 kilometres—from a moving car. The images summon a painful procession of intertwined voices, sounds and chants from both sides of the steel line. There, blood has lost its colour. In this mesh, there are only severed threads; undone, ripped apart, dismembered, divided.
During her field research, Mónica de Miranda listened to dozens of people who remain stuck to the border, in between “who can live and who must die,” as stated by Achille Mbembe. The project is layered with accounts of those who are forced to be away from where they were born, of lives at the limit of all humanity, when the dream landscape transforms into a nightmare. Through the fiction created by these fabrics and interwoven voices, the artist ventures a sheltering gesture, a symbolic refuge in the face of the catastrophe of staying in those lands.
The border-town Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa proposes the idea of a “mundo surdo” [left-handed world] where all dissidence and all otherness are included, going directly against the principle of why borders were created in the first place. Her words are interspersed by the images that Mónica de Miranda shows in this exhibition, for at least they offer the possibility of imagining a destiny.
I am becoming-being
the questor the questing the quest
You and I have already met
We are meeting we will meet
The real unknown is feeling
The real unknown is love
[...]
We are the awakening feminine presence
We are the earth
We are the second coming
Notes
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Melusina, 2006.
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza, Capitán Swing, 2016.
Gloria Anzaldúa, “The coming of el mundo surdo”, in The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. by
AnaLouise Keating, Duke University Press, 2009.
Mark Sealy, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other, FotoFest Biennial,
Schilt Publishing, 2020.
Este es mi hogar
este fino borde de
alambre de púas
Gloria Anzaldúa
El hilo rojo del destino es una antigua leyenda oriental que se encuentra tanto en la mitología china (红线) como en la japonesa (赤い糸) y se relaciona con la idea de que un fino e invisible hilo rojo conecta afectivamente a las personas. Más allá del lugar, del contexto o de las circunstancias que le toque vivir a cada una, acabarán encontrándose en algún momento, pues están unidas por un vínculo inquebrantable. Aunque esta creencia ha sido capturada por las fantasías del amor romántico, el mito alude en realidad a la fuerza del destino que enlaza nuestras vidas, sin importar la naturaleza de la unión. Más profundamente, se relaciona con la confianza, con la fe en que algo nos sostiene más allá de nuestros actos, e invoca un hilo rojo atado al meñique como símbolo de una constelación de conexiones infinitas, de una red amorosa capaz de contener la solitaria existencia del individuo. Es, qué duda cabe, una hermosa creencia. Ojalá todas las personas, independientemente de su origen, pudieran confiar en el destino de esta forma.
Muchas artistas, la mayoría mujeres no europeas, han utilizado la potencia de una hebra o de un trazo rojizo como reclamo, como un gesto político y emocional que aborda la otra cara de este mito oriental, su contrarrelato. A veces ha sido un camino, una costura, una mancha, una cascada roja que cae hasta el suelo. Otras, ha sido la sangre de un cuerpo la que dibuja sobre una superficie; es el caso de los sudarios de Teresa Margolles, del rostro ensangrentado de Ana Mendieta o de sus siluetas en la arena. Pero también son los quipus de Cecilia Vicuña, las costuras de los cuerpos desmembrados de Catalina Parra, las corrientes subterráneas de Mona Hatoum o las fotografías bordadas con hilo rojo de la serie A fine line (2022) que Mónica de Miranda presenta en esta exposición. Son obras, prácticas e imaginarios de artistas que desde tiempos y espacios muy distantes se comunican, de una manera casi espectral, como parte de una red de conexiones irrevocables. Lo fantasmagórico importa, afirma Avery F. Gordon, al confirmar que las apariciones de fuerzas del pasado acuden al presente una y otra vez de formas múltiples y complejas. Es también el hilo rojo del destino, en este caso subrayando el desamor universal.
Mónica de Miranda (Oporto, 1976) ha desarrollado una contundente obra en torno a la diáspora africana en Europa, específicamente en el contexto portugués. Utilizando como medios principales la fotografía y el video, su trabajo ha explorado la memoria de la tierray del paisaje después de los procesos de colonización iniciados por los habitantes del continente europeo a partir del siglo xvi. En formatos colaborativos, en los que su práctica siempre entra en diálogo con otros creadores, la artista indaga en la herida colonial de los territorios subalternizados, pero lo hace desde una composición visual
antagónica a la desgracia. «Sus imágenes son líricas, performativas y contemplativas: momentos tranquilos que se ofrecen como una especie de consuelo», escribe el curador Mark Sealy en relación con la práctica fotográfica de Mónica. Efectivamente, hay una dualidad, un contraste en los ejercicios de representación de sus trabajos: la tensión de la historia a la que aluden opera como una criptografía cuyo desciframiento ofrece siempre un espacio para la reparación.
Para el proyecto Shadows fall behind, De Miranda ha realizado una investigación profunda de la frontera terrestre entre España y Marruecos, en la costa norte africana. Recorrió las ciudades de Ceuta y Melilla intentando comprender esa otra clase de urdimbre que entrelaza —siempre trágicamente— una valla fronteriza con los sueños migrantes de la tierra prometida. Las fotografías nos muestran el paisaje al que miran esos sueños. ¿Será que hay alguien allá, en la otra orilla, con un lazo rojo atado a mi meñique? ¿Acaso se rompió el hilo que nos mantenía a salvo? Podrían ser las preguntas de quien ya no está para escuchar las respuestas. Como un sutil decorado, la artista superpone bordados de patrones tradicionales islámicos sobre el horizonte de la costa española. Y, !ahí está!, nuevamente lo fantasmal, el espectro de una hibridación cultural cien veces negada. El hilo rojo señala aquí una cartografía imaginaria que transgrede el dibujo geopolítico de esta frontera y le otorga la calidez de una textura, de algo que pueda ofrecer un cierto tipo de abrigo.
Junto a las fotografías, la artista presenta la pieza audiovisual Border song (2022), realizada en colaboración con el músico afroportugués Xullaji. El video recorre la valla de Ceuta y Melilla, un contorno de no más de veinte kilómetros, desde un coche en movimiento. Sus imágenes nos convocan a una dolorosa procesión en la que se entremezclan las voces, los sonidos y los cánticos de uno y otro lado de esta línea de acero. La sangre allí ha perdido su color. En esta trama solo hay hilos cortados,
descosidos, roturas, desmembramiento, división.
En su trabajo de campo, Mónica de Miranda ha escuchado a decenas de personas que permanecen ancladas en la frontera entre, como sentencia Achille Mbembe, «quién puede vivir y quién debe morir». El proyecto se sostiene sobre capas y capas de relatos de quienes están forzosamente lejos del lugar que los vio nacer, de vidas al límite de toda humanidad, cuando el paisaje de los sueños se ha transformado en pesadilla. A través de la ficción que proponen estos tejidos y estas voces entrelazadas, la artista aventura un gesto de amparo, un simbólico refugio frente a la catástrofe que supone permanecer en estas tierras.
La fronteriza autora chicana Gloria Anzaldúa sugiere la idea de un mundo surdo donde tenga cabida toda disidencia, toda otredad, para la cual, precisamente, se han creado las fronteras. Sus palabras se entrecruzan con las imágenes que Mónica de Miranda presenta en esta exposición, pues ofrecen la posibilidad, al menos, de imaginar un destino.
I am becoming-being
the questor the questing the quest
You and I have already met
We are meeting we will meetThe real unknown is feeling
The real unknown is love
[...]
We are the awakening feminine presence
We are the earth
We are the second coming
Notas
Achille Mbembe, Necropolítica, Melusina, 2006.
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza, Capitán Swing, 2016.
Gloria Anzaldúa, «The coming of el mundo surdo», en The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. de
AnaLouise Keating, Duke University Press, 2009.
Mark Sealy, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other, FotoFest Biennial,
Schilt Publishing, 2020.
All that burns melt into air is an exhibition composed by installation, film and photography, that presents a story told in part fictionally and part as a documentary, formulated in different chapters. The exhibition comprises plants, mirrors, sound, video and photographs. Everything formed by these elements reflects, in turn, a deep link with conflicting memories and historical factors and narratives. It is a portrait of a geographical and historical reality related to the island of São Tomé, in the West Coast of Africa.
The show displays places between ruins a the forest, between the utopian visions of the modernist avant-garde and the post-fall images of Socialism and its ideologies. The past reappears, transformed into the present, in a transcendent process of rebirth that in its ethereal quality has the potential to travel again from today to tomorrow.
All that burns melt into air (instead of “All that is solid melts into air”) suggests precisely the layers of a new manifest, referring to a socialist utopia now impregnated with an ecological meaning and urgency for change. Starting from the metaphor that everything that burns (in an attempt to extinguish memories) melts, and does so as a transformative process, the exhibition refers to social and political changes during the rise of the movements of liberation in Africa, or African Socialism.The show explores the experience of modernity, its utopias and its remains, as ruins and forgotten memories engraved within the decay of abandoned buildings. All that burns melt into air is simultaneously about destructive and productive forces, and their constant
process of destruction and renewal.
All that burns melts into air es una exposición compuesta por instalación, video y fotografía, que presenta una historia contada en parte de forma ficticia y en parte como documental, formulada en diferentes capítulos. La exposición se compone de plantas, espejos, sonido, video y fotografías. Todo lo formado por estos elementos refleja, a suvez, un vínculo profundo con recuerdos conflictivos y factores y narrativas históricas. Es un retrato de una realidad geográfica e histórica relacionada con la isla de Santo Tomé, en la costa occidental de África.
La exposición muestra lugares entre ruinas y el bosque, entre las visiones utópicas de la vanguardia modernista y las imágenes post caída del socialismo y sus ideologías. El pasado reaparece, transformado en presente, en un proceso trascendente de renacimiento que en su cualidad etérea tiene el potencial de viajar nuevamente desde el hoy al mañana.
All that burns melts into air (Todo lo que arde se funde en el aire) -en lugar de “Todo lo sólido se derrite en el aire”- sugiere precisamente las capas de un nuevo manifiesto, refiriéndose a una utopía socialista hoy impregnada de sentido ecológico y urgencia de cambio. Partiendo de la metáfora de que todo lo que arde (en un intento de extinguir los recuerdos) se derrite, y lo hace como un proceso transformador, la exposición alude a los cambios sociales y políticos durante el auge de los movimientos de liberación en África, o Socialismo Africano.
La muestra explora la experiencia de la modernidad, sus utopías y sus restos, como ruinas y recuerdos olvidados grabados en la decadencia de edificios abandonados. All that burns melts into air trata simultáneamente sobre las fuerzas destructivas y productivas, y su constante proceso de destrucción y renovación.
All that it burns melts into air é uma investigação de Mónica de Miranda que toma a forma de uma exposição no campo expandido da intersecção metodológica da instalação e do filme e que, nesta expansão física (no espaço) e conceptual (nos tempos e nos lugares que invoca), toma a forma de um cenário onde é contada uma história em parte ficcionada e em parte documental composta por diferentes partes. O todo formado por estas partes reflecte, por sua vez, uma profunda ligação com memórias e factos históricos conflictuais.
Parte I – o título
All that it burns melts into air é uma referência a “All that is solid melts into air”, o início de uma frase do primeiro capítulo, intitulado “os burgueses e os proletários”, do Manifesto do Partido Comunista, escrito por Karl Marx e Friedrich Engels em 1848. A frase completa - “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” (Marx e Engels, , [1848] 1985) - reflecte o carácter revolucionário do capitalismo moderno que transformou a Europa e a África em meados do Século XVIII evocando uma imagem da era industrial com os seus efeitos no ser humano. Por outro lado, remete também para a linguagem da química para sugerir que as tradições sólidas evaporam-se no ar. Um mundo moderno supostamente ligado à reforma social nas suas implicações com um pensamento e uma acção colectiva parece, nesta metáfora, ter dado lugar a um mundo de átomos (indivíduos) desconexos.
All that it burns melts into air, de Mónica de Miranda – como “All that is solid melts into air”, de Marx e Engels - traz-nos para um imaginário da actualidade marcada pela realidade e urgência do aquecimento global. Dificilmente Marx estaria a pensar nas mudanças climáticas nos anos 1840. Contudo, estava a começar a reflectir sobre o que viria a descrever como fenda metabólica, uma ruptura nas trocas materiais entre a humanidade e a natureza. A agricultura própria do tempo de Marx, da revolução industrial, caracterizava-se pelos métodos intensivos de cultivo de grande escala que apareceram como solução para maximizar a produção e que resultaram em monoculturas. Tal como as monoculturas da agricultura, também as monoculturas sociais podem – como o colonialismo demonstra – ser destruidoras.
All that it burns melts into air (em vez de “All that is solid melts into air”) sugere precisamente as camadas de significado impressas no manifesto. A partir da metáfora de que tudo o que se queima (muitas vezes em tentativas de apagar memórias) derrete e funde-se com o ar num processo transformativo, refere-se às mudanças sociais e políticas em África. Durante a ascensão dos movimentos de libertação em África, o Socialismo explorou a experiência da modernidade, na sua utopia e na sua queda de instituição segura para algo decadente muito diferente do seu projecto inicial. Importa lembrar que o Modernismo foi também a força que organizou África em colónias e, assim, também o motor por detrás do fascismo. No texto de Marx e Engels, há um sentimento simultaneamente de beleza e de estranheza (no sentido Kantiano de unheimlich) no seu entendimento paradoxal do sublime enquanto algo tão aterrador quanto fascinante. O manifesto é sobre as forças simultaneamente destrutivas e produtivas, sobre o terror sublime de uma nova ordem do mundo, uma ordem que é instável no seu constante processo de destruição e de renovação.
Estes efeitos paradoxais do modernismo aparecem visualmente traduzidos no All that it burns melts into air de Mónica de Miranda. Um retrato em parte ficcionado e em parte documental, a exposição-instalação-filme mostra lugares entre a ruína e a floresta, entre as visões utópicas das vanguardas modernistas e as imagens do pós-queda do Socialismo e das suas ideologias. Enquanto as relíquias aparecem enquanto entrada para os lugares da história política do passado como forma de lidar (ou de reconciliar) com estas memórias no presente, as ruínas, tomadas pela natureza, surgem aqui como metáfora para as memórias que foram apagadas (ou queimadas) para dar lugar a outras construções. Nas suas temporalidades conflictuais, as ruínas referem-se tanto a um passado como a um futuro. Por outras palavras, o passado reaparece transformado no presente, num processo transcendente de renascimento que, na sua qualidade etérea, tem o potencial para viajar novamente do hoje para o amanhã.
Parte II – o(s) espaço(s), o(s) lugar(es) e o(s) seu(s) tempo(s)
Quando entramos em All that it burns melts into air, imergimos num conjunto de espaços na ilha de São Tomé. Neste processo imersivo quase esquecemos as dimensões físicas desta ilha situada num país com menos de mil quilómetros quadrados. Nas fotografias e no vídeo, as roças imensas, as piscinas largas, os edifícios coloniais sem fim, uma plataforma que é uma ponte partida para o mar confrontam-nos a partir da sua paradoxal imponência de escombros deixados pelos portugueses durante o período colonial.
Reminiscentes das drosscapes de Alan Berger – lugares cujas superfícies foram transformadas de acordo com novos valores que apagaram os aspectos geográficos reais (2007) - , estes espaços apresentam-se como os resíduos que ficaram do colonialismo e representam a queda de um império. Estes resíduos perpassam em muito a fisicalidade da matéria – as ruínas do presente – para a imaterialidade das memórias do passado que ficaram impressas nos espaços e que se transportam para a actualidade. Nestas viagens temporais, tanto os espaços como as memórias são sujeitos a processos de apropriação e de transformação. Isto é particularmente visível nas imagens do antigo Cinema Império, retratado com as gémeas vestidas de branco à sua frente, a sublinhar a sua simetria física que aponta para a sua existência e temporalidade dupla. Resgatado e restaurado em 2001, depois de quase uma década ao abandono, com dinheiro de Taiwan, foi apropriado e rebatizado – hoje, chama-se Cinema Marcelo da Veiga - para um uso que vai para além do uso original de projecção de filmes sendo agora um lugar de grandes eventos na ilha.
Esta apropriação é provavelmente ainda mais aterradora quando feita pela mão da natureza. Edifícios oitocentistas decadentes engolidos pela natureza que os cobre de musgo, de humidade, e de plantas que crescem nas fendas do que resta das suas paredes e das suas janelas para o vazio; corredores e escadas vazias; piscinas cobertas de folhas e água suja. Com a independência, em 1975, a habitação e exploração das roças acabou por ser entregue a trabalhadores que passaram a ser assalariados do Estado. Hoje, na maior parte destas roças (mais de cem em São Tomé) não há emprego (Pape e Rebelo de Andrade, 2011). É preciso lembrar que quando estamos a deambular nos espaços de All that it burns melts into air estamos na África equatorial, onde a luta do homem contra a natureza é diária. Num clima tropical húmido no qual as temperaturas ficam entre os 21 e os 27 graus centígrados, um mês sem alguém a tratar da terra será o suficiente para que uma horta deixe de cumprir a sua função por ficar enterrada na erva que cresce rapidamente. Nestas condições, a madeira, matéria prima das roças, apodrece, e o metal enferruja em pouco tempo como as imagens do Clube Naval denunciam. Em momentos de prosperidade, o homem avança com a natureza mas em momentos de estagnação ou de crise, a natureza avança e fica em vantagem sobre qualquer acção humana (Pape e Rebelo de Andrade, 2011). A estrutura de betão do Clube Naval, ao abandono, sujeita a humidade constante e às chuvas intensas, a par com a vegetação de rápido crescimento, surge cheia de fissuras com elementos metálicos expostos e corroídos. Da pequena varanda resta apenas o seu esqueleto metálico, frágil.
Também a antiga plataforma a partir de onde as gémeas avistam baleias está em destroços como que a lembrar que a implantação geoestratégica deste país, com a chegada dos portugueses em 1470 à ilha de São Tomé e um ano mais tarde à ilha do Príncipe, foi a de uma plataforma. Virada para as rotas do atlântico e para a costa africana, a sua implantação ditou o seu uso como entreposto comercial, em especial para o tráfico de mão-de-obra escrava.
A par das fotografias, passamos por uma palmeira gigante virada ao contrário, e somos convidados a entrar em duas grandes estruturas que, mais uma vez, nos deixam num limbo temporal. Com um desenho baseado nas roças que podemos ver nas imagens, são aquários suspensos a partir de pilares e vigas de madeira com uma aparência débil. Com uma fisionomia exótica, os aquários remetem-nos para as imagens que, regra geral, associamos a paraíso – vegetação robusta, árvores exóticas, cabanas. Contudo, um olhar mais atento irá perceber que os aquários são ecossistemas que albergam um conjunto de plantas numa biodiversidade fora do seu lugar, recontextualizadas dentro de caixas. Também a enorme palmeira foi arrancada da terra, virada ao contrário e pendurada num processo brutal de desenraizamento, reconfiguração e recontextualização. A parte tridimensional da exposição-instalação-filme apresenta-se assim como um conjunto de esculturas-memória de uma era específica da história.
Estas esculturas-memória são reminiscentes dos princípios da “Forma Aberta” de Oskar Hansen, de 1959, cujos princípios assentam na participação activa dos indivíduos para criar o seu próprio ambiente e co-criar os espaços que habitam. Um dos fundamentos da “Forma Aberta” é o de revelar as tensões inerentes à construção de um edifício ao expor a sua estrutura (Rainer and Engel, 2016). E os complexos retratados de All that it burns melts into air, no seu estado fisicamente frágil, acarretam precisamente o estado actual das ideias utópicas sobre as quais foram erguidos.
All that it burns melts into air cria um espaço de reflexão, discussão, e debate sobre os aspectos das memórias conflictuais e culturais do Socialismo e do Colonialismo a partir de noções de território e de lugar, de identidade cultural, de deslocamento e de refúgio. O espaço contido na instalação traduz este aspecto do trabalho, criando um lugar que é (re)apropriado, (re)habitado, e (re)contextualizado. Ao deixar-nos entrar na instalação, em vez de observá-la ao longe, Mónica de Miranda propõe uma experiência reminiscente da Tropicália (1967) de Hélio Oiticica, de entrar e viver num lugar (em) suspenso.
Este processo traduz precisamente os modos como São Tomé nasceu, enquanto laboratório implantado no meio do Oceano Atlântico entre cruzamentos culturais, e como hoje está suspenso algures entre os tempos passado, presente, e futuro e entre os lugares da ruína, do paraíso, e da guerra, sempre com a luta entre o homem e a natureza como pano de fundo. Sobre os escombros e a força da natureza, estão as vidas das pessoas velhas, adultas, jovens e crianças descendentes de antigos escravos angolanos, moçambicanos e cabo-verdianos, pessoas que foram compradas, trocadas e vendidas como se de mercadoria se tratassem durante o século XIX e ainda no passado recente, em parte do século XX. As pessoas que viveram nestes lugares, rodeadas pelas mesmas palmeiras e coqueiros que ainda hoje dão uma falsa imagem de paraíso são as mesmas que viveram conflitos e atrocidades. E é nesta dualidade que as memórias, as identidades, e os lugares que compõem All That it burns Melts into Air se constituem e onde procuram modos de lidar com o passado no presente.
Todas as culturas se definem, parcialmente, por aquilo que valorizam e preservam da sua herança passada. A arquitectura é uma parte essencial deste legado mas em muitas partes do mundo está a ser destruído (Serageldin, 1997). No caso de São Tomé, a destruição dos símbolos do passado é uma celebração do seu fim mas é também um testemunho vivo e portanto um processo em constante transformação que decorre de múltiplos contributos naturais e humanos. Todos estes factores e mutações deixam marcas vivas nos lugares materiais dos espaços como nos lugares imateriais das memórias, moldam o presente e determinam o futuro. Um retrato algures entre as ruínas humanas e naturais, entre as visões utópicas das vanguardas modernistas e a pós-queda das ideologias socialistas, All That it burns Melts into Air desenha-se assim no questionamento dos processos de construção (e destruição) de memórias, de identidades, e de lugares que constituem tanto do passado como do presente e de um futuro.
Parte III – as personagens
Tão relevantes quanto o(s) espaço(s) e o(s) tempo(s), na construção da(s) narrativa(s) de All that it burns melts into air, são as personagens que as habitam – um grupo de meninas vestidas com conjuntos de saias azuis escuras e blusas brancas, que poderiam ser fardas de um colégio do período colonial, canta uma música de São Tomé na língua local com a floresta como cenário; uma jovem vestida de branco deambula entre as ruínas; e duas irmãs gémeas também vestidas de branco parecem assombrar todos os lugares imponentes da Ilha.
Numa constante oscilação entre o simbólico e o documental, as fotografias e o filme de All that it burns melts into air operam como uma reivindicação do presente e do futuro onde a natureza regenera as cicatrizes geradas pelo passado colonial. A câmara transforma-se no olho, usado para gravar momentos e junta observações do quotidiano com ficções entre coreografias e deambulações.
Nos percursos entre a floresta e as ruínas, as composições que determinam as imagens têm um papel importante para os modos como as percepcionamos. Na história da arte moderna e da arte contemporânea, a hierarquia das verticais e das horizontais e a orientação de uma imagem foram e são ferramentas importantes para a construção das imagens - lembremos Onements (1948) de Barnett Newman, as pinturas verticais com uma linha ao meio para invocar as noções associadas ao Divino de dividir e de formar, de bom e de mau, de feminino e de masculino; ou os readymades de Duchamp, como a Bicycle Wheel (1913-1951), uma roda de uma bicicleta com o eixo central preso a um banco de quatro pernas para indicar, simultaneamente, a sua origem industrial moderna e os seus valores estéticos clássicos. As ideias do duplo e da imagem simétrica aparecem também ao longo das fotografias e do filme de All that it burns melts into air: as gémeas vestidas de igual; os espaços que, habitados pelas gémeas, parecem ainda mais simétricos. As simetrias servem aqui de ferramenta para reforçar tensões: entre o passado e o presente; entre o presente e o futuro; entre a ruína e a reconstrução; entre este lugar e um outro lugar; entre o colonizado e o colonizador; entre o paraíso da natureza exuberante e o inferno da guerra.
As imagens insistem na paridade e na dualidade para pedirem a nossa atenção a cada detalhe que as forma. Não há nenhum tipo de hierarquia ou de centralidade inerente a uma das personagens. Pelo contrário, operam como entrada para uma situação, para uma história. Não se trata tanto de quem são aquelas pessoas mas sim do que se passa ali. E raramente há alguma resposta mais poderosa do que o efeito visual do duplo e da simetria.
Este efeito de dualidade das personagens – como dos lugares – de All that it burns melts into air opera como um emblema da unicidade de São Tomé, um lembrete de que são as micro-narrativas que, de fora – como quando ouvimos as meninas a cantar na floresta – nos escapam em parte ou no seus todo, que constituem, e muitas vezes contradizem, o que entendemos como passado. Em última instância, o que (as personagens de) All that it burns melts into air parece(m) dizer-nos é que só com um entendimento tão completo quanto possível do passado poderemos viver o presente e projectar um futuro.
Luísa Santos.
Referências bibliográficas
Berger, Alan. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2007.
Hehl, Rainer, and Ludwig Engel. Berlin Transfer. Open Living Structures. Berlin: Ruby Press, 2016.
Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and A. J. P. Taylor (trans.). The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1848] 1985.
Serageldin, Ismail. The Architecture of Empowerment: People, Shelter and Livable Cities. London: Academy, 1997.
Pape, D. e Rebelo de Andrade, R. “Roças de São Tomé e Príncipe”, Revista Monumentos n.32, Dezembro 2011
The work of Mónica de Miranda can be understood as an agent that continually reconnects artistic processes with the transitory condition of the spectator. Regardless of the themes that she investigates, or of socio-political reflections that strap in her identity a real and emotional sense with the place and history of those who inhabit it, her works contain part of her self-referential experience but not always autobiographical, because it is not a testimony of the journey but of someone who recognizes herself in the transition and in the territorial change.
This change, or this logic of circulation, lies not only in the fact that she has lived in several countries and known different cultures, but essentially in the way she interprets the temporal relations and the memory of these experiences, that contribute to the construction of meta-narratives which are articulated under a line/time; as an information flow that integrates seemingly diverse places and temporalities. This abstract line locates places that intersect at different moments of time, and in the specific case of her work they are not reduced to a linear determination of the past, but rather to recognize the temporal correlatation that allows an active relationship of the subject over the present.
In this sense the exhibition “Atlantic – Journey to the center of the earth” is exemplary of her work process for two main reasons. The first is present in the title in which we can infer two apparently contradictory planes, the first being the word that determines an immense and mutant geographic mass that is the Atlantic Ocean; and the second is the Journey to the Center of the Earth, a reference to Julius Verne’s utopian work that is close to her. However, the placement of the hyphen amplifies this transitory possibility which, although present in her work, is an aggregating element that expresses the multiplicity of senses in the reception of the same by the viewer, having as a structuring line the reference to two substances: water and earth which are opposed in their constitution.
The second reason that leads me to this brief reflection is the duality between the ocean and the earth, a physical but simultaneously immaterial differentiation, an imaginary that goes back to the beginnings of humanity, and for this same reason metaphysic: between fluidity and solidity. It is riven by the need to know what is hidden beneath the earth which naturally supports the ocean and breathes in the volcanic mouths of the Atlantic islands of the Macaronézia, such as the Azores or, in this case in particular, the Cape Verde archipelago, specifically in Ilha do Fogo (Island of Fire).
Monica de Miranda recognizes in this island an intensity of the life of our planet in the sense that it is renewed by the volcanic eruptions that ferment of fire and of lava that immediately cools and everything crystallizes, everything transforms and updates; in an approximation to the paradoxical duality that the presence of the volcano contains: between life and death. The photographs of women dressed in black with bare feet, as in “Untitled. From the series City-Scapes” and “Formation”, or the artist’s own body in the diptych entitled “Horizon”, are relevant in the sense that this figure transmits the idea of osmosis with the burned soil in which its own regeneration survives the desertified landscape. The volcano is a presence that rises in the landscape and is also a recurring image in the collective imagination and visual representation throughout history. But in this work of Mónica de Miranda is, above all, a sign that presents a second skin that models and transmutes the landscape, not only by the visual mantle that covers all in an ash relieve, but because it announces an interior and organic experience that resides in an unknown place, so close to the center of the earth, whether this model is an imaginary and fictional construction or a given geological matrix.
And as a fictional construction the intervened pigmented and waxed series of photographs -entitled “Bedrock”- rescue this intermittent materiality which, while present, merges into the printed image affirming in artist’s gesture the intervention on the image as a recording of a journey; a time that is updated in its finalization.
Under the same methodology, a sculptural object in the form of a library shelf, contains black sand inside a box in its base. This natural element, the black sand, is also subject to the logic of the image but escapes to the photographic, contributing to the construction of meta-narratives that are pointed by references that approach territorial mapping. However, this mapping is only recognizable if we take into account the geography of places and the temporal correpondence that is continually reorganized in the becoming that Monica’s work represents, in each layer, or in each register that welcomes her affections, and undoubtedly in her politic reflection that confronts us as image/time of the places that Monica de Miranda seeks in the correpondence of the Self with the Other.
South circular consists of a double video projection, a spatial structure where the viewer is assigned his seat, three photographic panels and a pyrography. With an approximate running time of twenty minutes, the video first shows us two women — twins, a recurring theme for the artist — in the shadow of nondescript ruins over the Tagus. There’s no sound. Three disparate elements, then — a female pair, a structure in ruins and a river surrounding Lisbon and winding through the city’s outskirts — lay the foundation for a historical inventory of a military defence line that with time assumed a different role and another meaning. This anachronous defence wall sets a paradox before our eyes — it began as a military defence complex to keep the French from the capital during the invasions at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and now, more than a century later, it’s a territory where a by-and-large African population coming from the Portuguese ex-colonies, along with people from rural areas, and others, established their communities when they found themselves with no means to live in the prosperous, much-desired capital.
In 1899 this fortified line was called the Lisbon Trench Camp; only much later, at the end of the 1990s, was it deactivated. The wall perimeter (observable in the pyrography, the piece called Military road) consists of a circular line going around the north side of the capital and along a large portion of the south bank. That was Mónica de Miranda’s itinerary for her research. The artist visited crumbled-down forts, and others that still stand — São Julião da Barra being one of them — with an aim of offering an existence in the present tense to a few of these war structures. Along her itinerary, Miranda encountered the inhabitants — communities, mostly African, who through the decades cemented their presence in an act of defiance, also self-determination, establishing roots along the fort line, preserving their cultural heritage while also sharing it with other communities. South circular is a multi-voiced choir singing of a tension between memory, nostalgia and the urgency that tints our modern view of the city and its inhabitants — the “legitimate” dwellers, and the outsiders. Using sound mixing and visual editing with a keen sense of rhythm, Miranda bares a narrative web of places and moments of historical significance, turning them into a series of heterotopias in flux. This is embodied in the characters in the video, all of them facing a common enemy. There’s Zia, a female fighter in fatigues, a warrior setting up a new defence barrier — a wall, maybe — as she keeps building a home for herself, while listening to news of the Angolan revolution on the radio — some current, others dating back to the Revolution of April 1974. And there’s the urban knight going along the old military road, passing old defence posts now housing the homeless, travelling the hills from residential areas Mira Loures and Olaias to Alto de São João Cemetery. The road circumnavigates the capital, never entering it.
In this redeemed geography, duality is the constant — two men talk; twins face each other or go in opposite directions; pairs of landscapes at first glance seem to be one and the same, but then you look again and they’re not. All of these are metaphors for time and space opposed, for past and present constantly intersecting. Where you once had epic ruins, and then abandoned ruins, a new urban landscape was born and cemented, and now exists separately from its surroundings and has an identity of its own, alien to any notion of belonging to the city — and in turn the city resists including it, obeying an inherited logic of Europe as a territory where all that is different or in any way not clear-cut will be segregated.
In the video, in a dialogue between two men on a stage in Mira Loures, that felling of loss, of common ground not found, is given voice.
“Is Europe like this?”
“I don’t think so. But I don’t know Europe. Never been there. I only know what she says.”
“What does she say?”
“Don’t let them in. Keep them out. Look down over there, to the left of the city. That’s where the wail comes from. Look. Listen.”
What we see is not a film set, but a concrete stage built especially for the community, for their cultural activities and events. Finally, never used for its intended purposed, it became yet another ruin — except unlike those other ruins, the ancient forts defending the capital, this stage, a contemporary ruin, has never served the community.
With her piece, Miranda set out to register a memory of an interrupted, fragmented, paradoxical geographical line, a memory that lives on in words and speech, and in the Kimbundu chant “Humbi Humbi”, a hymn to freedom sung with the city seen from afar. It’s the opposite of memory as historical construct, as political act. It’s not the narrative of a Portuguese Overseas as told in books on the Portuguese Colonial Empire, which the twin sisters diligently go over page after page, revisiting history — an act of freedom performed at the border of Lisbon, the city they won’t enter.
Barthes conceived the photograph as a literal “emanation of the referent”, from which radiant energy from once-present “real bod[ies], which w[ere] there” links observers in present time to beings who existed in the past.1 He referenced, here, the way in which Sontag envisaged these radiations to be much like “delayed rays” from stars, emanating through space and time; these rays—carrying not just proof of life, but life itself—reach observers far removed from their moment and place of existence, forming what Barthes called “a sort of umbilical cord” linking “the body of the photographed thing” to our gaze.2 Like ethnographic recordings of voices from the past, the material object of the photograph, and light—which he called a “carnal medium”—not only bring back the departed, but the milieu in which they lived out their lives. If the sonic conventions of the time are reproduced in voice recordings, photographs subtly convey the norms of personal posture and relationality to others, as well as the relationship between one person to another, and to the external world – social, economic, political worlds. This “carnal medium” of light arrives at the doorstep of our present moment, bearing evidence of whether our loved ones’ environments provided them with the stability necessary for sustenance, or made their lives precarious and unviable.
I suggest, in this essay, that there is another facet with which we might engage when we look at photographs, especially when it comes to records of the past to which we have personal attachment, to those images containing narratives with which our own are inevitably entangled. This added dimension is especially palpable when the photographs are those through which immigrant, exiles, and otherwise dislocated persons make sense of their experiences of being “out of place”. When we see a photograph with actors and landscapes significant to our personal emotional geographies, we imagine, sometimes, that they have power to help us recreate our own fantasies of belonging. Often, these compulsive and repetitive re-enactments are an attempt to recapture moments of compromised power and loss. Through memory and creative re-creation, we conjure up stage-play worlds in order not only to revisit but recreate otherwise inaccessible scenes from the past. These worlds we re-construct serve as material locations onto which we can project can project idealised versions of personal history, re-enacting scenes of damaged pasts, wilfully inserting ourselves as actors onto the scene.
Reading Sontag reminds us that the pleasure we experience in taking and looking at photographs is indicative of our “[p]oignant longings for beauty […] for a redemption and celebration of the body”; however, we know, from her writing, that “other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well,” including the “compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing”.3 This desire to stage, distill, and record—an impulse that has become more obvious in this second decade of the 2000s than it was during Sontag’s lifetime—has linkages to displaced persons’ compulsive rituals of repetition. Whilst repetitions and revisitations of a task can be lauded as a conduit to a meditative state—part of the methodology of striving for completeness, for union with the task, and mindfulness—they can also be an indication of woundedness. Rather than a mindfulness and presence that lead to alleviation of anxiety, we (consciously or unconsciously) return ourselves to a damaged or unresolved past precisely because it is the source of anxiety. Yet, we often find that our repetitive returns offer no clarity, alleviation from pain, or understanding. Rather than allowing us to find release through acknowledgment, our rituals are re-enactments of trauma, directing the choices we make in life and making us return, obsessively, to the source of pain.
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If Barthes famously theorised that photographs have the uncanny ability to recall absent persons back to life—I, as a person currently living in another century, but intrinsically tied to the political and economic realities produced by the century in which Barthes’ and Sontag’s words were written—am interested in tracing the ways in which image repertoires work in our worlds, and how the discourses of transnationalism, migration, and displacement might be networked with their thoughts about photography. How might we, the remainders and reminders of the twentieth century’s upheavals, regard images of now-inaccessible worlds? How might these images act as conduits to self re-fashioning, as we attempt to recreate and insert ourselves into narratives of belonging that have become unavailable to us?
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It is these frameworks—the ways in which we return to image-worlds in order to articulate dislocation, as well as to re-stage home and belonging—through which I want to respond to Luso-Angolana photographer and video artist Mónica de Miranda’s photography and video work. The visual self-narratives that emerge out of her films, “An Ocean Between Us”, “Once Upon a Time”, and “Field Work”, in particular, become conduits to psychological and emotional explorations, wherein geographical travel, open oceanic vistas, “middle passages” of canals connecting the ocean to rivers going inland, and tenders – boats used to transport goods and people to larger ships at harbours – are used as metaphors for precarious existences as post-colonial subjects, of life created in in-between spaces, of estrangement, as well as the powerful desire to recreate and reconstruct “home” in the artist’s own terms. In addition, de Miranda uses various cinematic techniques, including fractured narrative styles, three-screen installations that play the same narrative with slightly different timing, and soundscapes that recall both the freedom represented buy the ocean and the technologies of the state that attempt to control migratory bodies—including radar and satellite sounds—to mirror dislocation, desire for boundless freedom, and the difficulties of economic and geographical mobility for many from the geo-political Third World.
In my engagement with de Miranda’s video works, our desire to relocate our diasporic bodies and experiences through return—to investigate the emotional cartography of an imprinted “home” location, and to “put to rest” the voices, smells, and image hauntings we experience but cannot consciously identify—is read through my own experiences of dislocation and attempts to navigate myself through to a “homespace” using images, words, and thought. I know that sometimes, after much time lost at sea, we may find eventual acceptance of what seems unacceptable in the beginning – to not long for one nation or physical location to call home, to find belonging in unbelonging, to feel not-incomplete within a state of flux and formlessness.
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Among more privileged travellers, the act of photographing and the photographs themselves have long been used to narrate mobility, access, and power. But for the “other”, less powerful communities, photographs are evidence of their dislocation and fracture. At the same time, they also assure us of a once-stable history—evidence of belonging and of belongings, ordinary customs and rituals repeated, of banal moments recorded as part of the story of rootedness in a geographical and cultural location. Our collections of familial and familiar circles are conduits to self, even when they do not depict us directly. They help us re-establish familiarity, belonging, self, and connection to those who are no longer in our realm of contact, creating a bond between our capacity for visualising belonging and stability. These acts of looking are indicative of our psychological need for returning to pasts that are no longer physically or emotionally available. Yet we know that images are not stable – physically, they deteriorate; and conceptually, socially, and politically, they shift meaning, confounding those who wish for photographs to contain stable, documentary narratives or confirm the past that they know to be “true”.
For those who came from families well-connected enough to networks of power and privilege – who had access to cameras, rolls of film, and even home movie-making equipment – there is an abundance of uncanny evidence, residuals of absent persons to whom we are narratively and genetically connected. We return to these images when we lose those in the images to death. Sometimes, we return to them during those instances when we lose our own tethering to our stable understanding of self. In mourning for a beloved other to whom we attached ourselves, and to re-collect the beloved self—unmoored by pain—we return to our two-dimensional stockpiles that faithfully preserve worlds we can no longer access. For others, the photographic record is less abundant, or altogether absent. If there is a violent rupture in one’s history, resulting in disruption to family attachments to home-spaces, there will inevitably be an absence of images.
The resulting lacunae in family image banks also result in ruptures to our pathways of imaginary return, creating estrangements between genealogical contact zones. Whereas friends from more stable political and national narratives will look to family and national albums to locate themselves, those whose histories were violently interrupted will have the added burden of longing for what is regarded as a completely “normative” twentieth century experience: layers of photographs, moving from sepia-toned, white-bordered and staged studio portraits to those taken at home using 35mm cameras and Polaroid Instamatics, each layer of images illuminating a family’s movement through visual technologies of the last century. That separation from “normative” narratives of modernity leaves us with an abundance of longing; we recreate returns, and build image banks that signify the contradictions of displacement – to establish belonging and right of return, and the impossibility of return.
Marianne Hirsch, in her seminal article, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile” – detailing the ways in which traumatic memory is transmitted in families of those who survived the Holocaust, and the effects of that “received trauma” on the second generation—named the phenomenon “postmemory”.4 Hirsch explains that this transmitted trauma, as well as the alienation created by not having been present there—and thus unable to share the experiences that caused and created one’s family’s upheavals and suffering—produces powerful longings in the generation born to survivors, who long to be a part of a world to which it is impossible to return, partly because of temporal shifts, but also because that world has been physically destroyed.
Children of survivors live at a further temporal and spatial remove from that decimated world. The distance separating them from the locus of origin is the radical break of unknowable and incomprehensible persecution; for those born after, it is a break impossible to bridge.5
Hirsch explains that despite the geographical and temporal distances that separate the next generation from their parents’ “decimated worlds,” the depth of trauma, “mourning and memory […] imparts […] something akin to memory.”6 This “belated” generation grows up “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth”, with their own experiences and narratives being “evacuated” by the experiences of their parents; yet, despite their intricate connections with their parents’ trauma, they find that they are unable to fully understand the traumatic memories of their parents, or be able to re-create their worlds.7
“Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.”8
Hirsch points out that latter generations, who arrive post-trauma, are only able to access the “voids” of disappeared worlds through creatively producing aesthetic works connecting their own longing to belong to what is, essentially, a received, and imagined version of the past; this hunger, she argues, produces “diasporic aesthetics of temporal and spatial exile that needs simultaneously to rebuild and to mourn,” inventing in order to “relocate” themselves in time and space.9
Here, I wish to emphasise that I am not equating the experiences of Holocaust survivors and that of their children with those of other displaced people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; rather, I am attempting to note that there are fractured parallels, with varying degrees of separation, between the experiences of the “post-memory” generation and other displaced people’s children’s experiences. This is especially true when it comes to their desire to insert themselves into their parents’ worlds, a desire that is heightened by photographs depicting their parents’ past lives. The children of postcolonial migrants—displaced as a result of “ethnically-motivated” pogroms, systematic violence and state-sponsored brutality, and at other times from more difficult to identify structural and economic violence—similarly seek out visual evidence of the pasts that they cannot be a part of, but to which they feel powerfully connected. For the immigrant, the exile, and the displaced—whether that displacement is a result of economic, environmental, or violent political upheavals—repetitive returns to often idealised, lost locations, via images of family events in which they may not even have been old enough to be a part, is an act of circumnavigating the trauma of dislocation. Photographs and rarer collections of moving images become containers of emanations of the past, essential to narrating the condition of being post-violence, post-war, post-colonial.
Because of their desire to recreate the worlds they lost, postcolonial immigrants, refugees, exiles and asylum seekers are often accused of having “[t]oo deep an attachment to territoriality and locatedness”;10 this inability to move beyond “nationalisms, essentialisms” is regarded as a negative characteristic associated with immigrants.11 Attachments to territory and former identities produce unseemly fissures in their persons and identities when they relocate to new territories. These ruptures—material evidence of having been ejected violently, of not being able to mould the self into new social and physical geographies—prevent them from cultivating the desired native’s seamlessness; this appearance of having little to no apparent breakage – an idealised characteristic in the “native”—is what the second generation often attempts to mimic.
Visual theorist Griselda Pollock named this uncanny, inexplicable existence of another place within our memory “‘natal memory’—that is, the imaginary sense of belonging created by the familiarity of the first places that we learn to know before we learn their geographical, historical or national identities.” Pollock suggests that although our conscious persons may not be able to identify the significance of a particular location to our being, “places, colours, smells, geology, vistas” survive in us; it is “often unrecognized memory of place and space associated with where we are born [which we absorbed] without the fear of separation […] Thus it marks our earliest and slow emergence into a sense not of place as a topographical landscape but of emplacement in a phenomenological world.” Because this imprinting is something that came into existence prior to our knowledge of and attachment to nation, “natal memory” cannot, she argues, be associated with “the locus of any kind of nationalism.” However, Pollock is cautious about over-romanticising our unconscious attachments, or pointing to natal memory as evidence of an “essential” sort of belonging to a place; she points out,
“…when we learn that these deep impressions are in some sense, false, for they are not the grounds of a consolidated identity, but merely a contingency, the chance of being born there because of whatever vagaries of one’s parents’ political or economic migrancy, then a profound dislocation occurs within the psychic spaces furnished by visual and spatial memory. It is at this level of collision between knowledge and phenomenological sensation of the given world that the experience of dislocation is produced and can become thereby a motor or a topic for some other kind of working through: in analysis, writing or art.”12
Thus, far from being a location of peaceful reflection and belonging, “natal memory” is theorised “as a source of uncanniness and anxiety,” and a form of imprinting that is formed when a rupture is experienced, or “only when dislocation effects a caesura between emplacement and location.”13 It is this “uncanny anxiety” that creates fruitful—if, ultimately, never providing a complete sense of belonging, ease, and “closure”—collaborations between diasporic artists, writers, and the locations that they were forced to leave behind as children. The caesura created by migration and displacement—the long pause between consciously present memories firmly attached to a location, and the unconscious desire to return to an often-unidentifiable place—becomes the motivation for producing work that attempts to create a tangible homespace, or investigate our uncanny anxieties that are a result of dislocation.
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Through her explorations of the Afro-Portuguese world, Mónica de Miranda’s works reflect on the history of contact between Portugal and its archipelago of (former) colonies around the world, filtered through her own fictionalised narratives and experiences. Using a wide-cast net along the Lusophone archipelago, De Miranda maps currents that carried bodies, ideas, and emotions, hinting at the fact that most who were in the way of the tidal wave of empire did not have the power to change or affect history. The resulting disruptions are reflected in the elusive, fragmented, and reconfigured narratives that emerge in her films, “Once Upon a Time” (2012), “An Ocean Between Us” (2013), and the research project leading to the installation “Home Sweet, Sour Home” (2013). For each project, de Miranda revisited locations significant to her family’s memory and her own search for belonging. Her films and installation work locate – through reflecting on personal and family narratives – the ways in which displacement, travel, and colonial and post-colonial violence on the body have triangulated across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, imbedded in the maps that determine physiological, psychological, and emotional makeup of her subjectivity. All three works are, in the artist’s words, a “search for home…biographical work,” in which she places herself “into the scene,” combining “documentary work with fiction.”14 Much like the works of the “postmemory” generation of artists, who produced aesthetic works that were expressions of their longing to belong to disappeared and decimated worlds of their parents’ memory – de Miranda, too, rebuilds a narrative for herself; her works are a form of contemplating loss, mourning, and re-creating in order to “relocate” herself in time and space.
De Miranda’s films operate in the tradition of works about exile, dislocation, and displacement, as well as the less politically fraught genre of travel. Her mode of narrative sits strategically between fiction and documentary, exceeding the possibilities permitted by realism in order to get as close as possible to a truth that eludes traditional documentary and autobiographical practices. Her films are, thus, imagined autobiographies that narrate her experiences of being out of place, as well as the possibilities opened up by the enriching processes of contact. Various figures—sexual and romantic attachments, as well as de Miranda’s friends—who come in and out of frames also act as conduits to temporary homes, especially in the absence of the familiar, reflecting psychological and emotional considerations about the effects of being a product of amalgamation and erasure.
Her methodology begs an interpretation of her use of moving image technologies to mobilise her declarations of agency, arrival, and presence, wherein the camera becomes part of her investigations and her mobilisation and self-exploratory processes. Where image banks establishing family lineages and belonging to landscapes are scarce, she creates a film—a mobile set of tens of thousands of stills, themselves composed of unstable digital pixels—set at sea, with momentary anchorings and disembarkments on landscapes, only to return to a central narrative of dislocation. It is through the processes of filmmaking that she engages in reconstructing belonging and resituating her own identity, inserting her presence into a series of oceanic and landscapes, each of which were created through the momentum of the Portuguese colonial project. In “Once Upon a Time” (2013), “An Ocean Between Us” (2012), and “Home Sweet, Sour Home” (2013), she revisits locations significant to “memory and belonging”. All three works are, in the artist’s words, a “search for home, a biographical work,” in which she places herself “into the scene,” and combines “documentary work with fiction.”15
In her films, she relies almost solely on visual strategies to explore the significance of cityscapes, landscapes, and oceanic bodies to her project of re-mapping subjectivity and re-conceptualising self through memory, imagined reconstruction, physical return, and creative production. “Once Upon a Time” offers the ‘emotion of motion’ in the form of a voyage,” taking into account audience perceptions the visual elements of films, “such as light, shade, textures, and colors that contribute to the comprehension of the filmic narrative.”16 The strong presence of nostalgia, “of a distant time, and a sense of disconnection to a space”—communicated using “light, shade, textures and colors” —almost becomes an identifiable character.17 de Miranda notes that her choices of “chromatic and light arrangements are important for the creation of the narrative and the viewer’s perception of the meanings and contents of the narrative.”18 Together, these elements, along with her use of “long shots and takes” reveal “memory [as] an archive of images”; they help us meditate on her experiences of navigating through personal spaces in which her family had once lived, or—in the absence of the physical home—the larger cultural and geographical environments they had occupied.19
In both films, the sea, itself a location of both anxiety and meditative acceptance of impermanence, having form and formlessness, at once life-giving, and life-destroying, is often a metaphor through which artists and writers engage with the presence of dualities. De Miranda notes that for her, the “ocean symbolically represents the unconscious desires, and the relationship represents the dualities within the self” (39). In her films, the sea—the entity that separates Portugal and its former colonies, and also creates a platform for connecting disparate landscapes—is developed as a metaphor for liminality. This water—blue as it may be in de Miranda’s imaginary—can also turn black with death; it is the body that permitted the voyages of colonial desire, camouflaging centuries of terror and swallowing so many African lives into anonymity. Yet, even as we recognise the sea as vast container of mourning that resonates with submerged narratives of painful separations and atrocity, de Miranda also regards it as a place in which one may find consolation, and even reconciliation.
“An Ocean Between Us” (2012), a high definition colour video with sound, is shown on a double split-screen. It is a narrative about migrants and immigration, caught in transitory, in-between spaces, and the nostalgia and longing created by being thus suspended between place and time. She writes that the film is “geographical (hi)story-telling that tells my stories of immigration and personal histories of diaspora. It is an exploration of having to live in “spaces of non-belonging and detachment”; she refers to these transit-spaces as “no (wo)man’s lands” where she found little refuge, which became “a metaphor for my experience of immigration”.20 It begins with the sounds of the harbour, before images appear. The first image is of a ship at sea, on the right screen; then, on the left screen, we see de Miranda in white, standing, facing the ship and the vastness of the ocean. After this, we see the interior of the ship, and a male figure in a white, tropical suit and a hat walking past shipping containers. Later, on the left screen, we see the man on a boat, as the anchor is lifted in the right screen facing the sea; the largeness of the waterscape frames his body. We see de Miranda, also on the boat, alone in the space of a cabin—the walls of which are plastered with photographic prints. She is asleep at a table laid out for a meal—her head on the white tablecloth. The man and a woman walk up and down the stairways inside the boat, which is anchored—de Miranda says—in a canal “along the dock by the port of Lisbon, waiting for the ‘last call’ to departure to Luanda [Angola]”.21
Accompanying the long slow, shots of the boat, showing its two passengers as they stand facing the sea, or as they walk up and down staircases connecting the two stories of the boat, we hear sounds distinct to a harbour. The soundscape of this film, in particular, are evocative of the “acoustic traces of travelling and migration.”22 On the top layer of sound, we hear boat engines, horns to warn other boats. But beneath those dominant sounds, we hear the sea, always present—so much so that it dominates the soundscape of the film. The boat, and the liminal space of the canal are the main locations of the film’s narrative, as well as the two main metaphorical strategies de Miranda employs. The space of the boat, de Miranda theorises, is “a discursive boundary; a subjective limit in the viewers’ eyes, a dual interrogation of self as spectator and self on screen.”23 She references Michel Foucault’s words about the metaphorical power of boats, wherein he theorised the vessels as “‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in, on itself and the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.’”24
De Miranda specifies that the figure of the migrant is represented in the film by the meanderings of the couple – a man and a woman—both wearing white. They represents the colonial project’s construction of the “self” and “other”, resulting in post-colonial subjects who struggle to reconcile the presence of both self and other within them (32). We see them in frame after frame, situated in this liminal location of the canal—as well as the intersection of sea-faring history and the territories on which Portugal continues to maintain a footprint. They are both stationary and mobile, traversing in-between zones—anchored in the waterway between harbour and sea, the spaces of staircases connecting one story of the boat to another, and the spaces in-between each other. Yet the figures are not without power or agency; because some observers may recognise that the female figure is de Miranda, they may also realise that she is also the primary investigator and explorer, directing the narrative.
The installation work, “Home Sweet, Sour Home,” explores her memories of her maternal family’s homes in Angola—as well as other homes in which they resided, however temporarily, in various locations in the Lusophone world, including Luanda, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Mindelo, as well as in London, where the artist completed her university education. De Miranda “re-created”, through her imagination and through the act of drawing representational sketches of the houses and interiors, guided by stories she was told about those spaces; that this was an exercise in re-creation, of making “memory maps” was especially apt for her mother’s and grandmother’s houses in Angola, which she never inhabited, and therefore did not have first-hand knowledge of.
Her “journey home” began with her re-enacting her revisitation of each house or apartment building in which she and her mother and grandmother lived; she attempted to actually find some of these homes, going to each country and city, tracking down addresses. Some, she says, were easy to find; others no longer existed—demolished, and replaced by a new building. Because of those disappearances, she had to “recreate spaces” that resembled the architecture of the time, in line with her mother and grandmother’s stories. Then, she began the process of making architectural sketches of the interiors.
“Because the houses were represented through my memory, they were projections made of affections, where some of the proportions of the drawings were influenced by my relationships with the people with whom I shared the house. Some rooms in the work are larger than they are in reality, other rooms do not have doors or windows. I include corridors that do not connect rooms to one another, and represent fragmented places that symbolize fragmented relationships lost in space and time. These places codified in a language that was too personal and emotional, needed translation, therefore I contracted some architects to redraw my houses and translate them into architecture sketches, so I could understand the projection of my own emotions contained through the house drawings in a more rational way.25
Altogether, she had twenty-five “maps” of houses, including “squats, to temporary accommodations…family houses and hostels with addresses in Angola, Brazil, Portugal and the UK.”26 These maps, rather than being to actual scale, “are architectural projections of [her] memories of the houses [she] passed through between childhood to adulthood…[they] symbolise struggles and conquests, insecurities and securities, absences and presences, oscillating between feelings of belonging and exclusion.” De Miranda tells me, in a conversation,
My mother’s homes…I don’t remember or know what they looked like; I only know them through my grandmother’s stories. Bringing this out of memory was cathartic; drawing them involved connecting with the unconscious, coupled with the archetypal idea of a house. What I came up with, in my drawings, were emotional spaces; the rooms were often bigger or smaller than reality. They tell a lot about immigration, and my struggles to belong and find home.”27
She understood, through this exercise, that the “imagined home” is an emotional location, a “place of affections that exist as a powerful evocative space.” 28 The houses that she ended up re-presenting, she realised, “are archetypes, remnants of memory that mark life events […] such as: birth, death and separation from parents, initiation, marriage and divorce. The transition from childhood to adulthood was registered here through a change of address and country of residence and a drastic change of accommodation (when we moved from a family home to a squat).”29 In attempting to trace and recreate “home” through these imagined returns, she attempts to “return to lost origins” and document her own memories – overlapped as they are with her mother’s and grandmother’s, as well as her “own personal myths and fantasies”; our “notions of home and family” she found, through her research, “are a place of arrival and departure, a place of intersection, a place of rest, a commonplace but also a place of struggle and uncertainty.” 30
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“Once Upon a Time” (22 mins), is a three-channel, high definition colour video work with sound; the triptych installation creates a three-dimensional effect, with each screen streaming disconnected narratives that are, nonetheless, inter-connected, pushing the narrative forward. The narrative begins with images of an airfield, a plane landing, and a control tower. Then we see a docked ferryboat, out of which passengers stream out, rushing to their destinations. It is only after these images of arrival that we see de Miranda, in a white dress, standing at the sea-shore of an unnamed city, the silhouette of a mountain looming in the dark, against the backdrop of palms waving in the blustery night wind, the lights of the city pinpricks in the background. The embracing warmth, and the moisture in the air are palpable. At times, her face is superimposed against the lights – they become stars in the black sky. Then, against a montage of scenes showing roadways and rushing vehicles, in the screen on the right side, we see a man, wearing a simple white undershirt and a white “plantation hat” with a black band—the costumery of the tropics—facing us. His image fades, and we see more cars rushing, and his figure walking into distance in the middle screen. The montage of shots we see next are of the interior of a building; on one screen, we see the man standing, facing an open-shuttered window, out of which early morning light streams into a dark interior. On the far right screen, we see de Miranda, standing against another window—this time, with no shutters—revealing a green land rising up to an escarpment, and a blue morning sky. The middle screen continues to show a long shot of a darkened roadway—speeding past from the interior of a vehicle; as the montages on the other two other screens fade, we continue to see the speeding roadway, conveying the sense of a continuing journey. Much of the remainder of the film contains a variety of interiors, showing de Miranda, other male companions, and her daughter as they sleep, awaken, walk through the space, stand at windows to look out at the vistas before them, interspersed with sounds of speeding motor vehicles. At others, we see montages of greenery, horses being put through training, and even wild antelope—with de Miranda standing before them, observing. She wears white, and stands motionless, even as rain begins to fall. Another montage shows her on the centre screen, lying on the sea-sand with her daughter lying on her stomach, whilst the two screens on the right and left show mirrored reflections of the sea breaking against the shore; in the next montage, we see her again on the seashore—but this time, she is alone, walking, then lying on the sand, facing the ocean. Before her, great, hulking ships list a little in the sea within reaching distance, rusting in the salt. This montage, in particular, indicates the ways in which memories we cannot call our own often hulk in our horizon, rusting, ever-present, powerful.
“Once Upon a Time” allows de Miranda to explore a different fantasy—to accomplish, as though in a “fairytale,” the object of finding home. The film’s structure is based on archetypes of the fairy tale and the “hero’s journey” that mirror our psychic impulse to journey towards self-discovery, indicating our desire “for personal growth and transformation”. However, she reminds us that her work also “engages with lived experiences and personal memories” where she is able to explores her “inner fears and desires [using dark undertones conveyed by] forests, seas, abandoned buildings, shipwrecks, journeys through the wilderness” that symbolise her psychological states, her unconscious, her “fears or repressed feelings.”31 Because these are “stories that [she] performed through the enactment of [her] life stories,” the film is an expression of her own “collective unconscious” and her own quest for “courage or for a sense of home”, of being in the Lusophone diaspora and trying to find belonging.32 It was a project that took three years, a time when she did not have much money in hand; she describes the feeling of making autobiographical work, especially from a precarious position, as process of unclothing oneself: “I was very naked, in a way…It’s my story.”33
The narrative structure of “Once Upon a Time”, she notes, meanders “between cities, houses, airports and roads, private rooms, family houses, hotels, places of private life, in places of my own memories but simultaneously set also in those ‘nonplaces’ belonging to no one.”34 She was able to re-visit places in which she had once lived, or where her family had set roots: Portugal (where she was born, and lived till she was nineteen); Brazil (where some of her family had migrated; and Luanda, Angola (where her maternal family had its roots). The making of the film allowed de Miranda to make herself present, be in the flesh in locations that extended the territory of Portugal—a trans-oceanic territory over which the small Iberian country continues to casts a long shadow, and over which her own history is mapped. The process of filming – of returning to locations in which her family has made “home”, however transitionary and precarious these homes may have been—itself becomes a tool of investigation; using the “play of time-space compression” intrinsic to film-narrative structures, she creates metaphors of movement, flow, dislocation that echo her geographical displacements and lack of access to standard notions of belonging and locatedness for all diasporic people.35 The process of making films – as well as the narrative conveyed by the film and the material body of the film itself – thus allows her to use references to transitory spaces to “recreate a ‘third space’, a space that is related to concepts of landscape, territory and home defined through a self made fairy tale.”36
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De Miranda’s video work and stills form an unusual arc that warrants methodological attention to the complex ways in which she uses visual vocabulary to address the persistence of uncanny reminders and reminders of past encounters, and the ways in which these “remainders” continue to make themselves present in both Portugal and its colonies. Portugal casts a shadow over a spectrum of the world, with large landmasses and islands becoming colonial possessions in what became Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and Cape Verde Islands in Africa, Brazil in South America, and a slew of islands, smaller territories, and coastal cities in South Asia—Goa in India, Colombo in Sri Lanka, and Macao in China, among dozens of others. In each of these locations, the Portuguese disrupted existing trade linkages, monopolising sea routes. In de Miranda’s works, we see traces of the restless journeys that the Portuguese began making five centuries ago, resulting in amalgamated subjectivities onto whom these journeys of conquest continue to be superimposed. Sometimes, we realise, that this history imprints itself on zones of contact and conquest in ordinary and ubiquitous ways; at others, it brands them in more painful ways.
Despite the thread that speaks to powerlessness in the face of power, her work still positions the agency of the photographer at the centre of the narrative. She interweaves the larger discussion about migration of both people and practices with her own intimate experiences of being an in-between person—geographically and genetically speaking—in the world that unfolded.
If map making and navigation cultures were essential for fuelling imperial drives, de Miranda, too, becomes skilled at mapping and navigating not only physical landscapes and seaways, but the less charted territories of Lusophone subjects—and her own—interior selves. She explores the unfamiliar and the estranged, wilfully inserting all that is perceived as “other” about herself—and the strange other within herself—into landscapes that do not quite recognise her as part of its definition of self. She deconstructs a relationship that was initiated and subsequently based on unequal power structures and violence, but also remakes that world into something approachable, as a landscape of experiences into which she can insert herself and make familiar.
On the surface, her work is a conversation about identity and belonging. In her video works, especially, the personal overlaps with colonialism and subsequent globalisation. But they also speak to the attempt to reconcile a history that is not altogether palatable, honouring fantasies and desires for unification that all who have experienced violent interruptions to their bodies and psyches undoubtedly imagine at some point in their lives. De Miranda’s interest in exploring the “self” and “other” imbedded within her person, the existence of a shadow person within her that follows her is an important part of the narratives; a continuous thread of conversation about the existence of shadow selves—and reconciling those shadows with the self that one recognises and presents to the public—is embedded into the structure of the stories. She uses the technology necessary for creating moving image works to converse with that shadow person, to bring “him” to the present, and into the same spaces as she currently exists. These shadowy others who follow each other in the various landscapes appear in the form of female and male figures— beautiful, young people wearing white, gliding between doorways and windows of sea-facing apartments, and stepping up and down stairways connecting stories of large cargo vessels at sea.
*
When I look at de Miranda photographs, I see a visual reflection of all the ambivalence I experience as I attempt to tidy up my own memories of travel, migration, displacement, and attachment to things that are no longer there. Sometimes, I refuse reconciliation—theories about hybridity and the rich spaces of possibility created by liminal zones seem too glib, only available to the privileged immigrant.
Sometimes the nature of mourning renders us unable to look at images—either because death, destruction, and distance has made their subjects too terribly remote or because the complex and ambivalent anger that accompanies mourning leaves us too divided to know whether to weep for or rage at the beauty of the image.
The colour fields used by de Miranda—washed out blues and hazy greens—resonate with emotional vistas, drawing us to locations and conversations that exist only in intergenerational memory. These moving images are tableaux that help us ease estrangement and bridge geographical and temporal distances. “Home” remains an unreachable location, a pinging reminder imprinted into our collective family and community memory; it remarks on the way that past attachments stay ever-present, indicating absences and melancholic presences that insistently wound our present.
We shape our survival narratives to surround and protect the wound of absence. The body contains nostalgia and longing; it tells a story about how we are all vulnerable in certain spaces, and how in such spaces, we attach ourselves fiercely, sometimes, to things that don’t deserve – and cannot bear – our love.
Bibliography of Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill & Wang, (1981).
De Miranda, Mónica, Geography of Affections (2016).
Griselda Pollock, ‘Back to Africa: from Natal to Natal in the Locations of Memory’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 5: 1+2 (2006).
Hirsch, Marianne. ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture,15:2 (1992-9.
— ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, Poetics Today 17: 4 (1996).
Sontag, Susan. On Photography (1977), New York: Picador, (2001)/
1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), pp. 80-81.
2 Ibid, 81.
3 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977) (New York: Picador, 2001), p. 24. See also: PDF of On Photography at http://web.colby.edu/garygreen-courses/files/2012/02/On-Photography001.pdf.
4 Hirsch first refers to the term “post-memory” in ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.’ See: Marianne Hirsch, ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture,15:2 (1992-93), pp. 3-29.
5 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, Poetics Today 17: 4 (1996), pp. 659-686; p. 662.
6 Ibid 662.
7 Ibid 662.
8 Ibid 662.
9 Ibid 664.
10 Griselda Pollock, “Back to Africa: from Natal to Natal in the Locations of Memory”, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 5: 1+2 (2006), pp. 49–72; p. 62.
11 Ibid. 62.
12 Ibid. 62.
13 Ibid. 62.
14 From a Skype conversation between M. Neelika Jayawardane and Monica de Miranda, 16 June, 2017.
15 From a Skype conversation between M. Neelika Jayawardane and Monica de Miranda, 16 June, 2017.
16 Mónica de Miranda, “Once Upon a Time”, Geography of Affections (2016), pp. 21-22.
17 Ibid. 22.
18 Ibid. 22.
19 Ibid. 22.
20 Mónica de Miranda, “An Ocean Between Us”, Geography of Affections (2016), p. 33.
21 From a Skype conversation between M. Neelika Jayawardane and Monica de Miranda, 16 June, 2017.
22 Mónica de Miranda, “Once Upon a Time”, Geography of Affections (2016), pp. 25.
23 Mónica de Miranda, “An Ocean Between Us”, Geography of Affections (2016), p. 45.
24 Foucault (1967: 47), quoted in Mónica De Miranda, “An Ocean Between Us”, Geography of Affections (2016), p. 31.
25 Mónica De Miranda, “Home Sweet, Sour Home”, Geography of Affections (2016), pp. 55-56.
26 Ibid. 51.
27 From a Skype conversation between M. Neelika Jayawardane and Monica de Miranda, 16 June, 2017.
28Mónica De Miranda, “Home Sweet, Sour Home”, Geography of Affections (2016), p. 53.
29 Ibid. 59.
30 Ibid. 51.
31 Mónica De Miranda, “An Ocean Between Us”, Geography of Affections (2016), pp. 34-35.
32 Ibid. 34.
33 From a Skype conversation between M. Neelika Jayawardane and Monica de Miranda, 16 June, 2017.
34 Mónica de Miranda, “Once Upon a Time”, Geography of Affections (2016), p. 19.
35 Ibid. 19.
36 Ibid.19.
The move away from the singularities of class or gender as primarily conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in a awareness of the subject positions of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of the originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These in-between spaces provides the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood singular and communal that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of culture
We always stem from one place. A place which lies on the intersection of thousands of lines, as many lines as those which entangle us, spur us on and arouse our interest. This can be a place with physical, genetic, symbolic coordinates; it can be somebodys place in a city, as in a social hierarchy. It can be something or someone or somewhere that acts as a place where all sorts of lines intersect: physical and chemical lines, genetic and social, ethnic and economical, aesthetic and ethical lines. These intersections turn this place into a unique focal point, filled with multiple contexts and multiple possibilities, a focal point which synthesises different places into one singular space. It is not a matter of topography but of topologies.
In such a place, Geography would only be able to draw maps of some impersonal, pre-individual unconsciousness, a realm where our bodies and identities are shaped and where urbanism and architecture, hairstyles and fashion, streets and songs are determined. The place where we are born, where we live, where we die. But this is not, after all, the Geography of physical spaces; it is the Geography of those places where we construct ourselves also as memory and dream. Places from which we become what we are, in all those spaces that we intersect with. Places that we take along with us as baggage, like tourists or migrants, and places that we invariably find when we wake up. Places where we ourselves are always a place.
These New geographies strive for new cartographies. The difference is a leap into contemporary realities.
Monica De Miranda renounces old certainties and constructs herself within her own moving place. Wrapped up in a multiplicity of spaces, she expresses her own place, even when she intends to do something else. She knows that the place isnt what she sees. But that in itself doesnt make her an artist. The art lies in making sensitive that which usually remains insensitive in those places.
The increasingly intense connections between places and the massive roaming of certain places into others demand nowadays a new timed geography, a new cartography of affections, as well as new media, new substances, new forms and new codes. Only then can all the forces implicated in these complex spaces be made sensitive. These are all things that we find at play in Mónica de Mirandas work.
Mónica brings an infinity of places into one place. She also evokes new geographies, as when she intersects maps and photographs of bodies, each body alluding to its own place, where different identities cohabitate under ones own identity.
In New Geographies, distances are measured by affection. That is why the artists place is near the familiar place, the place where one is married, has friends, interacts socially, travels, immigrates, works. It is from that place that she participates in eternity.
Mónica works from her own place, from the place of her relations, in a place that belongs to all and which is made of an infinity of lines that connect collective and personal places. A new place made up of old places.
Delving into sculpture and video, photography, installation and multimedia , Mónica shapes a unique place. Here, the multiple intersections of all the lines her work evokes is expressed by the intersection of hybrid media that question borders and propose a place that is born from those multiple intersections.
Always attentive towards the territories she is exploring and with, which she intends to establish dialogue, Mónica recognises the proliferation of the insensitive lines that pin-point the location of culture and of human bodies, of art and of life, and she intersects them, thereby showing us the hybrid and multiply determined place that create them.
Its a clowns marriage, that which the artist undertakes; a union where sacred and profane cohabitate. A car radio picking up tunes from around the world on the streets of London intersects the local and the global. Mónica doesnt just make conventional dichotomies more extreme, she constantly experiments with a crossing of real and metaphorical borders, weaving a new cartography of affection, which reflects a new subjectivity and exhibits all of these new places, where our contemporary live is built.
No conversation or reflection on the history of architecture and urbanism in Angola can avoid considering the Portuguese colonial project and its impact on the formation of Angola’s cities.
Whilst any city is the result of an articulation of time – past, present and future – and is, as such, an object consisting of many identities and experiences, this interaction does not always occur pacifically.
The history of Angola’s cities is, as Isabel Castro Henriques notes, “the expression of a process of colonial domination, materialized in the urban space and its buildings, as well as in its social hierarchies, subject to the rhythms of history, economics, and politics” i. Urbanization was one of the principal political activities of the Portuguese Estado-Novo regime, allowing for and legitimising architectural and urban production and resulting, in Angola, in constructions that expressed a particular tropical language, rooted in the architectural principles of modernism and adapted to the location, geography and local climate.
This Tropical-Modernist architectural legacy is in no way representative of the principles of Estado-Novo colonialism, and in fact served as the basis for a rupture from which a new narrative emerged, of an egalitarian and democratic society – one that never really existed on the ground. In Angola, not only did the urban plan lead to the erasure of existing places and the imposition of new social ideals, but the modernist utopia of freedom was also largely a failure.
2
The post-independence period saw the emergence of different styles of building that reflected new Marxist political ideologies, as well as apartment buildings constructed by Russians and Cubans, among others.
After the end of the civil war, Angola experienced an economic boom, the result of rising oil prices, and the emergence of a capitalist economic model. These changes led to a flurry of new building under the banner of national reconstruction, including vast housing and infrastructure projects, as well as the appearance of large-scale, private real-estate ventures.
The speed and scale of new real-estate and infrastructure projects in Angolan cities is proportional to the state of abandon of the historical architectural legacy. Efforts to preserve and restore old buildings have been largely ineffective, not only due to their technical complexities but also to the perceived lack of political and economic incentives, as well as the impossibility of disassociating this built heritage from its historical context.
Restoration, here, means not only recovering the built forms, but also looking critically at history in order to establish a dialectic between past and future, drawing links between the built forms and their new occupants so as to create new memories.
Although built heritage is often discussed, these concepts have been side-lined by commercial interests and because of their conflicted relationship with history – if this architectural legacy represents a past from which we want to distance ourselves ever-more, then the skyscrapers and urban projects emerging now are the simulation of a “New Angola”, brimming with a subtle desire to erase history and memory.
3
The remnants of different political, economic and social actors that become visible and material in the morphology of cities is what makes them unique; furthermore, it is in these spaces that (new,) ever-more distinct and singular identities are formed, as the memories of different social groups come into play.
It is this geography of tension between a past that is present and a present that is uncertain, full of the spatial-temporal contradictions typical of trans-historical (post-colonial) locations, that serves as the starting point for Panorama, Mónica de Miranda’s post-archival research project, which explores the links (past and present) between colonial and post-colonial memoryii. Working in, and on various different media – photography, video and installation – the artist, whose academic and artistic trajectory has navigated themes such as urban archaeology and personal geography, traces a critical process of historical deconstruction and (re)construction of the Angolan collective memory.
Panorama is both the title of the project and the name of an iconic hotel constructed in the 1970s on the Ilha de Luanda peninsula, with panoramic views over the city bay and the sea. Once one of the most emblematic and charming hotels in Luanda, it has been long since closed down and abandoned. Hotels bear the symbology of the journey and of diasporic transit, and are one of the reoccurring architectural elements in the artist’s work. In Hotel Globo (2015) the building almost seems to constitute a resistance to the rapid changes occurring around it; whilst the Panorama is the materialization of decadence, a shipwreck resigned to its fate.
The duality between past and present (and future), permeates the project entirely, as is evident in other works such as Fall (Queda) or Angolan Home (Casa Angolana). The first is a direct allusion to the fall of empire and to the environment to which we are transported; the Kalandula waterfalls. Here, an old, colonial-era guesthouse is engulfed by nature. The landscape remains intact and absorbs the “foreign” architecture.
The second refers to the phrase “Portuguese Home”, echoing both the search for an original, Portuguese identity, and the debate about political, cultural and artistic identity. Here, we are confronted with an idea of an Angolan home, completely preserved, yet which does not conform entirely to type: this Angolan Home is a modern house, a reflection on the debate about the origin and authenticity of this architecture. The wax effect applied to the images lends them a sense of the eternal, a reference to the importance of preserving physical objects and, as such, collective memory.
The inclusion of figures such as the twins who appear in Karl Marx and When words escape, flowers speak, amplifies the significance of identity: the double-identity of twins can be confusing and overlap – but they are, nonetheless, distinct and individual. The fictionalization of history with micro-narratives adds temporal dimensions which refer not only to the colonial past, but also to Angola’s more recent history; and to its future.
Panorama is not urban archaeology, nor is it simply a meditation on the presence of the colonial past in a post-colonial context; or on individual, versus collective memory. The images are not only a record, but exist on a frontier which allows for a wider reflection on individual and collective strategies of identity formation which, as advanced by Homi K. Bhabha: “initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation in the act of defining the idea of society itself”iii.
By underlining the way in which the empire acquired a material form in the everyday urban context, permeating and conditioning the collective imaginary, Panorama reveals dormant ghosts, conjured up by the acceleration of time and space. It reminds us of the need for different interpretations of the reality surrounding us, of the importance of considering and, as such, not forgetting that which is produced in the articulation of cultural differences – moments of confrontation that play a crucial role in the construction of the cultural identity of the country.
Paula Nascimento
i Isabel Castro Henriques e Miguel Pais Vieira (cit) – “A cidade e o Pós-colonial – Parte II” in Nuno Domingos e Elsa Peralta (org)
ii Mónica de Miranda – Sinopse de Panorama
iii Homi K. Bhabha – The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics, 2
Tomorrow is another day é uma expressão que aponta desde um lugar presente para o futuro com um olhar expectante sobre as memórias e as heranças do passado, trazendo para o discurso as falhas e as ausências da história e da política e apontando para um amanhã esperançoso alicerçado na reimaginação. O título da exposição refere-se ainda, à vontade de fazer arquitetura que quebra cânones vigentes no momento pós-independência no continente africano em que a arquitetura adquiria a capacidade de despertar utopias e implicava também um compromisso com a democracia, com a liberdade social , produzindo lugares de valor inestimável. Trata-se, portanto, de uma tentativa de reflexão da reconciliação entre o que já existe e aquilo que nunca foi e que um dia talvez será algo diferente, entre o velho e o novo, entre a memória, história e a distopia e utopia ideológica.
A exposição é composta de séries de fotografias e de um vídeo desenvolvidos pela artista Mónica de Miranda. Numa primeira instalação fotográfica, Babel Tower (2018), o cenário de intervenção artística é a Tour de l’Échanger, uma torre, em Kinshasa na República Democrata do Congo, que já foi uma das mais altas na África aquando de sua construção (1970-1974), projetada pelo arquiteto franco-tunisino Olivier-Clément Cacoub a pedido do ditador Mobutu para servir de homenagem a Patrice Emery Lumumba, a principal liderança na luta contra a dominação colonial belga. O seu formato é uma mistura de signos arquitetônicos que versa entre arranha-céu, pirâmide e cidadela, o que parece exprimir uma vontade de poder. Cacoub foi também o responsável por Gbadolite, considerada por muitos como a Versailles do Congo, além de muitos outros projetos na Africa de língua francesa antes, durante e depois das guerras por independências. A torre não chegou a ser terminada por várias décadas, sendo concluída recentemente com dinheiro chinês.
Monumentos são erigidos para fixar símbolos, exaltar a memória de acontecimentos e de personagens que fizeram a História, a partir da perspectiva do poder. São feitos de forma sólida para transmitir a imutabilidade da glória e fazerem perdurar essas narrativas por gerações. Edifícios também são monumentos erguidos para encarnar visões de mundo e organizar nossa maneira de estar e apreender o tempo e o espaço. Esta nova série de trabalhos de Mónica de Miranda sugere-nos uma outra categoria: o corpo-monumento. Desenvolvidas em Kinshasa e Maputo, as obras partem do patrimônio construído antes e depois das guerras de independência para assinalar a apropriação e a ressignificação de dogmas de poder e de cânones de beleza e da estética helenística por meio da presença e do protagonismo da mulher negra. Ausente dos livros de história e das narrativas oficiais, a sua presença constante nas obras aqui apresentadas transforma-se num corpo-monumento. As gêmeas acrescentam ainda a representação da dualidade e da alteridade, num jogo de semelhanças e de diferenças em ambientes naturais e arquitetônicos, em que ruína e resiliência nos projetam para um terreno de reinvenção social.
A dramaturgia e a representação foram usados em muitas teorias das ciências humanas e na arte como instrumento de análise e de transformação social, a exemplo do Teatro do Oprimido de Augusto Boal, justamente por explicitarem de forma potente os elementos que compõem as dinâmicas da sociedade. Tomo emprestada esta lente de observação baseada no teatro para ler o trabalho Beauty (2018), núcleo central desta mostra, e que conta com a colaboração do artista Chullage na construção do som. Primeiro pela instalação trazer em sua composição elementos que nos remete à arte dramática: as cortinas, a estrutura, o backstage. Segundo, porque ao adentramos nesta instalação e olharmos para o espelho contido nela somos jogados para dentro do vídeo como agentes participantes. Poderíamos pensar numa espécie de teatro decolonial com sua dramaturgia própria, personagens, atores sociais, narrativas, em que se explicita as dinâmicas que animaram e ainda animam as relações que se perpetuam na contemporaneidade com referencias ao passado e construção do presente, da filosofia da estética em relação com a cidade, e que questiona quem somos nós nesta peça?
A série fotográfica Still life (2018) apresenta os espaços de aprendizagem de escultura na escola de Belas artes de Kinshasa uma das mais antigas de Africa. Modelos clássicos estão presentes tanto em réplicas de estátuas greco-romanas quanto em anotações e desenhos anatómicos minuciosos no quadro. Ao mesmo tempo, observamos a trasladação e a transgressão destes códigos e técnicas para esculturas com traços africanos.
O percurso expositivo encerra-se com a fotografia You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming título retirado da famosa frase de Pablo Neruda que tem inspirado por décadas movimentos de resistência contra ditaduras e o fascismo, recém-acordado nas Américas e na Europa. Palavras estas que foram entoadas na marcha das mulheres, em janeiro de 2017, nos Estados Unidos, e que viraram lema no Brasil desde o assassinato da deputada negra Marielle Franco, em março deste ano. As flores, que tão frequentemente são associadas à fragilidade e à beleza femininas, são cada vez mais lembradas como oferendas à luta, a um amanhã promissor e de fato transformador. Com a conscientização da importância da interseccionalidade e a união das mulheres, quem poderá deter esta nova primavera?
In the recent project Panorama (2017), Mónica de Miranda returns yet again to looking at modernist architecture in Angola. In Hotel Globo (2014-2015), she had already critically examined the changing urban surface of Luanda through video, photographic and performative incursions into the interior landscapes of the 1950s Hotel Globo. The modernist hotel is still functioning in Luanda’s downtown, whose architectural heritage has been increasingly replaced with gentrified high-rise luxury buildings. In Miranda’s work, the Globo became a spatio-temporal and affective ‘lens’ through which her bodily gaze looked at the multiple geographies and histories of the city – colonial, post-independence, post-Cold War, post-civil war – in order to think the complexity of its layered present and to imagine the possibility of different futures.[1]
In Panorama, the abandoned Hotel Panorama – located on the island of Luanda (Ilha do Cabo) from where its guests once had panoramic views of the city and the Luanda bay, on one side, and the Atlantic Ocean, on the other – becomes the main protagonist; or so the title of the entire installation seems to tell its viewers. But, in Miranda’s non-linear – and, in fact, fairly non-narrative – visual story, there are other architectural ‘characters’ in various locations in Luanda and beyond. Furthermore, many such vacant spaces appear occupied by actual, if always enigmatic, characters; in the case of Panorama, these are twin sisters. In Hotel Globo(2014-2015), Once Upon a Time (2012), An Ocean Between Us (2012) and Erosion (2013), among other previous works, the artist herself appeared on screen alongside male collaborators, whereby she hinted at the possible narrative existence of a couple as much as at non-binary notions of identity (as far as gender, sexuality, race, nation and culture are concerned) and at a non-masculinist gaze. In these works, the characters lend themselves to being perceived as different versions of a self that could be simultaneously male and female, European and African. In Archipelago (2014) and Field Work (2016), the twin sisters made their first appearance within Miranda’s oeuvre, as another strategy to address the ‘in-betweenness’ and the ‘doubling’ of self and other and here and there that is proper to the hybrid subjectivity of diaspora. Appearing as children in the latter installations, in Panorama the twins have grown up.
As we shall see, by drawing upon the name and history of the Hotel Panorama, the Panorama to which the installation as a whole refers poses larger questions, if always deeply personal and affective, on history, memory, desire and a condition of (un-)belonging to manifold spaces and times.[2] It also examines the notion of the ‘panoramic’ gaze and of its purportedly all-encompassing visual knowledge and pleasure. The work disrupts such a conception of the gaze and the attendant possibility of fully containing, retrieving or fixating the ever-changing processes of personal and collective becoming, particularly those marked by the diasporic experience. So, although contemplative, the gazing subjectivity in Miranda’s work is far from totalized and totalizing and, instead, avowedly fragmented and fragmentary. The gaze – bodily, psychic and geographically and historically situated – is split into many gazes. It does attain some sort of panoramic view, but only by the juxtaposition of its fragments. Such fragments do not equate the separated and categorized parts of a given totality that is divided into components only to be thoroughly mastered and seamlessly made whole again as an object of power/knowledge.[3] They do not equate mere playful signifiers either, lending themselves to the endless game of reification and commodification of histories, spaces and identities proper to what Frederic Jameson famously called the postmodern cultural logic of late capitalism.[4] The fragmented and fragmentary nature of Miranda’s panoramic visions – inhabited, affective and spatio-temporally situated landscapes of architecture and nature – resist the depoliticized moment when meanings get lost and a concern for agency is done away with. Meanings are always contingent and positional, ever-changing and relational, but, as far as being and becoming are concerned, they are also arenas for struggles of recognition and resistance.[5]
As to history, memory, desire and the condition of (un-)belonging to manifold spaces and times, Panorama’s multiple and multiplying gazes do not redeem a sense of loss of stable points of origin or rootedness – an origin that could only mythically be seen to allow for a unified vision, knowledge and experience of the world, of the self and of communities. Rather, such a loss is positively embraced in the ethico-political activity of (un-)belonging to an always shifting network of routes across continents, islands and oceans.[6] Grounded in her own autobiographical experience of being from both Europe and Africa, Portugal and Angola (with the United Kingdom and Brazil also partaking of her affective geography), the longing that arises from the loss of a stable sense of belonging does not fall into the mythic traps of nostalgia. Instead, it is transmuted into a cosmopolitan and communal desire for being at home in the world (this cosmopolitanism having, however, always to remain deeply critical, as the ability to move across borders is a privilege that a majority of impoverished subjects worldwide cannot afford).
Angola is one of Miranda’s affective landscapes of Atlantic belonging. Born in 1976 in Portugal to an Angolan mother and a Portuguese father and maintaining familial connections with relatives who stayed in Angola upon independence in 1975, Miranda’s work is deeply marked by family memories and experiences and, more broadly, by the collective histories of Portugal and Angola. In Panorama, her focus on the psychic and physical remnants of several pasts – colonial, post-independence, post-Cold War, post-civil war – within natural, urban and architectural landscapes of Luanda and beyond serves the larger purpose of examining the contradictions of the present and imagining alternative futures.
With the demise of the Cold War in the 1990s, and the definitive end of the thirty seven year-long civil war in 2002 (won by the MPLA, in power since independence), Angola entered a period of economic liberalization and accelerated growth, serving mostly its elites. One of the most visible and tangible manifestations of such economic, political and social changes has been a profound transformation of Luanda’s urban landscape, propelled by fierce real estate speculation and gentrification. These operations have had as one of their most problematic consequences the forced removal of the poor populations of centrally located slums or musseques to faraway peripheries that are not serviced by public transportation networks. Many such slums grew exponentially during the civil war, as people had to flee war-torn areas and look for easier access to resources, whose transportation throughout the country was prevented by the war. The other consequence of the profit-seeking real estate speculation and gentrification in Luanda has been a disregard for architectural heritage, all too quickly and conveniently classified for demolition so that space becomes available for high-rise office buildings, shopping malls and parking lots – a process which has become characteristic of a globalized capitalism to which Angola now fully belongs.[7]
Panorama addresses such complexities by focussing on the surviving, albeit abandoned, modernist buildings of the Hotel Panorama (Hotel Panorama, 2017) and of the Karl Marx Cinema in Luanda (Cinema Karl Marx, 2017), as well as on the constructed natural landscapes of the botanical gardens of the Floresta da Ilha (When Words Escape, Flowers Speak, 2017), still functioning in the vicinity of the Hotel Panorama on the island of Luanda. But Panorama’s non-descriptive and contemplative narrative also unfolds outside the capital, more specifically, in the province of Malanje and in its capital city, similarly called Malanje. Located about three-hundred kilometres east of Luanda, this region (like many others) was deeply marked by the liberation war against the Portuguese colonial rule (1961-1975) and by the civil war (1975-2002). As to the former, the violently repressed revolt of the cotton-field workers in the Baixa do Cassange in the Malanje province on 4 January 1961 is usually considered the first of a series of events triggering the beginning of the liberation war in Angola in 1961 (commonly called ‘colonial war’ in Portugal, with 1963 marking the beginning of the war in Guinea-Bissau and 1964 in Mozambique).[8] As to the civil war, it began immediately upon independence in 1975, as a Cold War proxy conflict waged by the three liberation movements: the Soviet Union and Cuba-supported MPLA, the Zaire-backed FNLA, and UNITA, supported by apartheid South Africa and the US.[9] Malanje was severely destroyed throughout the many decades and several phases of the conflict, and progressively rebuilt thereafter. But this area also has an impressive pre-colonial history, and a colonial history of resistance and struggle against the Portuguese presence from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and against Portuguese settlement since the 19th century.[10] At a more personal level, the city of Malanje was also the place where Miranda’s mother grew up. Like Luanda, it is a space where intergenerational family memories and collective histories emerge in the very material fabric of modernist architecture from the colonial period – which has been re-appropriated in various ways after independence and after the civil war, even when ruined –and of natural landscapes. The latter are shown to be as thickly woven by history and memory as architecture, not only when the vegetation appears to infiltrate and occupy the buildings, but also when nature is portrayed on its own.
Fall (2017) is a photographic installation whose fragments make up an unstable panoramic view of the area surrounding the Calandula Waterfalls in the Malanje province, called Duque de Bragança in the colonial period.[11] It is accompanied by an archival black-and-white photograph of the falls meant for their touristic promotion around the 1960s, which Miranda found in a Lisbon flee market. This image provides a centrally framed and frontal view and seems to evoke a paradisiac nature, a kind of lost paradise, untouched by man. Unlike it, Miranda’s panoramic colour version highlights how this purported paradise is far from natural in any straightforward sense and, rather, deeply embedded in history. The artist underscores the sense of constructed-ness of the landscape by presenting a panorama that is comprised of uneven fragments, a diagonally layered juxtaposition of multiple frames that, in turn, evince a plural and bodily gaze, moving in the landscape. Furthermore, she directs her gaze less to the falls – peripherally represented in her composite images – than to the adjacent spaces from which they can be observed, calling attention to the situated-ness of the gazing subjectivity and avoiding the history-effacing fetishization of natural landscape found in the touristic image. The camera focusses on the remnants of a modernist hotel also from the colonial period, which is abandoned and yet re-occupied, re-appropriated by the local vegetation. The way Miranda’s photographs frame some of the landscapes within architectural structures recalls how the hotel’s verandas and ground-floor arcade once constituted the privileged ‘lenses’ through which its guests looked at the falls and, more broadly, how any visual panorama is inescapably positioned. As Donna Haraway insightfully wrote, ‘one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement’ and ‘vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices’.[12] Haraway rightly argued for ‘the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structured and structuring body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplification’.[13] Miranda’s images continuously remind us of this situated-ness.
The Fall to which the title of these works refers evokes other falls besides that of the Lucala river: the historical falls of the pre-colonial African kingdoms, of the Portuguese colonial empire, of peace upon independence, of the Marxist utopia; the ruins of modernist architecture and of its attendant dreams; the ruined nature, due to war and the capitalist exploitation of natural resources. As nature is de-exoticized and de-mythologized as paradise, Fall is obviously reminiscent of the biblical idea of losing innocence and of being expelled from paradise. Miranda does succeed at ‘expelling’ the viewer from any such notion. This polysemic Fall is also evocative of the groundlessness of the diasporic subjectivity, eventually able to transmute homelessness into unhomeliness, root into route, to be at home in the world. Finally, all these meanings pertaining to Fall are made visually manifest also in the diagonal display of the panorama.[14]
Miranda also photographed in the city of Malanje, although exact locations are never given. In Swimming Pool, the artist presents several views of an abandoned open-air modernist swimming pool, built in the colonial period and currently surrounded by musseques. Like the hotel in the Calundula Waterfalls, the swimming pool in Malanje was a leisurely site destined mostly for the white population, shown to have been re-appropriated after independence and the civil war. Today, it is not as abandoned as it might seem at first sight, since it is actually used as an improvised site for the storage and making of building materials, as the soil-filled swimming pool and adjacent spaces make evident. Like the Calundula hotel, it appears as a kind of ‘lens’ through which to contemplate the surrounding landscape, which is never too visible. One can only imagine the view from the three diving boards above, or from the lateral amphitheatre, spots that would allow one to observe not simply the now absent water, but also the landscape beyond the swimming pool’s low walls. Similarly to her Calundula images, a multifarious sense of fall emerges here, albeit not explicitly in the title. The swimming pool is a space where the fall into (rather than of) water occurs, and where nature is immediately perceived and experienced as constructed, and so more readily demystified.
In the city of Malanje, Miranda also photographed Angolan House (2017). This is a set of images where inhabited modernist twin houses from the colonial period are portrayed in the present as having been re-adapted, while retaining the original design.[15] They have become almost identical, but not quite. Local vegetation again partakes of the re-occupation of space, this time domestic. In Miranda’s work, actual homes and houses serve the purpose of raising broader and at the same time deeply personal questions concerning the unhomeliness of diaspora, the hybridity of its ‘in-between’, doubled and doubling subjectivity, and the political, social, economic and cultural impact of migration on urban space. The physical and psychic loss of the Angolan family home is transmuted into an Angolan Housethat encompasses multiple, quasi-identical twin houses, both kept and transformed over time. Intervened with wax and pigment typical of the encaustic process, these images give rise to what I have called in the title of this essay a twin (or split or double) vision of (un-)belonging. That is, an old technique used to pre-empt the loss of images by protecting them from the damaging effects of the passage of time conveys a deep sense of transformation evident in the accumulation of layers of scratched wax and pigment. Usually used to preserve paintings, the encaustic underscores the constructed nature of the photographic record and of memory, both able to retain only partially and subjectively what they make present again or re-present. The result is a vision of both the past and the present, of here and there, of self and other that avoids the pitfalls of the nostalgic loss of the home to become critically future-oriented in the world. Similarly photographed in the Malanje area and intervened with wax and pigment, Like a Candle in the Wind (2017) asks of natural landscape the questions that Angolan House raises by means of domestic architecture. Here too a fall of sorts seems to be at work, as wax could indeed have dripped from a burned-out candle on this encaustic-processed photographic surface, whose title is retrieved from the lyrics of a well-known song about ‘never knowing [where] to cling to’.[16]
Back in Luanda, one can see how similar strategies of photographic representation of modernist architecture and natural landscape serve the purpose of examining the city’s past, present and future, through the affective and ethico-political perspective opened up by personal and collective history, memory and desire. The diasporic condition of (un-)belonging to manifold spaces and times emerges by means of a bodily, moving (even while appearing to be still) and gazing subjectivity that is also geographically and historically situated.
In Hotel Panorama (2017), we find another instance of juxtaposed images – this time of the abandoned modernist hotel on the island of Luanda – making up a panoramic view of the façade that faces the Atlantic. This is accompanied by an archival black-and-white panoramic photograph of the hotel’s other façade, facing the city and the bay, taken between the 1960s and 1970s. The panorama shown in this image is not only architectural, but also literally inscribed in neon on top of the building as the hotel’s name. Designed by the Portuguese architect Carlos Moutinho very likely between the 1950s and 1960s, the iconic Hotel Panorama became progressively decayed during the civil war and was eventually abandoned. A renovation and augmentation plan was designed in 2007, but never carried out. Miranda’s colour and composite Hotel Panorama redirects the viewer to the landscape of city and bay that the archival image occludes, but the visual access to it only occurs as filtered by the architectural ‘lens’ of the Atlantic-facing façade. It is through the entrance, opening onto a wide window on the other side, and the ground-floor arcade that one can contemplate the urban and maritime landscape in the background. On the other hand, Miranda’s panoramic view of the hotel draws attention to the empty verandas of the modernist façade, whose Atlantic view remains outside the frame. Filtering and fragmentally displayed, one also observes how the architectural panorama of the empty hotel is inhabited by the vegetation in the foreground.[17]
Shot in the botanical gardens of the Floresta da Ilha (Island Forest) near the Hotel Panorama on the island of Luanda, When Words Escape, Flowers Speak (2017) portrays the constructed, although apparently neglected, natural landscape of the functioning gardens.[18] These images show the gardens occupied by twin Angolan sisters, centrally framed holding their hands with their eyes closed amidst a mix of vegetation. The information that this setting is a botanical garden is not given, but one senses the constructed-ness of the landscape as soon as one notices that the twins are standing between two swirling paths. Miranda analyses botanical gardens in this and other works – such as Archipelago (2014) and Field Work (2016) – in order to recall their weighted colonial histories of collecting, cataloguing and displaying specimens for European knowledge and pleasure. She examines the ways in which the spatial remnants of such colonial impulses have been re-appropriated in post-colonial times. In more personal terms, like an affective collection of portraits gathered and transportable in a family album, botanical journeys and archives also allow Miranda to think about the formation of diasporic identities between past and present, here and there, self and other, which the almost identical – but not quite – twin sisters and paths underscore. The twin Angolan sisters re-appropriate this territory with a meditative – rather than nostalgic – shared presence. Portrayed in an inward-looking moment, they seem to be listening to the manifold pasts remembered and futures foretold by the landscape itself.
From the island of Luanda, the twins move to the Alvalade neighbourhood, where they are seen wandering in the closed-down modernist Cinema Karl Marx, called Avis before independence. It was designed in the early 1960s by João Garcia de Castilho, the Portuguese architect of many other modernist buildings in the city (such as the open-air Cine-Miramar, designed with his brother Luís Garcia de Castilho in 1964).[19] In Cinema Karl Marx (2017), Miranda’s camera focusses on those spaces of the abandoned movie theatre from where the activity of watching used to (and, in her images, does) take place: the long veranda marking the building’s façade and, inside, the amphitheatre made up of the now derelict chairs. These viewing spots are inhabited by the multiple, bodily, gazing presence of the twin sisters, moving in the architectural landscape of the Karl Marx even while they appear to be still. Indeed, movement is here both physical and psychic. When the twins sit down in the empty amphitheatre, whereas one of them peers out at something outside the frame, the other looks back at the viewer, who, occupying the place of the cinema screen, thus becomes a screen of sorts, not only gazing but also being gazed at. Like the panoramas discussed previously, Miranda’s panoramic view of the cinema’s exterior façade is comprised of several juxtaposed frames, which evince a moving gazing subject not simply inside but also outside the image (even if the camera viewpoint seems centrally placed and fixed). The multiple shots, alongside the history told by the name change of the Karl Marx, its current ruined condition and its artistic reactivation, make evident the very passage of time in the fabric of space, the mythic nature of totalizing visions – be it of the gaze, the subject, history, society, origin or identity – and the imagination of alternative, shared and sharable futures. Panoramic futures, avowedly made up of moving fragments.
[1] See Ana Balona de Oliveira, ‘Os Hóspedes do Globo: (Des-)Mapeando a Memória da Cidade Vertical com a Horizontalidade do Corpo’, in Buala, 8 November 2016, http://www.buala.org/pt/vou-la-visitar/os-hospedes-do-globo-des-mapeando-a-memoria-da-cidade-vertical-com-a-horizontalidad-0; Ana Balona de Oliveira, ‘Globo Lodgers: (Un-)Mapping the Memory of the Vertical City with the Horizontality of the Body’, in Mónica de Miranda, Geography of Affections 2012-2016(Lisboa: Mónica de Miranda, 2017), pp. 111 – 123.
[2] The idea of the panorama had previously emerged in the work Panorama (2009), shot in Lisbon’s outskirts.
[3] See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
[4] See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
[5] See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 222-37.
[6] See Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1997); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
[7] See Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2015); Jon Schubert, ‘2002, Year Zero: History as Anti-Politics in the “New Angola”’, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 41, Nr. 4 (2015), pp. 835-53.
[8] Other events include the attack on the São Paulo Prison in Luanda on 4 February 1961, and the attacks on the coffee plantations in northern Angola led by UPA (União dos Povos de Angola, later known as FNLA, Frente Nacional para a Libertação de Angola) on 15 March 1961.
[9] MPLA refers to Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola; FNLA, to Frente Nacional para a Libertação de Angola; and UNITA, to União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola. Agostinho Neto was the leader of the MPLA between 1962 and 1979, and independent Angola’s first president. The MPLA was the Marxist-Leninist liberation movement which fought against Portuguese colonial rule beside the FNLA led by Holden Roberto and the UNITA led by Jonas Savimbi. It has been in power since independence. The Angolan civil war was a Cold War proxy conflict, having continued throughout the 1990s until Jonas Savimbi’s death in 2002.
[10] This was the area of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Ndongo was ruled by Ngola Kiluanji in the 16th century and his daughter Njinga Mbandi, Queen of Ndongo and Matamba in the 17th century, is still seen in present-day Angola as a symbol of resistance against Portuguese occupation. Her statue used to be located at the Kinaxixi Square in Luanda but is now placed at the entrance of the São Miguel Fortress, where the National Museum of Military History is housed.
[11] Waterfalls had previously been examined in Lost Paradise, a part of the Archipelago (2014) installation.
[12] Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn 1988), pp. 585.
[13] Ibid., p. 589.
[14] The notion of the fall had previously emerged in the work Falling (2013).
[15] In Field Work (2016), one could also see a Twin House. In Archipelago (2014), besides the young twins, there were also twin islands of sorts in the panoramic Island.
[16] Bernie Taupin, Elton John, Candle in the Wind, 1973.
[17] For an indoor image of the Hotel Panorama, see Ana Magalhães, Inês Gonçalves, Moderno Tropical: Arquitectura em Angola e Moçambique, 1948-1975(Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2009), p. 61. For a brief synopsis on the design, see ibid., p. 211.
[18] The new Luanda Botanical Gardens are going to be constructed on the hills sprawling across the Miramar, Boavista and Sambizanga neighbourhoods, with a privileged view of the bay. Boavista used to be the area of the Roque Santeiro market, one of the biggest open-air markets on the African continent, now dismantled. Sambizanga, a poor yet proud neighbourhood whose history is inseparable from that of the struggle against Portuguese colonialism, is going through demolitions. These two slum areas are located in the vicinity of the elite Miramar neighbourhood, and the changes they have been going through will entail a radical transformation of seaside northern Luanda.
[19] See Walter Fernandes, Miguel Hurst, Angola Cinemas: A Fiction of Freedom (Göttingen and Luanda: Steidl Verlag and Goethe Institut, 2015), p. 221.
The work of Mónica de Miranda can be understood as an agent that continually reconnects artistic processes with the transitory condition of the spectator. Regardless of the themes that she investigates, or of socio-political reflections that strap in her identity a real and emotional sense with the place and history of those who inhabit it, her works contain part of her self-referential experience but not always autobiographical, because it is not a testimony of the journey but of someone who recognizes herself in the transition and in the territorial change.
This change, or this logic of circulation, lies not only in the fact that she has lived in several countries and known different cultures, but essentially in the way she interprets the temporal relations and the memory of these experiences, that contribute to the construction of meta-narratives which are articulated under a line/time; as an information flow that integrates seemingly diverse places and temporalities. This abstract line locates places that intersect at different moments of time, and in the specific case of her work they are not reduced to a linear determination of the past, but rather to recognize the temporal correlatation that allows an active relationship of the subject over the present.
In this sense the exhibition "Atlantic - Journey to the center of the earth" is exemplary of her work process for two main reasons. The first is present in the title in which we can infer two apparently contradictory planes, the first being the word that determines an immense and mutant geographic mass that is the Atlantic Ocean; and the second is the Journey to the Center of the Earth, a reference to Julius Verne's utopian work that is close to her. However, the placement of the hyphen amplifies this transitory possibility which, although present in her work, is an aggregating element that expresses the multiplicity of senses in the reception of the same by the viewer, having as a structuring line the reference to two substances: water and earth which are opposed in their constitution.
The second reason that leads me to this brief reflection is the duality between the ocean and the earth, a physical but simultaneously immaterial differentiation, an imaginary that goes back to the beginnings of humanity, and for this same reason metaphysic: between fluidity and solidity. It is riven by the need to know what is hidden beneath the earth which naturally supports the ocean and breathes in the volcanic mouths of the Atlantic islands of the Macaronézia, such as the Azores or, in this case in particular, the Cape Verde archipelago, specifically in Ilha do Fogo (Island of Fire).
Monica de Miranda recognizes in this island an intensity of the life of our planet in the sense that it is renewed by the volcanic eruptions that ferment of fire and of lava that immediately cools and everything crystallizes, everything transforms and updates; in an approximation to the paradoxical duality that the presence of the volcano contains: between life and death. The photographs of women dressed in black with bare feet, as in "Untitled. From the series City-Scapes" and "Formation", or the artist’s own body in the diptych entitled "Horizon", are relevant in the sense that this figure transmits the idea of osmosis with the burned soil in which its own regeneration survives the desertified landscape. The volcano is a presence that rises in the landscape and is also a recurring image in the collective imagination and visual representation throughout history. But in this work of Mónica de Miranda is, above all, a sign that presents a second skin that models and transmutes the landscape, not only by the visual mantle that covers all in an ash relieve, but because it announces an interior and organic experience that resides in an unknown place, so close to the center of the earth, whether this model is an imaginary and fictional construction or a given geological matrix.
And as a fictional construction the intervened pigmented and waxed series of photographs -entitled "Bedrock"- rescue this intermittent materiality which, while present, merges into the printed image affirming in artist's gesture the intervention on the image as a recording of a journey; a time that is updated in its finalization.
Under the same methodology, a sculptural object in the form of a library shelf, contains black sand inside a box in its base. This natural element, the black sand, is also subject to the logic of the image but escapes to the photographic, contributing to theconstruction of meta-narratives that are pointed by references that approach territorial mapping. However, this mapping is only recognizable if we take into account the geography of places and the temporal correpondence that is continually reorganized in the becoming that Monica’s work represents, in each layer, or in each register that welcomes her affections, and undoubtedly in her politic reflection that confronts us as image/time of the places that Monica de Miranda seeks in the correpondence of the Self with the Other.
La obra de Mónica de Miranda puede entenderse como un agente que conecta continuamente los procesos artísticos con la condición transitoria del espectador. Independientemente de los temas que investigue o de las reflexiones sociopolíticas que atan en su identidad un sentido real y emocional con el lugar y la historia de quienes lo habitan, sus obras contienen parte de su experiencia autorreferencial pero no siempreautobiográfica, porque no es un testimonio del viaje sino de alguien que se reconoce en la transición y en el cambio territorial.
Este cambio, o esta lógica de la circulación, radica no sólo en el hecho de que ha vivido en varios países y conocidas culturas diferentes, sino esencialmente en la forma en que interpreta las relaciones temporales y la memoria de estas experiencias, que contribuyen a la construcción de meta-narrativas que se articulan bajo una línea/tiempo; como un flujo de información que integra lugares aparentemente diversos y temporalidades. Esta línea abstracta localiza lugares que se cruzan en diferentes momentos del tiempo y en el caso específico de su trabajo no se reducen a una determinación lineal del pasado, sino más bien a reconocer la correlación temporal que permite una relación activa del sujeto sobre el presente.
En este sentido la exposición "Atlántico - Viaje al centro de la tierra" es ejemplar de su proceso de trabajo por dos razones principales. La primera está presente en el título en la que podemos inferir dos planos aparentemente contradictorios, siendo el primero la palabra que determina una masa geográfica inmensa y mutante que es el Océano Atlántico; y el segundo es el Viaje al Centro de la Tierra, una referencia a la obra utópica de Julio Verne que le es cercana a la artista. Sin embargo, la colocación del guión en el título amplifica esta posibilidad transitoria que, aunque presente en su trabajo, es un elemento agregador que expresa la multiplicidad de connotaciones en la recepción del mismo por el espectador, teniendo como línea estructuradora la referencia a dos sustancias: agua y tierra, que se oponen en su constitución.
La segunda razón que me lleva a esta breve reflexión es la dualidad entre el océano y la tierra, una diferenciación física, pero simultáneamente inmaterial, un imaginario que se remonta a los comienzos de la humanidad, y por esta misma razón metafísica: entre fluidez y solidez. La artista es arrastrada por la necesidad de saber lo que está escondido
debajo de la tierra, que soporta naturalmente el océano y respira en las bocas volcánicas de las islas atlánticas de la Macaronézia, como las Azores o, en este caso en particular, el archipiélago de Cabo Verde, específicamente en Ilha do Fogo (Isla de Fuego).
Mónica de Miranda reconoce en esta isla una intensidad de la vida de nuestro planeta enel sentido de que es renovada por las erupciones volcánicas que fermentan de fuego y de lava para inmediatamente se enfriarse cristalizando todo; todo se transforma y actualiza en una aproximación a la dualidad paradójica que contiene la presencia del volcán: entre
la vida y la muerte. Las fotografías de mujeres vestidas de negro con los pies descalzos, como en "Untitled, from the series City-Scapes" y "Formation", o el propio cuerpo del artista en el díptico titulado "Horizon", son relevantes en el sentido de que esta figura transmite la idea de ósmosis con el suelo quemado en el que su propia regeneración sobrevive al paisaje desertificado. El volcán es una presencia que se eleva en el paisaje y es también una imagen recurrente en la imaginación colectiva y la representación visual a lo largo de la historia. Pero en esta obra de Mónica de Miranda es ante todo un signo que
presenta una segunda piel que modela y transmuta el paisaje, no sólo por el manto visual que cubre todo en un alivio de cenizas, sino porque anuncia una experiencia interior y orgánica que reside en un lugar desconocido -tan cerca del centro de la tierra- como si este modelo fuera una construcción imaginaria y ficticia o una matriz geológica dada.
Y como construcción de ficción, la serie de fotografías intervenidas, pigmentadas y enceradas, titulada "Bedrock", rescata esta materialidad intermitente que, mientras que está presente, se funde en la imagen impresa afirmando en el gesto de la artista la
intervención sobre la imagen como grabación de un viaje; un tiempo que se actualiza en su finalización.
Bajo la misma metodología, un objeto escultórico en forma de una estantería de biblioteca, contiene arena negra dentro de una caja en su base. Este elemento natural, la arena negra, también está sujeto a la lógica de la imagen pero escapa a la fotográfica, contribuyendo a la construcción de meta-narrativas que son apuntadas por referencias que abordan la cartografía territorial. Sin embargo, esta cartografía sólo es reconocible si se tiene en cuenta la geografía de los lugares y la correlación temporal que se reorganiza continuamente en el devenir que representa el trabajo de Mónica en cada capa o en cada registro que acoge sus afectos y sin duda en su reflexión política que nos confronta como imagen/tiempo de los lugares que Mónica de Miranda busca en la correspondencia del Ser con el Otro.
We have known an abundance of metaphors connected to travel, such as images of ships, the coastline landscape and the sea, nature and unidentified buildings in Mónica de Miranda’s photographs and films. These evanescent stages are at times inhabited by two figures – a man and a woman – who appear occupied with a pursue of something located elsewhere, outside of the realm defined by the image. An acute sense of impermanence is suggested by the shifting of places, moods, countries and landscapes, and permeates de images with deep nostalgic overtones. Such is the case of her series entitled ‘Once Upon a Time’ (2013), which are conceptually articulated as a travel diary, a patchwork of memories, desires, projected homes and imagined communities in flux that trigger personal catharsis.
If we take Edouard Glissant’s work ‘Poetics of Relation’ published in 1990 as point of departure for an analysis of belonging and territory, we are faced with a deconstruction of the self, where journeys and ‘errantry’ come into play.
More significantly, Glissant invites us to view identity as a rhizome, which can no longer be defined as fixed roots, legacies and places, but as a product of their interrelations. Thus the author regards ancient myth, religious texts and other foundational articulations of western culture as narratives of people without roots. From Homer’s Odyssey to a number of biblical tales, displaced communities and individual travellers accounts, histories of diaspora are woven in our human consciousness as a seamless and assiduous pattern. But let us examine the notion of diaspora, which refers to a dispersion of people away from the area in which they and their ancestors have lived, in light of Mónica de Miranda’s artistic practice.
Following the implicit logic of body politics and in contrast with geopolitics – which focuses on the link between power and geographical space – Mónica de Miranda locates her subject of study in a fluid subjectivity that exists in virtue of its affinity with others. In this unstable territory, home becomes a shifting paradigm where the journey of the self is essentially a constant attempt to belong to a community of shared meaning. Surpassing the limitations of identity politics, the artist’s entire art production becomes an exercise in emotional geography.
In her series ‘Once Upon a Time’ (2012) home is a territory delimited by the body, and as such, it was graphically depicted in the text- based work Come home to the place you never left which functioned as an epigraph to her epic travel ‘novella’ in chapters, the video triptych Once Upon a Time. A compelling example of the artist’s attempt to re enact geography, the triptych offered a rich panoply of fragmentary imagery collected during the artist’s transits through three continents. With these series, she performed an unpredictable card game of sorts, where she shuffled places with which she has emotional ties – Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, Mindelo, Lisbon and London, and merged them in a single narrative. The ‘relational identity’ of the characters – to employ Glissant’s thinking – is linked to the experience of contacts among cultures and not to a singular sense of filiation and belonging that is rooted in one place. Here is where travel is summoned: the second chapter of the journey that is Once Upon a Time is fruit of the artist’s proximity to the fluvial port of the Tejo river in Lisbon. In the video diptych An Ocean between Us, the fluvial port and a stationary cargo ship become the stage for imagined transits: as a passage between worlds, the liner evokes the journeys that connected the continents through the big waters, providing a ground for the encounter of people and for the expansion of trade. Conceived as a set of light boxes and a video projection An Ocean Between Us dealt with spatial ambiguity: we see ships as symbolic umbilical cords that unite stranded parts: an ocean and a river, a lost love, and the promise of a re encounter become elements of a catharsis.
In her recent video Hotel Globo (2015) the artist invites us to immerse ourselves in a singular place, a building that can be interpreted as a still vessel anchored in the city of Luanda: the Hotel Globo. Built in 1950 by émigré Portuguese doctor Francisco Martins de Almeida on the site of his medical clinic, after settling in the prosperous city of Gabela, in the province of Kwanza Sul, legendary for its alleged production of the best coffee in the world. Conceptually, the derelict hotel stands as a symbolic enclave of recent Angolan history, as its fabric contains imprints of colonial Lusophone Africa and its aftermath. The fragmentary narrative of the film is displayed in the artist’s signature diptych format, where a silent couple inhabits rooms that equally served as places of passage to traders from the countryside, or nests for romantic encounters, but also as refuge to militias during the civil war. Significantly, Angola’s twenty seven year-long armed conflict became one of the hardest collateral effects of the Cold War in the confines of the old colonies: a surrogate battleground for imperial confrontation where human lives ostensibly came at a lower cost.
The couple’s nonchalant wandering through the hotel facilities seems to wake up ghosts as it rehearses an indefinite personal drama in the decaying modernist atmosphere of the building, which stands in permanent need of restoration. In this work, as in Mónica de Miranda’s previous films, there is a stasis, a sense of immobility that refers as much to still photography as to a philosophical position in regards to the subject matter: relations are as impenetrable as the nature of the locations in which they dwell. A metaphor for the social and economic wreck brought by the furious neoliberal impulse of Angola’s real state speculation that is deforming Luanda, the building, according to his present owner, stands in a timeless zone, stuck between a promising past and an inevitable demolition.
Also in connection with the idea of dereliction and speculation, her series ‘Archipelago’ (2014) are not only pertinent for their examination of the topics of exoticism and power, but also for the nostalgia of autonomous and uncorrupted nature typical of the era of the Anthropocene, furthermore entangled with personal and collective memories.
In light of de global threat on the environment, and as a way to reconfigure the archive of Lusophone diasporic communities poetically, the artist is engaging in a new body of work, which draws from post-archival practices placing nature at the centre. In this new work, the very ontology of photography will be addressed in the form of multimedia installations, as its subjective authority will be replaced by multiple perspectives of the image, by means of the fragmentation of photographs – as she did previously with her works Erosion (2012) and Island (2014). Here, the archive will be ‘displaced’ to make visible the histories of migrant communities and their interconnectedness with places of origin.
As Glissant did with his literary work, perhaps the artist’s new vision is to draw from the unconscious of people to provide a memory capable of transcending non-history.
In doing so, the image will seek to articulate itself as a fruitful sum of future horizons.
This essay examines the aesthetic, ethical and political relevance of the performative and portraiture-based quality of the video and photographic work by Monica de Miranda. I shall focus on the way in which bodies – notably the artist’s own body but also that of collaborators – inhabit porous spaces whether by moving or by standing still. Such spaces are opened up by the possibility of passage, both metaphorical and literal, contained in “windows”, “corridors”, “staircases” and “elevators”, between indoors and outdoors, between architecture and landscape, emotional as much as physical. The performances for the camera by Miranda make up visual and sound narratives, non-linear and of a contemplative nature, where memory and desire, autobiography and ction intertwine. In Hotel Globo (2014-2015), the diasporic lodgers of Miranda’s interstitial spaces are also passengers between the several times and historical moments of Luanda.2 The city’s increasing architectural verticality, appearing to contain a desire for the erasure of history and memory, is opposed by the horizontal lassitude not only of the “utopian” ships from the Cold War, half-sunk in the bay, but also of the bodies lying down in the rooms of the modernist hotel from the colonial period, where old forms of occupation gave way to a dynamic of artistic conviviality.
Miranda’s Hotel Globo is also, or even mostly, about that passage, intimately connected to the spatial and architectural, the temporal and historic, the identity-based and diasporic: the bodies’ performative passage through the affective and mnemonic, personal and political spaces of architecture and landscape. In their meditative and transitory dislocation, without possession or property, these bodies nonetheless re- appropriate space in a manner which is passive only in appearance; they undertake an active reinvention, even when languid, of dwelling. In this, they replicate the constant reinventions which the passage of several generations of guests through the Hotel Globo inscribed on the skin of its walls, on the skeleton of its oors and staircases, corridors and elevators, verandas and windows, and in the content of some of its rooms, abandoned by guests. From best hotel of the 1950s colonial Luanda and meeting point for businessmen coming from the provinces, to accommodation space for Soviet pilots managed by the estate company Anghotel in the post- independence period (marked by the beginning of the civil war in a Cold War context), and secret shelter of UNITA refugees in the beginning of the 1990s, the Globo was never really a touristic inn. Besides its foreign guests, it always received, for the most part, Angolans coming from the interior or the diaspora, like, for example, the anthropologist, writer, lmmaker and painter Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941-2010) after his move to Namibia in his last years, passages he recorded in watercolour. Almost always empty, it has recently become a meeting point for artists in downtown Luanda, an area undergoing erce gentri cation and in which the architectural heritage from several historical periods survives ever less to the growing tendency, inspired by models such as those of Singapore and Dubai, of high-rise luxury building.3 Some of these skyscrapers also remain empty, but for being too expensive to be bought and inhabited, while others, like new ruins alongside the old, are simply left un nished for lack of funds. These changes have been examined by several Angolan artists besides Miranda, such as Kiluanji Kia Henda, Délio Jasse, Edson Chagas and Angel Lhosvanny Cisneros.
The Globo’s reinventions across its many decades – during which it became a witness to, and an ever more isolated survivor of the major political, social, economic, cultural and urban changes of the country and Luanda – is evoked in Miranda’s installation through the oral testimony of Mário de Almeida. Almeida is a descendant of the hotel’s current owners, his father and uncles, and of the rst proprietor, his grandfather Francisco Martins de Almeida. Francisco was a Portuguese medical doctor from Beira Alta who settled in Gabela in southern Kwanza, where he married Mahinda, a soba’s daughter named Francisca Pereira after marriage. Extracted from an interview by Miranda so that only Almeida’s voice is audible and accompanying the installation’s video component, his testimony recounts histories from the colonial period, the post-independence, the long civil war (during and after the Cold War) and the post-war, drawing from his own experiences and those of relatives, guests and workers. Hotel Globo also includes eighteen acrylics of the original blueprints of the hotel’s renovation project, designed in the 1990s by the architect Carlos Penim Loureiro at Almeida’s invitation, but never built for lack of nancial and institutional support.4
The protagonist couple of Hotel Globo’s video – the artist herself and a friend collaborator – evokes vaguely the couple behind the building’s construction. Their bodies do not cross paths inside the 1950s modernist architecture – neither in each of the projections that make up the video diptych, nor in the visual encounter that the double projection could prompt on the gallery wall – except for a moment in the beginning of the video when the female face, on one side, and the male body, on the other, emerge simultaneously but no less isolated, phantasmatically re ected on windowpanes. Just like the Globo itself, bodies still waiting or already apart. Witnesses to Luanda’s contrasts, alien and frozen in time (to use the phrase with which Almeida describes the Globo in his account), these guests of history and memory become loose characters of a ctional narrative, resistantly horizontal visitors even when they move vertically, who try to map in vain the contradictions of an almost unrecognizable city through the modernist lenses of the Globo’s verandas and windows. They cartograph Luanda’s urban landscape with their gaze, but always from the very activity of mapping with their own bodies the interior architecture of the hotel, slowly walked across and inhabited, from dawn to dusk, from the intimacy of the room to the panoramic view of the veranda on the upper oor. The resulting map or cartography makes up a rhythmic collection of visual and auditory fragments shown in a diptych format. This double projection, in itself already fragmented and fragmentary, is marked by constant passages between visibility and invisibility (including moments of partial and total black-out) and by connections and disconnections between the two sequences of screened images. These seem to replicate the encounters and misencounters unfolding in the loose narrative, for whose ethics and politics the projection’s interstitial and liminal aesthetics thus contributes. In the performative rhythm of their halting, walking and looking, the bodies of Hotel Globo produce a geography that is personal as much as social, psychic as much as political, in line with the diverse writings of Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Judith Butler.5 These bodies invert the ânerie theorized by Benjamin, for the capitalist modernity of the city is observed from the interior of the building instead of the street and arcade, through windows rather than vitrines.6 The focus on space from the subjective interiority of memory and desire also calls to mind Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, and the idea of looking at an always simultaneously interior and exterior space from the physical and psychic body, an always bodily and situated gaze, evokes Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” – fundamental feminist contribution – more than Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological lessons.7 Haraway writes:
One cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement. Vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices … I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structured and structuring body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simpli cation.8
These are bodies that traverse space with the gaze, but implicating themselves precariously, transitorily, with no pretension of territorial conquest and occupation, or epistemological totalization in the manner of certain Enlightenment empiricisms and rationalisms. The resulting map or cartography can only constitute itself, then, as a kind of un-mapping or un-cartographing, a reshuf ing of the city’s current coordinates from the three storeys of the Globo, from the several layers of history and memory – collective and individual; colonial, anti-colonial, post-colonial, post-Marxist and post-civil war – that they “lodge” and that Almeida’s oral narration, contiguous to the video installation, summons continuously. This un-mapping can only be fully understood also from the perspective of the desire for the inscription of memory in the present and for the future that the never built renovation project, positioned next to the video, evokes. The way in which Globo’s isolated lodgers inhabit it – bodily, psychic, horizontal, both when they lie down and when they walk along the corridors – turns them into a metaphor of the building itself: isolated in the city centre; island surrounded by cranes and concrete; decadent oasis, but communal and alive; suspended in time, but pulsating; phantasmatic re ection emerging in the glass panes of the surrounding skyscrapers’ mirrored surfaces that came to characterize Luanda’s downtown and bay.
Not only Hotel Globo, but also, for example, Once Upon a Time (2012), An Ocean Between Us (2012), Erosion (2013), Archipelago (2014) and Field Work (2016), as well as previous works by Miranda, and even her work as researcher and educator (always connected with the artistic), claims ethico-politically for a historically conscious, socially egalitarian and multicultural relationship (in its most complex sense) of individuals and communities in space.9 Despite claiming for this relationship through different visual strategies in her practice, these always seem to involve an aesthetics of body positioning and movement in urban, architectural and domestic spaces and landscapes, from which the artist does not subtract herself. On the contrary, she usually operates through the inscription of her own bodily subjectivity in the spaces she examines. In one way or another, these spaces always belong to a personal cartography punctuated by the artist’s several affective and emotional geographies. These are diasporic and Atlantic and include notably, though not exclusively, Portugal and Angola.10
In fact, some of Hotel Globo’s images had already appeared in that major project – Once Upon a Time – of which this and other works constitute chapters. Once Upon a Time was shown at Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa in Lisbon from the end of 2012 to the beginning of 2013. It also unfolded in the routes contained by both An Ocean Between Us, exhibited at Plataforma Revólver (Lisbon), and Erosion, shown at Appleton Square (Lisbon). Filmed between Lisbon, Mindelo, Rio de Janeiro, London and Luanda, Once Upon a Time is described by Miranda as a “travel diary” and a “tale of stories of misencounters, desires and memories”.11 In this work, the artist examines the notions of home, origin, root and belonging as passage, route and journey, as multiple and transitory paths, as a hybrid condition of “in-betweenness”, “unhomeliness” and “unbelonging” arising from the diasporic experience. This condition is neither fetishized nor exoticized, but lived through and, therefore, problematized and endlessly negotiated, in line with the theories of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and James Clifford, among others.12 Hall warned us of the danger of de-politicization at work in the post-modernist rei cation and commoditization of identities.13 He was referring to a certain post-modernism, close to what Hal foster called a post-modernism of reaction, as opposed to a post-modernism of resistance.14 Hall urged us to resist such a danger by claiming for a notion of identity as positioning, as multiple simultaneous positionings that, always contingent, to be sure, halt here and there the potentially interminable deferral of meaning proper to the semiotic game in order to acquire a meaning, an agency, a politics.15 Likewise, the passages that are always detectable in Miranda’s visual and sound archives, in her affective archaeologies and cartographies, take place in various shifting zones.
11 Mónica de Miranda, “Once Upon a Time and An Ocean Between Us”, in Re-Viewing Empires and Their Fantasy Objects, programme, non-numerated page. 12 See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 222-237; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1997).
13 Hall, “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?”, pp. 104-114; Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, pp. 222-237. 14 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface”, in Hal Foster (Ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), pp. ix-xvi; Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985). 15 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, pp. 229-230.(Seattle: Bay Press, 1985).
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of contact and border-crossing – ports, airports, roads, ships, oceans, islands, archipelagos, cities, buildings, hotel rooms; indoors and outdoors – without getting lost in inde nability, the endless deferral of meaning or unlimited semiosis.16 These contact zones are home; never permanent and natural, always contingent and arbitrary, an “endless, ever un nished conversation”, physical and psychic transit – but, nonetheless, home.17
In the meantime, Hotel Globo did its own course. It is marked by the theme of the curatorial project in whose context it gained a life of its own. Together with video works by other artists from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe and Portugal, it was commissioned for the exhibition Ilha de São Jorge, with which Beyond Entropy participated in the 14th Architecture Venice Biennale in 2014. The Biennale was devoted to the general theme Absorbing Modernity, 1914-2014, proposed by the curator Rem Koolhass. In disparate ways, all the videos looked at the manner in which architectural modernity was “conceived, developed, built, dwelled, absorbed, rejected” in these ve Portuguese- speaking African countries.18 So, in Hotel Globo, the theme of the origin as route, the home as journey and identity as diasporic hybridity also emerges as a re ection on architecture, the history and memory of architectural modernism, the way in which it crossed oceans to impose itself colonially on African territories, and how it was re-appropriated, reinvented and
16 On the notion of unlimited semiosis, see for example Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks, 8 vol. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1931-1966). 17 On the notion of contact zone, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge: London, 1992). The notion of cultural identity as a kind of “un nished conversation” is Stuart Hall’s (see John Akomfrah, The Un nished Conversation, 2012, video installation, and John Akomfrah, The Stuart Hall Project, 2013, 98 min., UK). 18 Vaz Milheiro, Serventi, Nascimento (Eds.), Ilha de São Jorge, p. 7.
Geography of Affections
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Mónica de Miranda
subverted by the speci city of these contexts both in the colonial and post-independence period.
In the bodily spectrality, performatively wandering, of Globo’s horizontal lodgers, and in the horizontality of the ships forgotten on the bay with which the video opens (already seen in communion with the horizontality of the body on the landscape in Erosion [2013] and Falling [2013]), we thus nd an ethico-political work of memory. Without forgetting the violence of the past and without losing sight of the ways in which imperial ruinations – both economic and social, in line with Ann Stoler – persist in the landscape of the post-colony open to global capitalism, this work of memory calls for the critical examination of the present and the active imagination of alternative futures.19
As Jacques Derrida noted in the context not only of his elaborations on the notion of “hauntology”, but also of what he termed “spectropoetics” – which, in line with Jacques Rancière, can only constitute itself as a politics,20 a spectropolitics – one of the ethico-political tasks of the present is precisely to learn to live more justly, which here, for Derrida, means “to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts”.21 He adds: “this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations”.22 He, who obsessively chased
19 Ann Stoler (Ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001); Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit: essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (Paris: Découverte, 2010). 20 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004).
21 Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge/Kindle Edition, 1994), exordium. 22 Ibid
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etymological spectres, in a kind of poetics of spectres and politics of memory, inheritance and generations also in terms of language as writing, difference and deferral,23 also called our attention to the fact that specters belong, just like us, spectators, to the frequency of a certain visibility – in the case of the specter, the visibility of the invisible – and that the screen “always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition”.24
It is precisely this fragmentary structure of disappearing apparition but apparition nonetheless – in line with George Didi-Huberman’s notion of surviving images and images “in spite of all”,25 and Hall’s warnings against meaning’s endless deferral and the need for a politics of identity and representation –26 that is possible to detect in the bodily, architectural, urban and maritime surfaces of Hotel Globo’s screens. Resisting historical amnesia and the concomitant architectural erasure, Miranda expresses, by means of images, the desire for historically conscious, communal and creative forms of occupying and producing space. Regarding both Miranda’s work and the building inspiring it, Hotel Globo could be said to harbour in its very name the potential for an open and universalizing hospitality – the utopia, perhaps, of an alternative experience of globality.
1 This essay was originally written for a lecture presented on 22 July 2015 at MNAC-Museu do Chiado in Lisbon. With the phrase “Globo Lodgers”, I am making an indirect reference to Night Lodgers (2007), the title of the documentary by Licínio Azevedo on the residents of the modernist Grande Hotel in Beira in Mozambique. * FCT Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Lisbon (CEC-FLUL), New University of Lisbon (IHA-FCSH-NOVA).
2 The rst version of Hotel Globo was commissioned in 2014 for the collective exhibition Ilha de São Jorge, curated by Beyond Entropy for the 14th Architecture Venice Biennale. The second version was produced in 2015 for the solo exhibition Hotel Globo at MNAC-Museu do Chiado, for which Miranda was nominated for the Novo Banco Photo award in 2016 (see Ana Vaz Milheiro, Stefano Serventi, Paula Nascimento [Eds.], Ilha de São Jorge – Objects, Buildings, Cities, Landscape and Visions [London: Beyond Entropy Ltd., 2014]; Mónica de Miranda, Hotel Globo [exh. cat.] [Lisbon: MNAC-Museu do Chiado, 2015]; Novo Banco Photo 2016 – Félix Mula, Mónica de Miranda, Pauliana Valente Pimentel [exh. cat.] [Lisbon: Museu Coleção Berardo, 2016]). Hotel Globo’s video and sound components were exhibited in the group show Uma Delicada Zona de Compromisso, devoted to Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (10 December – 7 February 2016, Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon). The solo show Hotel Globo # 2, which took place from 12 November to 11 December 2016 at Espaço Espelho d’Água in Lisbon, included a new photographic series.
3 Some of the building projects in Luanda’s downtown and waterfront have involved the demolition of slums and the forced removal of their inhabitants to the peripheries. See Jon Schubert, “2002, Year Zero: History as Anti- Politics in the ‘New Angola’”, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2015), pp. 835-853; Rui Soares de Oliveira, Magni cent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War (London: C. Hurst & Co, 2015).
4 In the work Home Sweet Sour Home (2012), Miranda had already made use of blueprints as a kind of archive. In this case, the blueprints of several houses where the artist had lived were redrawn from memory.
5 Henri Lefebvre, Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman (New York, London: Continuum, 2003); Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988); Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999).
6 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass. And London: Belknap Press, 1999).
7 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA.: Beacon Press, 1994); Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn 1988), pp. 575-599; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012).
8 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges”, pp. 585, 589.
9 For a complex view of the notion of cultural identity in the British context, see for example Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture? (Rethinking Race)”, Social Justice, Vol. 20, No. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1993), pp. 104-114. 10 Miranda was born in Portugal in 1976 to an Angolan mother and a Portuguese father who left Angola upon independence in 1975.
23 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 24 Derrida, The Specters of Marx, p. 125. 25 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002); Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
26 Hall draws from Derrida’s notion of différance, but only to the extent that it does not culminate in a depoliticizing “celebration of formal ‘playfulness’”, and retains the Derridian notion of trace precisely for pointing towards the idea of an incessant deferral of meaning which, however, keeps traces of previous meanings (Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, pp. 229).
The use of visual geography within the visual arts has a long and discerning history. Initiated and operating in the tradition of European exploration and research, visual geography represented the results of habitually institutionalised fieldwork by the use of paintings, photographs, drawing, prints, sculpture and other forms of the visual arts. The symbolic value of representation through the visual arts provided a system of cross-reference often of previously unrecorded subjects and subjectivities that had remained localised and widely unknown in the old world1. Prior to the expeditions from predominantly the western world, the circulation of this specialised form of the visual arts through print and publication allowed a mapping of the world according to their research and studies; a form of mnemonic system of patterns and images that accompanied ideas or associations which would assist in articulating a new world outside of the European project and subject.
The circulation of visual geography within the artworld and its institutions including museums, auction houses and collections as well as its presence in educational establishments and societies provided, and continues to stipulate within the contemporary, the accented history of development versus underdevelopment. This binary polarisation justified action around difference and its suppositions with a dualism that accommodated the ruthless power struggles resulting from colonial imposition and continuing within cultural and intellectual postcolonial struggles.
The early work by the artist and researcher, Monica de Miranda, between the years 2007-9, is based on the evaluation of her personal understanding of geographical accounts, within an urban archaeology that becomes despondently centralised in her later videoworks; An Ocean between us, Erosion and Once upon a time (2010-15) and the photographic works Archipelego, Line trap and Airport. The seminal work Black House (2009), part of the Black Flags series, acts as a middle passage to her practice. Black House is a barren, permeable structure of a small hut or shed like construction, sparsely erected from black fabric over a metal and wire frame. Barrenly lit, the sculpture is an overwhelmingly eerie experience of an indoor space suggesting a transitory dwelling rather than one that proposes any robust sense of belonging.
Black House, like many of her early projects, often engaged in rethinking urban life, and reimagining and reanimating the infrastructure in their experimental use of materials and formats which included screenprinting onto coloured fabrics, sporting objects covered in sequins and the use of text to drive the context of her insights. Since 2009, de Miranda’s oeuvre has gradually traded the explorations in sculptural forms for a confidence in lens-based articulations, of multiple projections, duratran lightbox and panoramic prints. This shift in the later works allowed de Miranda to open her gaze to geographies on the move; people, places and architecture in a restless poetry that retains factors including a feeling of greater voyeurism and surveillance, providing ample meaning beyond the preceding works’ polemic and redemptive states.
The recent work is effective in its suggestive abilities of urban malfeasance, often emotive and remotely sited narratives unsettled between a polyphony of systems and supporting networks of departure, transition and arrival. The photographic and videoworks explore the cruelty of fate, the remainders for the constrained within the messianic power of cities and states. Similar to the visual propositions of the Canadian artist Stan Douglas and the Algerian born, British based photographer Zineb Sedira; de Miranda examines the physical manifestations and the interweaving threads of culture, power, politics and histories. Her subjects, when present, remain weary for each thing that has changed, often looking outward from the safety of venetian blinds in a state of examination, half occluding their identities with hands and hats.
References to the colonial past remain fashioned; the subjects as characters wear white clothes, a necessary accoutrement in the humid tropicality of the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. In the Erosion series (2012), de Miranda returns to visual geography in a contemporary fusion of two images, the high rise and the seashore, as the emblematic collision of progress and nature. The eroding hulk of a beached cargo ship no longer remains useful, its reason or presence discarded, through which de Miranda accentuates the malaise and deathliness for the places and lives it had destroyed for its treasonous cargo.
de Miranda, continually offers figurative details in her works, suggestive elements, often eroded from multiple usage and the climate they traverse, to suggest as she does so cryptically, “Come here to the place you have never left” as a central text in her installation Once upon a time. de Miranda suggests a dueling tryst that it is probable in that we never really leave a place in the same way that places never leave us. She repeatedly suggests in these figurative details that we do not know who are all these protagonists. How is the urban advocating a particular cause or idea of the constant flow of people, when the settled lens should make comprehensive the roots of trade and commodities.
In Back Pack Paradise, Biting Nails, Road Lines and Where r u from? maps and places, names of cities and states persist as part of the body, as a grafted nationhood, correlating global travel with the rise in graffiti and tattoo subcultures. In Road Lines, the palms are presented as maps of places and travel, forced by cheap deals. In Biting Nails, the video focuses on a single character of a woman, whose nails are ‘painted’ with flags from different countries, gradually she bites her nails, violently tearing these boundary markers from herself. The transitory metaphor of flight and loss is highlighted in the acerbic text “I am not really there or here” on one of four screen-printed Black Flags series (2010). In the 2009 installation Battle of Europe, much the same notion was implied by presenting 11 EU Blue boxing punchbags, hung in a tight circle that contained the viewer more within its broader circle of influence rather than allowing the Schengen experience of borderlessness.
Staging and conceptualising the crisis for postcolonial internationalism and multiculturality, de Miranda explores its implausibility, the detente history that affects the ex-colonies and colonial subjectivities in a globalised world that has recanted its debts and is currently whirling to new economic instructions. Her work Changing Hats suggests such a lack of balance and the buffoon as the new subjectivity is explored in Remain to stay…. Forever.
de Miranda’s graphic yet uncompromised visual responses to the European Union competes with the collective nightmares from historic and geographical colonial haunting. Side by side they twitch as an ugly unconscious mechanism of denial that repudiates the interdependent relationships of cultures and people. Her recent photographic works including Hotel Globo and Sleep Over provide the overlapping argument of the singular community fast withdrawing to become a place of values where European essentialism thrives; most importantly where de-colonisation so necessary to move beyond visual and portrayed geographies of race and places, is indissolubly bound in corridors and pylons that maintain the illusions of progression and control at all costs. As the writer Ralph Ellison states ‘the true artist destroys the accepted world by way of revealing the unseen’2
1 The term is often used to refer to the Eastern hemisphere specifically to Europe.
2 Ralph Ellison, ‘Introduction’. Romare Beardon: Paintings and Projections, exh. Cat. Albany : The Art Gallery, State University of New York, 1968
If I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself
Michel de Montaigne
During the period between the years 1605 and 1609 the number of geographical publications in Europe grew exponentially to reach the same figure as all the books published since printing began in 1550. This phenomenon was directly linked to the enormous impact that colonial expansion was having on the minds of Europeans. Books relaying the voyages of discovery, with their depictions of unknown territories and the magical presence of ‘other’ cultures, became favourite reading material. The civilisation that invaded Latin America at the turn of the 16th century was dancing to the rhythm of the creative explosion known as the Renaissance. In that light, America appeared to be, according to Eduardo Galeano, ‘one more invention, incorporated alongside gunpowder, the printing press, paper and the compass, to the imminent birth of the Modern Age’ .
In the context of colonial expansion and the birth of capitalism, travel was a vehicle to connect economic and political interests to natural and human resources. As much a reflection on those impulses as an expression of the interconnectedness proposed by globalisation, a considerable number of artists articulate travel, migration and displacement as the conceptual armature of their work.
Travel in Monica de Miranda’s imagery becomes a metaphor for what Walter Mignolo calls ‘the colonial wound’: as a way to explore her multiple movements and those of her family through places linked by a common colonial matrix she builds her own emotional map in a variety of mediums. It could be argued that the stations chosen for her transit suggest a reflection on decolonization that in the Zapatistas’ terms would carry us towards a world that would fit many worlds: a proposal for a pluriversal -as in opposition to uni-versal – reading of reality.
Following the implicit logic of body politics and in contrast with geopolitics – which focus on the link between power and space – the artist locates the subject of study in the individual. In this territory of subjectivity, home becomes a shifting paradigm where the journey of the self is essentially a constant attempt to belong. Surpassing the limitations of identity politics, Monica de Miranda’s entire art production becomes an exercise in emotional geography.
Home as a territory delimited by the body is graphically depicted in the text-based work Come home to the place you never left, presented in Carpe Diem as a prologue to her epic travel ‘novel’ in chapters, the video triptych Once upon a Time. The most compelling example of the attempt to re enact geography, the triptych offers a rich panoply of fragmentary imagery collected during the artist’s transits through three continents. The video weaves a complex story where fictional and real places intersect personal spaces of memory and longing to build a non linear narrative.
Having resorted to maps in previous bodies of work, as in Where u From? of 2007, Monica de Miranda’s latest production reaches the poetic climax of the unsaid by shuffling places with which she has emotional ties – Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Mindelo – as in an unpredictable card game.
In another work in the exhibition, Home sweet sour house, the artist employs drawing to create a series of memory renderings of all the houses she has inhabited in her life. From the imprecise contours of childhood homes to her current domicile, the descriptive exercise is interrupted by the passing of time, whereas broken by conflict, exile or migrations and unsettled by the ambiguity of feeling. The result is a codified language in need of translation. Later interpreted by an architect into technical renderings, the hand drawings became pristine plates showing sensible layouts that nonetheless retain the personal features brought back from memory: rooms of uncertain proportions encapsulate the names of people who occupied them. Home sweet sour house is, once again, a repository of memory, a personal archive made of expressive calligraphies that reconstruct space from oral tradition. Orality is in this case connected with motherhood. Through interspersed images of a mother and her daughter it presents a connection as deep as the large sea that the self needs to find its bearings. This link of motherhood and the ocean and rivers is evocative of the female figures of syncretism Yemanjá and Oxum, mothers of the waters and wombs of history. The video lyrically describes loss and the pain of separation by means of oral knowledge, building a thread passed from generation to generation in a landscape of broken ancestries, where continuity rests only in blood vessels.
The second chapter of the journey that is Once upon a Time which is presented at Plataforma Revolver in Transboavista has been made possible by the artists proximity to the fluvial port of the Tejo river in Lisbon. In the video diptych An Ocean between Us, the fluvial port and a stationary cargo ship become the stage for metaphorical transits: as a passage between worlds, the liner evokes the journeys that connected the continents through the big waters, providing a ground for the encounter of cultures, the expansion of trade, and also for the inception of slavery. Conceived as a set of light boxes and a video projection An Ocean between Us deals in spatial ambiguity with melancholic undertones.
Ships for maritime travel become stages where symbolic umbilical cords unite the lost parts: an ocean and a river, a mother and a daughter, a lost love, and the promise of a re encounter are the elements of a catharsis. The various chapters of this travelling exhibition aspire to present an archaeology of the self through passages and landscapes. In it, travel becomes a vehicle of knowledge, where representation can never be trusted as the depictions of places reside within the realm of the unconscious, and memories are the tools for an exercise of healing the personal – and colonial – wound.
Gabriela Salgado
Curator
London, September 2012