“Colonial Memory, Wounded Civilization”
In his essay Discourse on Colonialism, Afro-descendant poet and politician Aimé Césaire pointed out that a civilisation that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a wounded civilisation. For him, in two centuries of bourgeois rule, Europe had been incapable of resolving the two major questions that had given rise to its existence: the question of the proletariat and the colonial question. More than seventy years have passed since the publication of that essay and Europe has still not resolved either of these issues.
Sunday, 29 September
10.00-11.35
Colonial Memory and the 60th Venice Biennale
The proposal in Block 3 is to present the artistic and curatorial experience of three of the national pavilions participating in the current 60th edition of the Venice Biennale; an event which has brought together an extraordinary variety of artistic practices – most of them operating from non-Eurocentric conceptual frameworks, imaginaries and worldviews – under the title Foreigners Everywhere. Two artists and a curator have been invited to talk about the work they have shared with the public in Venice. Marked by different diasporic processes, all three of them inhabit a multiple, multi-localised identity.
Introduction:
Andrea Pacheco González.
Panellists:
– Cindy Sissokho, curator of the Wellcome Collection, London.
– Mónica de Miranda, Portuguese-Angolan artist: “Curating the Living Archives”.
– Sandra Gamarra, Spanish-Peruvian artist: “Memoria Migrante”.
©️ Still from Greenhouse (2024) by Mónica de Miranda
The film Path to the Stars is part of the group show Tide Line which starts from the Revolution of 25 April 1974 to reach the present day,
reflecting on the ongoing revolutions, most importantly those related to the state of the planet.
©️ Still from Path to the Stars film (2022)
The Center of Modern Art Gulbenkian open its doors again to the public and with it the exhibition Tide Line (Linha de Maré) where my work Path to the Stars will be showcased.
‘Tide Line’ starts from the Revolution of 25 April 1974 to reach the present day, reflecting on the ongoing revolutions, most importantly those related to the state of the planet.
Organised around large installations, the exhibition corresponds, in a fluid way, to a group of ideas that framed the choice of works: transgression (in relation to the Portuguese dictatorship), manifesto (the first Portuguese artistic ecological manifesto), interiority (of the experience proposed by the artwork), mutation (technological, post-human) and evocation (of a real connection with the living world).
Of the approximately 80 works on display, many are recent acquisitions never before shown at CAM, including Monica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars, incorporated to the museum’s collection on 2022.
Film Path to the Stars follows the journey, from dawn to dusk, of an Angolan freedom fighter las she travels by boat past the banks of the Kwanza River, the largest exclusively Angolan river, which flows into the Atlantic south of Luanda.
Along the banks of the river, the woman has several encounters with herself, as she becomes a woman of water, a woman of land, and finally, a woman of language. The bodies flow into each other through the water; metabolically, through the involvement with all living and inanimate elements of the water cycle; metaphorically, through the embodiment of states of mind and memories; or even symbolically, through the cultural construction which weaves the narrative along the banks of the Kwanza River.
A metaphor of a female place that threads through various times and spaces, a serene-faced woman intently observes the nature that surrounds her, while her body slowly merges with the watery currents of the river.
©️ Still from Path to the Stars (2022) by Mónica de Miranda
“Free as They Want To Be: Artist Committed to Memory”
Free as They Want To Be: Artist Committed to Memory, an exhibition hosted by the The Clark Atlanta University Art Museum from September until December, 24 is featuring three works by Mónica de Miranda.
Co-curated by Dr. Cheryl Finley and Dr. Deborah Willis, Free as They Want To Be: Artist Committed to Memory is an exhibition of contemporary art inspired by historical memory through photography, video and archival materials. The exhibit asks how have these mediums impacted the afterlives of slavery in post emancipation America and the liberating power of photography (art) to define a free-self.
©️ Still from Beauty (2018) by Mónica de Miranda
“Path To The Stars”
Film and video gallery installation “Path to the Stars” (2022) explores the legacy of anti-colonial resistance in Angola through the metaphor of the river, an element that evokes ancient temporalities that cycle and spiral, challenging the triumphant teleologies of political discourse.
The video follows a female protagonist from dawn to dusk as she journeys down the Kwanza River. Eventually, she reaches the river’s mouth, where it empties into the Atlantic Ocean and where the Portuguese invaded Angola in the late 16th century.
The Kwanza river is a living organism that carries within the history of Angola – the history of liberation struggle, the civil wars, the precolonial histories, and the stories of the ecological disasters that are happening in this contemporary period.
During her journey, the woman confronts her own “shadow self” through shifting moments in time. Past, present, and future bleed together through various scenes and characters connected to the river. The poetic journey is situated in a space of imagination and liberation that is at once real and utopian.
©️ Still from Path to the Stars (2022) by Mónica de Miranda
For the group show Le Sel Noir Mónica de Miranda presents photographs from her series Greenhouse. The exhibition is inspired by Glissant’s philosophical-theoretical approaches to multiculturalism, the exhibition presents international contemporary art that deals with black subjectivity – understood as an expression of identification, self-positioning and aesthetic agency. Curated by Dr. Alejandro Perdomo Daniels.
©️ O som do vento e a minha casa from the Greenhouse series by Mónica de Miranda (2024)
The Kwanza River – among the longest rivers in Angola that flows into the Atlantic Ocean – provided a point of entry for the Portuguese invasion in 1482. As the site of numerous battles of resistance and a natural force in its own right, the river prominently features as an symbol of independence – Angola’s currency Kwanza, is named after the river. Mónica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars (2022) revisits this legacy of anti-colonial resistance in Angola, inviting the audience on a journey through revolutionary history and futures-in-the-making. The title is taken from O Caminho das Estrelas (Path to the Stars) a 1953 poem by Agostinho Neto, a freedom fighter and the former president of Angola. Over the course of a single day, from sunrise to sunset, viewers follow the path of a heroine as she navigates the River. She confronts various avatars of her past – and of Angola’s struggle for independence from Portugal – along the way. This deeply poetic film traces lines of understanding about the meaning of stars. Miranda sheds light on the invisible and uncelebrated figures who took part in the struggle for Angolan independence – namely women – as well as the ecological resources they defended, especially the waterways that have borne witness to history, and continue to do so in the present.
Curated by Johanne Affricot and Eric Otieno Sumba.
Opening Wednesday, 17 July, 6:30 PM
Bissaya Barreto Museum
Bringing together a collection of works, the exhibition proposes a profound reflection on identity, memory, territory, and resistance. The artworks are fluidly articulated, revealing layers of meaning that intersect the body, space, and time, between the visible and the invisible, the past and the present, the individual and the collective.
©️ Twist from Tomorrow is Another Day series by Mónica de Miranda (2018)
For the first time, Mónica de Miranda’s work will be on display in Australia. The exhibition at Ames Yavus Gallery was curated by Ananya Mukhopadhyay.
MEMORY/MYTH is a program of films and video installations borne from distinct yet overlapping experiences of indigeneity, diaspora and the intersecting global legacies of colonialism. Through contemporary and historic works by a group of acclaimed international artists, Ames Yavuz presents a conversation between kindred spirits — authors united by their shared inheritance of landscapes and stories ravaged by the imperial project. The extensive lacunae in such histories are visited by these artists as sites for both mourning and discovery, while also being generative spaces for myth-making, fantasy and the curative contemplation of possible futures.
Highlight works in the program include Blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, by celebrated photographer-filmmakers Donovan Wylie and Peter Mann, marking the first time the video installation will be shown outside of Ireland. Mónica de Miranda, a prominent Portuguese artist currently representing her nation at the Venice Biennale, will showcase The Island (A Ilha), commissioned by Autograph, London.
Image credits: Mónica de Miranda, The Island (A Ilha), Film Still, 2022.
“As if the world has no West” will premiere at Exposed Torino. The movie proposes the creation of new landscapes by investigating hidden, yet metaphysically present ecologies in Angola, deconstructing western understandings of memory, history, and land. The project enquires in the work of anthropologist Augusto Zita investigations in the Namibia desert, in which he devised a nature-oriented space/time system having light as a third dimension.
This work will bring forward this research , while deconstructing the understanding of land and looking at the land as a place of mutual care and liberation, As if the world had no west reveals nonwestern configurations of landscape.
EXPOSED is Turin’s new international festival of photography, which every year will bring temporary exhibitions, a specialised fair, educational activities, meetings, artistic commissions and off-site events centered around a theme to the Piedmontese capital in May. Promoted by the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region, the Turin Chamber of Commerce, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT on behalf of Fondazione CRT and organised by Fondazione per la Cultura Torino, EXPOSED was created to strengthen the deep bond between Turin and photography.