ALEXANDRA PRADO COELHO
Words

MATILDE TRAVASSOS
Portrait

PORTUGUESE WITH ANGOLAN ROOTS, THE VISUAL ARTIST MÓNICA DE MIRANDA’S WORK SUMMONS NATURE AS A “LIVING ARCHIVE”, AS WELL AS A VARIETY OF LITERARY REFERENCES, TO ASK ONE QUESTION: WHO CAN TELL US THE STORY?

A black woman descends a river in Angola. She wears military camouflage and travels along the Kwanza River on a journey lasting from sunrise to sunset. Her name is Carlota, the mysterious female soldier who the Polish war journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski photographed in Angola in 1975. Shortly after, she died in combat, leaving behind an image that would become an icon of the women’s liberation struggle. That said, it’s also Mónica de Miranda, the Portuguese/Angolan visual artist who is also the author of this film. And she is many other black women, from different times and places, on a journey to find themselves.

“There has always been a relationship between the landscape and human body in my work,” says de Miranda, welcoming us to her Lisbon studio. They’re “vast landscapes, with endless horizons”, in which the female body appears “in contrast to a classic, historical representation of domesticity.” Throughout the journey, the woman wearing camouflage uniform “has various encounters, with history, with the past, with the ecology of space, with herself, with her shadow, with death, with life”.

The film, which is called Path to the Stars, was made in 2022 and can now be seen at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s CAM (Modern Art Centre), after having been shown at various exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennale. De Miranda began thinking about it during the pandemic, stemming, as always the case in her work, from literary sources, the book Another Day of Life, by Kapuscinski, and O Livro dos Guerrilheiros, by Luandino Vieira, “where he talks about the metaphysical power of being able to scare off the enemy using the forces that exist in the forest”.

Descending the Kwanza “is a journey of discovery from a place that is also the protagonist”: the river. “When I go to Luanda, I get out of the city a lot and try to find places close to nature,’ explains the artist. “I spent various summers on the banks of the Kwanza. This story was already there. It occurred because I was there for a long time, listening to the story the river wanted to tell. That enormity of nature, which seems to be in a crude state, has often regenerated and hides many traumas”.

If “the forest was a haven in all the wars in Angola”, the river, in itself, “has many layers. It was the first place the Portuguese penetrated the territory and, on the first layer, it takes us to that place of navigation and slavery”. Saying that, its waters have enormous regenerative power. And this is how the river answers de Miranda ‘s question: “Who can tell us the story? Is it just scientific data? Or can nature do it?”

Nature continued telling stories, and intersecting with political history, in Greenhouse 2024, a piece which de Miranda took to the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, representing the Portuguese Pavilion with a project shared with historian Sónia Vaz Borges and choreographer Vânia Gala. The artists/curators occupied the Palazzo Franchetti with a ‘creole garden’ inspired by Édouard Glissant’s work. “Cultivated by enslaved people as an act of resistance and a source of food, the creole garden is the opposite of the monocultural plantation”, write de Miranda and Borges in the catalogue.

And it connects to other gardens that still exist, like the urban gardens on the outskirts of Lisbon, also bulwarks of resistance and survival for the communities that tend them. “They’re contact zones, where the urban city touches the rural. They show how communities trying to adapt to the city on its margins are defining those margins through veritable gardens of resistance”, says de Miranda.

History is also forged via knowledge transmission and it’s here where Greenhouse is receptive to the thoughts and teachings of Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973), agronomist and founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). At the heart of the project is the School of the Revolution, a circular structure inspired by the ‘tabanca schools’ set up by Cabral in Guinea. Once again, the forest emerges as “the refuge where the strategies to overthrow the colonial regime were outlined”.

After the Venice Biennale, the cycle comes to a close with plants from the “creole garden” arriving in Portugal, in the Quinta da Princesa neighbourhood in Amora, where de Miranda has been working on another project, the Black Seed Project. “I’m making an archive on the seeds and cataloguing them. Sugar cane, guinea pepper, rue, chilli, pumpkin, chayote,” she lists. “These seeds are symbols of Lisbon’s Afro communities’ resistance, who, expelled from central parts, create veritable Gardens of Eden, regenerating urban wastelands and making places for sharing, subsistence and freedom”.

TRANSPLANTING, 2024 | HD VIDEO AND SOUND, FILM STILLS

Quinta da Princesa will also host a public artwork inspired by the School of the Revolution, which the artist sees, in the future (she is currently looking for support) as a “meeting and sharing place for the community”.

However, no cycle ever really closes, because de Miranda’s work is all interlinked and each project communicates with those before and those after. The gaze of the woman descending the Kwanza River is extended in As If the World Had No West (photography and film, with texts and dialogues written by the artist with Ondjaki, as well as texts by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho), which can be seen from 6th February until 15th June at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates.

“How could we think about the world if the hegemonic construction wasn’t made from a Western perspective”? To answer this question, de Miranda follows the path previously braved by Augusto Zita - a path that takes her to the Namib desert, guided by Zita’s notebooks that Angolan musician Victor Gama introduced to her.

“Zita was an Angolan anthropologist who never received due recognition because he didn’t use conventional methods, but rather indigenous divination processes, based on cosmological methods”, explains the artist.

After his still-unexplained disappearance, only his notebooks remained, which contain the knowledge Zita had garnered through his relationship with the welwitschia (desert octopus), a plant sacred to indigenous cultures and which only exists in the Namib desert. With roots longer than 30 metres and a life expectancy of around a thousand years old, the plant is also a symbol of resistance.

In As If There Were No West in the World (2023), another woman travels through another territory (the Namib desert and Tigres Island, in southern Angola), “where the Portuguese moulded the landscapes, tore up the landscape, leaving scars’, the ruins of a colonial past that has now been partially swallowed up by the sand. The landscape, once again, is a “living archive” that contains a lot of what “Eurocentric stereotypes” choose to hide. “All places have stories. We have to sit and listen to them”.

Mónica de Miranda

Francisco Trêpa

The Portuguese Sibyl