The archive has recently emerged as a critical tool to conceptualize the heuristic value of history, heritage, and memory in debates on postcolonial discourses. Responses to the colonial archive are a significant current in late 20th and early 21st century culture. In many different contexts and in a range of visual media, artists have critiqued and deconstructed dominant Western myths and stereotypes of identity. The theoretical issues that inform this subject include the relationship between aesthetics and politics, forms of resistance, the structure and operation of cultural stereotypes in visual cultures, questions of cultural agency, the relationship between postcolonialism and feminism, cultural hybridity, and cross-cultural borrowing and appropriation.
The post-archive is a video and photographic project to be develop by Mónica de Miranda as practice based research. It will take the form of a contemporary art archive presented as a web-based platform. This archive will combine factual past
and present contemporary experiences with history and memory intertwined with fictional re-imaginings of post-colonial urban places and spaces through the place of the familiar and the genealogy of the personal spaces of the artist. This archive will be a study and practice of storing, cataloguing, and retrieving documents, photographs, videos, postcards, related to the city present postcolonial geographies of Lisbon and its contested territories, legacies, memories, and identities. It will look to the figure of the artist as an archaeologist and ethnographer, who works as a personal archivist and ethnographer of histories and aims to recover and reconstruct memories and archives, to reveal how this shapes a relation to the past and the construction of historical meanings for the present understanding of reality.
Scientific coordination and organized by Mónica de Miranda.
This project is part of the project Post-Archive: Politics of Memory, Place and Identity, CITCOM-CEC-FLUL.
This project was produced with national funding from the FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. under the project UIDB/00509/2020.
Mónica de Miranda is a Portuguese/Angolan visual artist, film-maker and researcher whose interdisciplinary and research-based practice critically looks at the convergence of politics, gender, memory, space and history. Her work encompasses
drawing, installation, photography, film and sound, on the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Mónica investigates strategies of resistance, geographies of affection, storytelling and ecologies of care.
She is the founder of Hangar (2014), an art and research centre in Lisbon. Hangar’s programmes provide spaces where artists, curators and researchers mainly from the global south can co-create and build social and creative networks to benefit their communities.
As artist and co-curator of the project Greenhouse, Monica represents the Portugal Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2024.
Her work has been presented at major international events such as: 6th Lubumbashi Biennale; 12th Berlin Biennale; 12th Dakar Biennale; 5th Biennale Internationale de l’Art Contemporain de Casablanca; Bamako Encounters – 13th African Biennale of Photography; 14th Venice Architecture Biennale; BIENALSUR 2021; Houston FotoFest 2022;18th Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia.
Solo and group exhibitions have taken place at: CAIXA Cultural, Rio de Janeiro; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Gulbenkian, Lisbon; MUCEM, Marseilles; AfricaMuseum, Tervuren; MAAT, Lisbon; MUAC, Mexico City; Barbican, London; Autograph, London; Frac pays de la Loire, Nantes; Uppsala Museum, Sweden; MNAC, Lisbon; Camões Cultural Institute, Luanda, among others.
Monica’s work features in public and private collections worldwide.