Depth of Field
Mónica de Miranda
Curated by João Laia and Nuno Crespo
Opening 28th March at 18:30
Until 13th June
School of Arts Exhibition Room
Free entrance
Following her participation in the 60th Venice Biennale, with the Greenhouse project, and in the Sharjah Biennale, with As if the world had no west, Mónica de Miranda is exhibiting Depth of Field project at the Católica Art Centre, in collaboration with Galeria Municipal do Porto / Ágora - Cultura e Desporto do Porto, E.M.
The exhibition, in the hall of the School of Arts from 28 March to 13 June, aims to showcase the work of Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita, one of the first African anthropologists to turn anthropological research towards the coloniser. Based on Zita's never-published field notebook, the artist has created a film in which she gives voice to the anthropologist's research and his investigations in the Namib desert, where he conceived a cosmological system orientated towards nature, with light as the third dimension.
The exhibition also includes a series of images depicting the Portuguese colonial remnants in the Namib desert, Towba and Baía dos Tigres in southern Angola, a ‘ghost’ village founded by fishermen from the Algarve around 1860, which they inhabited until the end of the colonial period in 1975 and then abandoned.
The artist's work explores the relationship between space and time, nature and history, memory and land through the lens of non-Western cosmologies and conceptions of time and space using the mediums of photography and film, informed by Zita's practices and the literary, cinematic and anthropological work of Ruy Duarte Carvalho.
Deph of Field brings together concrete documents of history with systematic aesthetic explorations that aim to bring to light hidden memories, ideas and conceptions of reality and depict the fall of the Portuguese empire and the colonial ruins of that empire, which are now swallowed up by nature in an act of natural regeneration.
As if the world had no west (2024)
As if the World had no West tells of the journey of a young woman who travels through the desert and who, through her relationship with the Mirabilis, ancient plants, listens to the cosmos. She listens to her elders, the earth, fire and air. The drought calls the rain, the ashes show the way, the plants tell her the stories of colonization, of the beginning of the world when the desert was still scrubland and there were trees and flowers. She tries to find out where the water is and searches for this universe by going through colonial ruins now buried by time and sands and lost in the middle of the sea.
As if the world had no West 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’s 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 hegemonic understanding of land and territory, looking at the land as a place of mutual care, liberation history and memory. As if the world had no West reveals non-western configurations of landscape, and the histories and memories it holds through film and photography.
– film synopsis
