Sabrina Amrani is delighted to present the online viewing room Mónica de Miranda: Deconstruction/Reconstruction, a complement to the artist's IRL exhibition All that Burns Melts into Air, currently on show at the gallery space.

To really understand an artwork, we need to know its context. And, in Mónica de Miranda's pieces, the places that each photography shows have a history of their own. In this sense, Deconstruction/Reconstruction brings to attention the unique conditions of the places the artist has visited in order to create her works. Through a deconstruction with a post-colonial gaze, Mónica de Miranda proposes a reconstruction of the cartography of her affections.

Across her investigations on the Afro-Portuguese world, Mónica de Miranda’s works creates a space for debate on the historical relation between Portugal and its former colonies, informed by the artist's own experience. De Miranda draws addresses bodies, ideas, and emotions, hinting at the fact that most of those in the path of the empire did not have the power to change history.

De Miranda body of works talks about exile, dislocation, and displacement, as well as the genre of travel. Her narrative mode 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 photographs 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 the 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.

In her films, she relies on visual strategies to explore the significance of cityscapes, landscapes, and oceanic bodies to deconstruct the self-through memory, imagined reconstruction, physical return, and creative production.

Mónica De Miranda’s films and photographs 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 of past encounters, and the ways in which these “reminders” continue to make themselves present in both Portugal and its colonies. Portugal cast a shadow over a spectrum of the world, with large landmasses and islands that became colonial possessions that now are Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde Islands in Africa; Brazil and a plethora of islands in South America; 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 trades linkages, monopolising sea routes. In the artist’s works, we see traces of the restless expeditions that the Portuguese made five centuries ago, and the colonial wound that still lasts today.

Any reflection or study on the history of Angolan architecture starts pondering the Portuguese colonial influence and impact in the building of Angola’s cities.

Angola urbanism is an expression of the process of colonial domination that took place in the public space and buildings, as well as in its social hierarchies, influenced by historical, economical and political factors.

The modernization of urban tissue was one of the main political activities of the Portuguese Estado-Novo regimen. This allowed the legitimization of architectural and urban production, what resulted in the Angolan context, in constructions that expressed a very unique tropical language, rooted in the architectural principles of modernism but adapted for its geography and local climate.

This new archicture called Tropical-Modernist does not represents the principles of the Estado-Novo colonialism, being, in fact, the foundation for a rupture from where a new narrative emerged, a narrative of an egalitarian and democratic society – which never really existed. In Angola, not only did the urban plan lead to the erasure of existing places and the imposition of new social ideals, but also the modernist utopia of freedom was a big failure.

With the end of the civil war in Angola, came an economic boom, a consequence of the rising of oil prices and the emergence of a capitalist economic model. All these changes led to the construction of new buildings under the subject of “national reconstruction”, what included vast housing and infrastructure projects, as well as the beginning of a large-scale private real-estate venture.

The rhythm and scale of these new projects in the Angolan cities was proportional to the state of abandon of the historical architecture heritage. Even thou the conservation of Monuments is a delicate matter, it got the support of private companies with commercial interests, and thanks to these monuments conflicted relationship with history- if this architectural legacy part of a past which we want to distance ourselves, then the new skyscrapers emerging now are the image of a “New Angola”, flurrying with a new desire to erase history and memory.

This geography of tensions between a past still present and a present that is uncertain, full of spatial and temporal contradictions, particular of post-colonial territories, is the starting point for the Panorama series. Panorama is a post-archival research project which explores the connections between colonial and post-colonial memory. Using different media such as photography, video and installation, Mónica de Miranda reflect on themes like urban archaeology and her personal geography, tracing a critical process of historical deconstruction and construction of the Angola collective memory.

Cape Verde is a country spanning an archipelago of ten islands located in the central Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of West Africa. The islands, volcanic in origin, are mostly rocky and do not have a lot of vegetation or green landscape, due to the infrequent rainfall. The population is mostly Creole. Few countries have experienced emigration as extensively as Cape Verde. The diaspora outnumbers the resident population, and virtually every household has an emigrant family member. Mónica de Mirand's work uses the eroded soil as a metaphor for the experience of emigration from Cape Verde. Tough economic conditions during the last decades of its colonisation and during the first years of Cape Verde’s Independence led many to migrate to Europe, the Americas and to other African countries.

On the island of Fogo, in the archipelago of Cape Verde, Mónica de Miranda recognizes the intensity of the life of our planet in the sense that it is renewed by the volcanic eruptions that spew fire and lava, which immediately cools and everything crystallizes, everything transforms and updates; in an approximation to the paradoxical duality that the presence of the volcano implies: between life and death.

Cape Verde rocky landscape, almost lunar, evokes the fertility promise. It became an ambitious colonial project for Europe's great leap into the New World, the experiment of what would become the biggest imperial expansion in Portugal's history. As a true colonization laboratory, a trade hub of goods and human beings , Cape Verde would become a platform for permanent migrations and a fragmented community, with most of its population now in exile.

For the last decade, Mónica de Miranda has investigated the archaeological urban reality of Lisbon and its African neighborhoods that stand on the city limbo. These places stand as points of resistance and places that reclaim an African ownership to belong to Europe. The project South Circular reframes the contemporary ruins of illegally built neighborhoods in Europe and the reclaim of belonging to a city that excludes foreigners from its centre. It is a double consciousness act of time and space: these two concepts are related and inquire on how the colonial past in Africa has direct implications to the present urban realities, struggles and the experiences of European and African postcolonial cities.

The archaeological traces of an old military defense line takes on a different role and meaning in the present. This symbolic wall sets a paradox before our eyes. What have begun as a military defense to keep the French invaders out of the capital, during Napoleon’s attack two centuries ago, is now a barrier that keeps a large African native population, coming from the Portuguese old colonies, out of the prosperous and much desired capital city.

This territory, excluded from the city basic infrastructure, and its inhabitants, also excluded from society, are the protagonists of South Circular. The video shows us a stage especially built for its community, their cultural activities and events. Nevertheless, these spaces were never used for their intended purposed, becoming a ruin before even being finished. Unlike the other ruins, the ancient forts used centuries ago for defending the capital, the ruins in South Circular are contemporary ones that never served the community.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is the main stage for Mónica de Miranda Project titled "Tomorrow is Another Day". This title is an expression that points from the present to the future keeping in mind the memories and heritages of the past, bringing to speech the flaws and absences of history and politics and pointing to a grounded hopeful tomorrow in reimagination. It also refers to a desire to make a new type of architecture that breaks with the established canon in the context of post-independence in the African continent, where architecture acquired the capacity of awaken utopias and also implied a commitment to democracy, social freedom, producing priceless places.

One of the most famous and symbolic buildings of this utopia architecture is the tower named Tour de l’Échanger, in Kinshasa. It was one of the tallest buildings in Africa at the time of its construction, between 1970 and 1974. Designed by French Tunisian architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub upon the request of dictator Mobutu as a tribute to Patrice Emery Lumumba, the leading leader of the resistance against Belgian colonial domination. Its shape is a mixture of architectural forms such as skyscrapers, pyramids and citadel, in the attempt to express a desire for power. Cacoub was also responsible for another construction in Congo, called Gbadolite, considered by many to be the Versailles of the Congo, as well as many other projects in the French colonies, before, during and after the Independence wars. The Tour de l’Échanger was an incomplete work for decades, being finished recently due to a Chinese investment.

All monuments are erected to fix symbols and to enhance the memory of events and the protagonists that made history from the point of view of those with power. They help to create a narrative that can last generations and change our opinion about reality. Buildings are also monuments erected to embody worldviews and to organize our way of living and understanding time and space.

Tomorrow is Another Day suggests another category of study: the body-monument. Recorded in the cities of Kinshasa and Maputo (Mozambique), it presents part of the national heritage built in the times of the Independence Wars to highlight the appropriation and resignification of power, the canon of beauty and the hellenistic aesthetics through the body of the black woman. This body, absent from the history books and official narratives, here becomes a monument body. The twins also add the representation of duality and otherness in a game of similarities and differences in natural and architectural environments, where ruin and resilience project us into a terrain of social reinvention.

Sabrina Amrani’s current exhibition “All That Burns Melts Into Air” starts with the eponymous project by Mónica de Miranda located on the island of São Tomé. In this immersive project we lose track of space and the physical dimensions of the island, located in a country with less than a thousand square kilometers. The photographs and video unveals immense fields, colonial buildings without ending, a broken bridge to the sea. They confront us from their paradoxical magnitude of rubble left by the Portuguese during the colonial period.

Born as a laboratory implanted in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, between a cultural crossroad, Sao Tomé is currently still, suspended between the past, the present and the future, between ruins, paradise, war, and the battle between man and nature. On top of the rubble and the nature, there are the lives of people: old, adult, young and children, descendants from Angolan, Cape Verde and Mozambican slaves, people bought, exchanged and sold as goods during the 19th and still during the 20^th century.

The people who lived in those places, surrounded by the same palm trees and coconut palms that still today give us a false image of paradise are the same ones who experienced conflicts and atrocities. Within this duality the memories, identities and public space grow, and at the same time they look for ways to deal with the past in the present.