Monica de Miranda’s research-led practice is grounded in postcolonial politics in relation to Africa and its diaspora. Her most recent project The Island (2021) contemplates the complex experiences of Afrodiasporic lives and Europe’s colonial past. Fusing fact and fiction, the work explores a long trajectory of black presences in Portugal by bringing together intertwined narratives – drawing on African liberation movements, migratory experiences, and identity formations through a black feminist lens.
Using film and photography, de Miranda deploys the metaphor of the island as a utopian place of isolation, refuge, and escape: a space for collective imaginings that speak to new and old freedoms. Anchored in cultural affinities and ecofeminism, the artist considers soil as an organic repository of time and memory, where ancestral and ecological trauma linked to colonial excavations continue to unfold. The Island urges us to develop a more conscious relationship between our bodies, the past and the lands we inhabit – and all that they hold – towards regenerative possible futures.
The Island is commissioned by Autograph, London and supported using public funding from Arts Council England. The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency.
Mónica de Miranda (b. 1976 Porto) is an Angolan-Portuguese visual artist, filmmaker and researcher who works and lives between Lisbon and Luanda. Her work – which incorporates photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation – investigates postcolonial politics of geography, history, and subjectivity in relation to Africa and its diaspora through a critical spatial arts practice. Often conceptual and research based, de Miranda is interested in the convergence of socio-political narratives, gender, and memory at the boundaries between fiction and documentary.
