Mónica de Miranda: Mirages and Deep Time

The exhibition Mirages and Deep Time at Galerias Municipais—Galeria Avenida da Índia features new transdisciplinary and multimedia work including sculpture, film, photography, and woven silk on photographic surfaces by Mónica de Miranda, whose research-informed practice delves into the ways that politics, identity, gender, memory and place are shaped by the convergence of geographies, urban archaeology, deep time and artistic strategies of subversion into post-colonial narratives.

Curated by Azu Nwagbogu, Mirages and Deep Time encompasses the problems with de-colonial tropes, it is a continuous and unmitigated search, requiring hyper-vigilance and suggesting an understanding of the limits of learned history. The exhibition gives space to the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of the reframing of Black history and identity in Portuguese history. It also propels the conversation towards nature and new forms of knowledge with which to approach the greatest challenge of the contemporary world in relation to climate change in the Anthropocene era.

The photographic works explore various relationships between femininity, nature and histories forgotten by a hegemonic system. Presenting a counter narrative of colonial and patriarchal history, the works raise important questions of belonging and identity construction in our contemporary era. The sculptures on display, covered by earth and plants, explore the metaphor of the island. The artist considers the land or territory as a container of memory, history, a kind of reciprocity between present, past and future. The earth holds within it both time and space, seen as a subject that is ever-changing, that is far from static.


In the film The Island (2022) an epistemological archeology is highlighted, whether of natural or urban landscapes, or of different epochs—past, present and future—which explore the relationship between space and memory—individual and collective—and between transit and diasporic conditions that currently, with the ecological crisis, have become a planetary condition. This work is accentuated by a turn to the telluric dimension and the geological time of the Earth and its agency. In this film, the traffic—of people, memories, and places—allows an incarnate gaze that oscillates between various points of view, undermining the scientific gaze based on the separation between the subjects. There is also the counterbalance between the fixed and disembodied gaze and that between the subject and the object. It questions the supposed “neutral” scientific objectivity against the involved and distorted subjectivity. In The Island, inspired by “Ilha dos Pretos” (Island of Blacks)—a denomination of oral tradition given in the 18th century to a community of people of African origin that settled in the riverside area of the Sado River—Mónica de Miranda creates an imaginary island: a place where the ghosts of this community and its stories intersect with the geological sense of time, drawing a parallel between the dominion of the human being over itself and the predatory extractivism of nature; there, through the metaphor of the river as the non-linear time that transcends material constraints, is the place where alternative futures can be imagined.

Mirages and Deep Time creates a broader temporality, beyond the anthropocentric notion of time. From this perspective, the natural and cosmic elements—such as the stars and mountains—are neither static nor passive but move and have agency. These different temporalities create nomads incommensurable with each other: as the main character states “there are no worlds; we are worlds”.

Mónica de Miranda’s visual narrative for this exhibition also revolves around a central motif: the mirror. Through the film and a series of photographs, Miranda uses the mirror as a structuring device that allows her to explore, in all their complexity and multiplicity, ideas of identity (self and otherness) and history (past, present and potential future). Miranda uses the mirror as a devise to subvert its illusory meaning. There is a suggestion to look away and a refusal to allow for a history told by the so-called dominant powers. The mirror becomes an agent to embody archetypal imaginations. ‘There is power in the gaze,’ as bell hooks stated; in fact, for Mónica de Miranda, the gaze in the rebel mirror is a strategy for looking and being looked at, with an agency of belonging, freedom and resistance.

For the seeker, there are obvious fundamentals that need upending: the one thread that runs through one nation to the next is the global history of colonization. The image of the thirsty traveler lost in a desert who sees water reflected in the sand that is not there refers to the unreliability of the senses when desperation has locked in, but humanity has shaped futures through imagination. How do we emerge into a new timeline with an imagination shaped not from desperation but from freedom? In the natural sciences, Werner Heisenberg’s ´Uncertainty Principle` establishes the delimitations of subatomic particles with regards to position and momentum. And in contemporary culture understanding the scope and meaning of decolonization in an increasingly globalized world can be intangible and sometimes impossible to grasp.

Public programme

July 23, 3pm
Performance: Sobre a casa (mar) lar by Nádia Yracema
Panel discussion: “Memory, Identity and Representation—The Black Presence in Portugal,” with Sónia Vaz Borges and Cristina Roldão

September 17, 4pm
Performance: Erosão by Zia Soares at Galerias Municipais—Galeria Avenida da Índia
Among the images created by Mónica de Miranda and the words of Amílcar Cabral, Zia Soares searches for the unseen in Mirages and Deep Time and the unheard in Para a defesa da terra, performing with actions that are triggered by erosive processes, that continuously or simultaneously wear out, transport and plant illusions, mistakes, realities and truths. The future is found in the body and voice of the performer who here is Earth. Only in her does the future anticipate itself. This performance is based on a reading of Amílcar Cabral’s agrarian studies and puts into play the relations between soil and memory, between ecology and resistance, topics that are already brought to attention in the exhibition space through the photographs, the film and the sculptures presented by Mónica de Miranda. Zia Soares proposes a performative intervention, deepening the connections between the past, present and futures of ecological and anti-colonial resistance.

September 24, 8am—5pm
Guided tour: “Ilha dos Negros,” African presence in Portugal
Co-production: Associação Cultural e Juvenil Batoto Yetu Portugal
Reservations via: bilheteira [​at​] galeriasmunicipais.pt (35 participants maximum)
A guided tour by coach, including a 12 km walk through the Sado Nature Reserve in memory of and in tribute to the various African peoples who passed through this region.