C&: If, in 2013, you had put Mónica de Miranda’s “Panorama” project in a room adjacent to the exhibit of Edson Chagas’ “Luanda, encyclopaedic city,” how would that have worked for you?
PN: It’s funny, I had never thought of those two exhibits being together, but it’s a fantastic exercise. I think that, formally, they’re very similar in the way they photograph, very close. Of course, there are technical questions, of framing, the type of image, and the type of object photographed that they choose. But despite achieving different results, they’re very close.
On the other hand, if I were to to imagine the two exhibits now, certainly one would be the introduction and the other the conclusion: the topic is recurrent. What interested me in Edson Chagas’ work, specifically, was its attempt to reconfigure our relationship with spaces through the objects that inhabit the work; and those who know most of those spaces, know that they are colonial ones.
Mónica is interested in the moment of confrontation, the moment in which we, as spectators, have to put our finger in the wound and think about how we got out of here, how we’ve moved on. It’s an ongoing work and one of my obsessions.
Paula Nascimento was born in 1981 in Luanda, Angola, where she currently lives and works. She is an architect and curator with degrees from the Architectural Association School of Architecture and from the LSB University in London. Nascimento collaborated with architecture studios in Oporto and in London before funding with Stefano Pansera Beyond Entropy Africa in 2011 – a research-based collective network that operates on the fields of architecture-urbanism-visual arts and geopolitics.
Adriano Mixinge (Luanda, 1968) is an art historian, curator and art critic and currently Executive Manager at MAAN – Memorial Antonio Agostinho Neto, in Luanda (Angola).