Interview: Artist Ângela Ferreira Examines Modern Architecture and Colonialism | PIN-UP
In this extensive interview, published on Pin Up, I interview the artist Ângela Ferreira on her interdisciplinary practice covering a range of topics from modernist African architecture, Portuguese colonial amnesia and Achille Mbembe’s writings, to postcolonial melancholia, Jean Prouvé’s buildings, and revolutionary role models. An excerpt from the introduction has been included below:
What if we were to re-think modernity as a truly world-historical event, as a fragmentary, uneven, and multi-sited episteme irreducibly entangled with, and thus constituted by, the ravages of imperialism and colonization? What would this polyvocal account of modernity, as well as the suturing of the modern to the colonial, entail for hitherto linear, Eurocentric, and nationalist narrations of modernism? In what ways do the logics of modernity and coloniality impact contemporary societies, particularly those located in Africa (Western modernity’s fuel), and what might archives of decolonization and anti-colonial resistance offer to subjects living through 21st-century neoliberal and neocolonial domination? Such questions motivate the research-driven art practice of Ângela Ferreira. Born in Maputo, Mozambique, educated in Cape Town, South Africa, and now currently residing in Lisbon, Portugal, Ferreira works at the intersection of art and architecture, using the precise formal languages of minimalism and architectural Modernism to distill complex transnational histories of colonialism and post-colonialism into evocative sculpture-video installations. Her work courses through the lives and spatial residues of iconic figures such as Jean Prouvé, Angela Davis, Donald Judd, Miriam Makeba, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, and many others, forming a worldly constellation of multiple modernities and counter-modernities. This summer Ferreira has presented solo exhibitions at Hangar in Lisbon, Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, and the Centre d’art Ygrec-ENSAPC in Aubervilliers, Paris.
Cover image: Ângela Ferreira, A Tendency to Forget, 2015. Exhibition view at Museu Coleção Berardo-Arte Moderna e Contemporânea, Lisbon, Portugal. Photo © Jorge Silva.