‘Tide’ from ‘The Island’ by Mónica de Miranda (2021) © Mónica de Miranda
Autograph
Autograph is a small gallery in Hoxton, which is open from Wednesday to Saturday only, but is FREE. Details of opening hours and location are on their website.
It’s housed in an ultra-modern building with a main gallery space – one wide square room with high ceilings – on the ground floor, and other spaces, of more conventional size, upstairs.
Whenever I’ve visited there’s only been a handful of other visitors so, apart from the exhibitions themselves, it feels like a cool, slick oasis of calm amid the hustling backstreets of Hoxton let alone the hectic traffic on nearby Shoreditch High Street.
Currently, Autograph is displaying a work by the Angolan-Portuguese artist Mónica de Miranda.
Mónica de Miranda: official biography
De Miranda is an Angolan Portuguese visual artist, filmmaker and researcher who works and lives between Lisbon and Luanda. Her work incorporates photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation. Through it she 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.
De Miranda is affiliated with the University of Lisbon where she is engaged on projects dealing with ethical and cultural aspects of contemporary migration movements linked to lusophone Africa, such as Post-Archive: Politics of Memory, Place and Identity, and Visual Culture, Migration, Globalization and Decolonization.
Intriguingly for someone who has roots in, what for many Brits are rather exotic countries – Portugal and Angola – her qualifications are very English. She holds undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in art and arts education from Camberwell College of Arts and the Institute of Education, and a doctorate in Visual Art from the University of Middlesex.
The exhibition
The exhibition consists of two elements:
1. The Island is a film, a 37-minute art film. This is being played on a continuous loop in the upstairs exhibition space. The room is dark, you make your way to one of the 4 or 5 basic benches provided, settle down and watch.
2. The main exhibition space downstairs contains half a dozen still photographs from the film. These have been blown up to large scale and cut up into a number of perfectly symmetrical separate frames. So one still from the film may be cut up into two, four or six separate sections, each beautifully framed and placed with mathematical precision on the white walls.
Installation view of photographic stills from ‘The Island’ by Mónica de Miranda at Autograph
They are all large, digitally clear, very calming images of a handful of people in lovely rural settings. Presumably they’re in Portugal, maybe even in Angola, but the lack of tropical foliage, and the look of the trees often made it feel like somewhere in the Thames Valley.
There are only about 6 of these big cut-up photos in the entire exhibition space. It makes for clarity and calm. It’s a very mindful experience.
The film
The problem with making any kind of art film must be persuading the audience to sit all the way through it. I wonder if there’s any data, from any gallery, of what percentage of visitors make it all the way through an art film. I watched about ten minutes of it.
During that time a striking, statuesque black woman wearing a long white dress stood in a haunting, abandoned quarry. Then she was wearing a bright red jacket trimmed with gold epaulettes and standing in what looked like a ruined outdoor auditorium with tiers of concrete benches.
Still from ‘The Island’ by Mónica de Miranda @ Autograph © Mónica de Miranda
Two young black women wearing black jumpers and red berets (the uniform, I think, of 1970s radicals) walked along paths through woods. The same two women wearing white dresses played on a hilltop with panoramic views over a wooded landscape. Without warning they are suddenly wearing Regency era dresses. Time jumps. Different historical eras are overlapped, photoshopped. At another point we see them sitting on a fallen tree half-sunk in a lake (see image at the start of this review).
The statuesque woman sat on some rocks. She was joined by a handsome black man. Cut to the same couple sitting down at a table placed just so on the sandy bank of a river. Long lazy tracking shots of the riverbank, as from a boat slowly drifting along the river.
Three points:
1. It’s all shot in a slow, classic style i.e. all the shots are long and lingering, they’re all set up to give full view of the scene. It’s consciously beautiful, especially the shots in the abandoned quarry, now filled with a huge pool of deep green water, some of which were really haunting.
‘Whistle for the Wind’ from ‘The Island’ by Mónica de Miranda (2021) © Mónica de Miranda
2. But more striking is the words. There are frequent shots of the striking woman speaking deep and meaningful sentences while staring into the middle distance. When she and the handsome man sit down at the dinner table on the river bank they don’t chat, they declaim more deep and meaningful sentences. As the two young women pick flowers in the woods, or walk through woodland paths or hold hands and spin round on the hilltop, there’s a voiceover of the same kind of deep and meaningful commentary. All spoken in a rich Portuguese accent, heavy on ‘sh’ sounds, sounding more East European than Latin.
I can’t find a transcript anywhere online. All I can find is the text accompanying the trailer on YouTube, where the voiceover tells us:
Do not stay lost.
Do not stay forgotten.
Do not lose the memory of who you are.
Breathe!
All the voiceover for the ten or so minutes I saw is like this. It, could have been copied from any one of the hundreds of books which fill the Spirituality and Mindfulness sections of bookshops. Like mottos from a series of inspirational posters. From the same place as the famous ‘Desiderate’ prose poem of healing advice:
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence…
Either you like this kind of thing or you don’t. Chacun à son goût. Personally, I found it very relaxing. My companion had to stifle her titters.
Thirdly, the music. It’s very, very low-key, slowly-changing chords generated by some kind of synthesiser or electronic instruments i.e. not orchestra or pop music etc. It’s ambient, relaxing and lulling. It reminds me of Brian Eno’s ambient albums from the 70s and 80s.
The combination of the bland bromides of the voiceover, sensitively read in a rich Portuguese accent, the slow ambient music, and the lazy tracking shots of the riverbank, of girls walking through woods, of the striking woman standing in abandoned sites…explain why after ten or 12 minutes I fell slowly, lazily asleep. I think I was woken up by my own snoring.
‘Ground Work’ from ‘The Island’ by Mónica de Miranda (2021) © Mónica de Miranda
The curators’ version
The curator’s commentary accompanying the show wants us to believe that 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 visitor is free to take these ideas and spin them on into complex post-colonial critiques, pondering empire, slavery, colonialism, gender and ethnicity, all the usual topics of contemporary art.
But as an actual sensory experience the film, and then the big white room full of beautiful photos, are wonderfully calming, relaxing and healing. If you’re in that part of London on one of the days when Autograph is open, it’s worth making a detour to experience a chilled half hour of these calm and healing music and images.
Related links
- The Island by Mónica de Miranda continues until 22 October at Autograph
- Mónica de Miranda’s website
Angola reviews
In case you get the impression that Angola is all beautiful woods, picturesque ruins and spiritual ladies, here are reviews of books by people who’ve worked in or visited this tragic, war-torn country recently.
- No One Can Stop The Rain: A Chronicle of Two Foreign Aid Workers during the Angolan Civil War by Karin Moorhouse and Wei Cheng (2005)
- Blue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey Into Angola by Daniel Metcalfe (2014)
Books & Boots 