to as the 25 de Abril) toppled the authoritarian fascist regime and ignited the beginning of the end of Portuguese occupation in Africa. Ferreira’s own political and artistic education entered a new phase when she moved to South Africa in 1976, a matter of months after the Soweto Uprising that entailed widespread and effective student protests in response to the apartheid government’s oppressive language policy and use of force. As South Africa’s military destabilised neighbouring nations, in a last-ditched attempt to defend white minority rule, she enrolled at the University of Cape Town’s famed Michaelis School of Fine Art. Relocating over the course of her life from Mozambique to Portugal, to South Africa and back to Portugal, has presented Ferreira with questions about citizenship and belonging, and has highlighted the fluctuating identities and political exigencies imparted by such dislocations and relocations. 2
Retracing her own connections to Mozambique, as the site of her birth and of Portuguese colonialism, is a mainstay of her artistic practice. To such an end, she models the architectural forms and ideas that not only bolstered colonial rule but determined people’s vantage points on colonialism and independence in Africa. In 1975, Mozambique declared independence from Portugal after a 9-month transition period. Various circuits, networks and channels relayed news on Mozambique’s independence, and served as the backdrop against which certain ideological divides surfaced over the end of colonial rule and the start of independence. For Mozambique (2008), one of Ferreira’s more widely exhibited works, illustrates how Mozambique’s independence from Portugal inhabited people’s imaginations along with the racist and non-neutral impulses of cinema cameras as tools of representation and political protest. Modelled-off the drawings of the Latvian-Russian Communist photographer and propagandist Gustav Klutsis, the wooden kiosk provides the scaffolding for the display of a screen and documents – in effect the aesthetic practices and philosophies – that characterised the first images of Mozambique’s independence. The screen allows for the juxtaposition of Bob Dylan’s performance of “Mozambique,” a song that neglects to mention Portuguese colonialism and decades of anti-colonial struggle, with footage of a film produced under the direction of the French filmmaker Jean Rouch, using Super 8 film cameras. Ferreira first confronted the legacy of Rouch as an engineer and filmmaker, working in Niger on Maison Tropicale, her 2007 recreation of the modernist houses designed by French architect Jean Pouvre. Also, on display is an agreement between the Mozambican government and the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard to complete a video project that would lay the foundation for experimental television, and provide footage for a film Nord contre sud (North against south) or Naissance (de’Image) d’une nation (Birth ‘of an Image’ of a Nation), a counterpoint to D.W.
Griffith’s controversial 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. There is no visual evidence
2 Ferreira, interview with author, Skype, October 2019
that Jean-Luc Goddard’s video project ever materialised. 3 Ferreira refuses to allow for the whitewashing and erasure of Goddard’s and Rouch’s time in Mozambique, which was not without controversy. 4 She provides a spatial context to visualise the images of independence that eluded international filmmakers and their Mozambican understudies. The artwork displays the disconnection between what a person aspired to picture in the euphoria of the moment and what a person could actually see, either through a camera or an image – an issue that has long fascinated the ruling party in Mozambique, Frente da Libertação de Moçambique. Ferreira’s work, and the research that has since followed on her insight, highlights Goddard’s and Rouch’s conflicting visions for film in Mozambique, and how they resulted in the training of a new generation of Mozambican filmmakers and technicians who the state relied on to produce an image of itself long after Goddard and Rouch departed. 5
As Mozambique’s history took centre stage in her artistic practice, Ferreira introduced the history of Mozambique’s coloniser, Portugal, into the same visual and spatial frame. For Ferreira, decolonialisation and independence are not one and the same historical phenomena. While living in Portugal after departing Mozambique in the years before the Carnation Revolution, she vividly recalls “a very quick decolonisation process,” one where she lived and shared spaces with populations who had returned to Lisbon from Portugal’s African colonies and who were not “progressive.”6 Ferreira notes that in that moment “she first [was] becoming conscious of what democracy could be and what the logic of democracy could mean in Africa.” 7 At a time when the political elite of Angola, a former Portuguese colony, invested heavily in Portugal, and when many Portuguese sought work in Portugal’s former African colonies due to high unemployment, Ferreira exhibited “Messy Colonialism, Wild Decolonization” (2015), an ode to the often-ignored history of the
“retornados.” For this installation, she constructs a replica of the shipping containers that Portuguese populations living in places like Angola and Mozambique used to ship their belongings back to the metropole. The stacked and disorganised crates act as a screen for Ferreira to project footage of the boxes littering the streets of Belém
3 Daniel Fairfax, “Birth (of the Image) of a Nation: Jean-Luc Goddard in Mozambique,”
Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 3 (2010): 56.
4 Goddard would deny that he was ever in Mozambique. Also, while living in Mozambique, Goddard claimed that Kodak film products were racist because of how they portrayed black skin. Ferreira, Interview with author, Skype, October 2019;
Pedro Pimenta, Interview with author, Maputo, Mozambique, December 2010, 5 See Ana Balona de Olveira, “Revolution in Crisis: The Ruptures of Revolution and
Ruptured Revolution through the Ruptures of Artistic Practice,” Revista de História da Arte, 12 (2015): 107-123; Ana Balona de Oliveira, “Ângela Ferreira Monuments in Reverse,” Buala, 7 January 2015, https://www.buala.org/en/to-read/angela-ferreira-monuments-in-reverse (accessed 18 June 2020); Ros Gray, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2020).
6 Ferreira, Interview with author, Skype, October 2019.
7 Ibid.
near the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, a monument to the nation’s colonial ambitions and explorations. The wooden crates conceal their content, and through Ferreira’s reconstruction, one gets the sense of the space they took up as well as the non-transferable nature of the spoils gathered in the colonies to the metropole – a direct reference to the social discord and economic hardship that greeted the “retornados.”
In Tendency to Forget (2015), Ferreira expands on the notion of decolonisation as defined by moments of loss and erasure introduced initially in “Messy Colonialism, Wild Decolonization”. The film consists of images that show people walking through the streets of the colonial capital, Lourenço Marques, and socialising on its sunny beaches. The only indication of colonial occupation comes through voiceovers, which do not comment directly on the images but, instead, consist of audio
recordings gathered by anthropologists Jorge and Margot Dias. At one point, images of an unidentified rural setting appear as Margot Dias comments on her surprise to see black women turn their backs on her in order to avoid being photographed. Dias expresses disappointment upon learning that the women wanted money in exchange for having their picture taken. The exchange exposes the desensitising effects of still and moving images that characterised the colonial gaze along with the varying, distorted and often ill-informed views people had on Portuguese colonialism. The unsavoury and sinister relationships that Jorge and Margot Dias established with Portugal and its colonial projects in Africa, throw into sharp relief the fraught nature of decolonisation and the political stakes of looking at colonial history through the lens of decolonisation.
There is an interactive and performative aspect to Ferreira’s body of work. She often rebuilds and reconstructs works for the specific spaces where she exhibits, and in so doing, illustrates the elusiveness of visions of independence and liberation, stories of participatory politics and the constructivity of a particular political position.
Her own movements and experiences in a type of Diaspora (Mozambique – Portugal – South Africa – Portugal) provide the context for (re-)visiting and (re-)telling histories of colonisation and liberation, while casting new light on the largely-ignored historical phenomena of decolonisation. Her work ignites the more conceptual, design, video art and architectural elements that remain underdiscussed in the history of art in Mozambique. Through her expansive research – and labour – intensive practice, she offers new angles and models to question the role of the sensory in moments of colonisation and liberation, and the afterlives of these historical moments, whether experienced from former African colonies or European metropoles.