Out

of Africa: A glance at the links between contemporary art in Portugal and Africa Australians have a typically self-depractory term to describe their relationship to the mainstream art of the so-called hegemonic centres: 'Cultural Cringe'. It is the cringe of the subaltern in the face of the master, the periphery with regard to the centre. There is more than a touch of self-conscious irony in the use of this term as it swivels symmetrically around feelings of both inferiority and superiority. Here in Portugal, the cringe is so great we dare not call it by its name or look it in the face. Yet it exists in the adulation of art-world fashions that seem to be playing centre-stage always somewhere else (New York, London, even Madrid: always 'there' and not 'here'). And that 'somewhere else' is always richer, stronger, 'better'. When we longingly say 'l fora' we don't mean Africa or India, we usually mean the United States or France, Germany or England. The relationship of peripheries to centres (and together with it, the question of globalisation) is one which has undergone radical surgery in the critical discourses of the last decade. The Biennale of Havana, Istanbul and Johannesburg attest to the need, within the art communities, to enter such discourses and to de-centralise, as does the focus on Africa and Latin America in Europe and the USA over recent years. The question is always vexed, however, by the suspicion that 'globalism' includes the Third World, but includes it from the perspective of the so-called First World. This relationship of peripheries to centre(s), however, is one that is shifting and not fixed, because it is intrinsically related to shifts in economic and political power1. The centre/periphery axes are, furthermore, intertwined with the various histories of European colonisation and domination. Since the early 1980s, post-colonial studies have undertaken to tease out the complex terms of these relationships in a multiplicity of ways, not all of them mutually complementary.
1

It is arguable that the perception of racial difference itself is, in the first place, influenced by economic motives. 'Africans were perceived in a more or less neutral and benign manner before the slave trade developed; however, once the triangular trade became established, Africans were newly characterized as the epitome of evil and barbarity'. Abdul R. JanMohamed, 'Colonialist Literature', in "Race", Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, p80.

Analyses of imaginary relations with racial 'Others', of the intersecting vectors of racial and sexual identities, of the centrist bias of the literary and artistic 'Academy', and of the complex relations of newly independent states to their colonial histories have all proliferated. The relationship of post-colonialism to post-modernism has also been variously scrutinised by writers such as Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, Iain Chambers and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Splinter-groups, divided affinities, radical differences. Edward Said's suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser is contested, for example, by Homi Bhabha's positing of the 'colonial subject' as both the coloniser and colonised, locked into a mutually interdependent co-construction, and he hence posits the 'colonised' subject as a kind of mimed version of the coloniser.2 And then there are those who find the post-colonial debate itself to be a trap, who find the concept of 'post- colonial' too celebratory of the end of colonialism and too firmly attached to a kind of fashionable 'academic marketability' 3. In the visual arts, these debates have been reflected and refracted, with varying degrees of credibility, in curatorial strategies. So we have to name but a few out of many realised projects Jean-Hubert Martin's much criticised but nevertheless groundbreaking Magiciens de la Terre in Paris in 1989, Susan Vogel's Africa Explores in New York in 1991, Dan Cameron's Cocido y Crudo in Madrid in 1994, Octavio Zaya and Anders Michelsen's Interzones in Copenhagen and Uppsala in 1996, and Okwui Enwezor's Trade Routes for the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale (Enwezor as artistic director, with seven guest curators). Concomitantly and facilitated by the lingua franca provided by the the media and by so- called globalisation individual artists from all parts of the globe have found a forum on which to perform complex or hybrid identities. Think, for instance, of Jimmie Durham, David
2

Homi K. Bhabha, 'Of Mimicry and Man', in The Location of Culture pp. 85-92. The notion of colonial mimesis is addressed in Franz Fanon's Peau Noir, Masques Blancs, Paris, Editions Seuil, 1952 and in V.S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men. See also Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities , Verso Books, London and New York, 1983, p92-3. Mimicry is the servile adoption and display of the sign of authority, but it is authority with a difference, shot through with a kind of mockery: as mirror image of the coloniser, the colonised mimic instates an uncertainty or rupture in the discourse of authority. In Homi Bhabha's words, 'it is from this area between mimicry and mockery, where the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of the disciplinary double, that my instances of colonial imitation come.' The Location of Culture, London, Routeledge, 1994, p86 See for example Anne McClintock, 'The Myth of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-Colonialism', Social Text, 31/32, 1992.

Hammons, Kcho, Mona Hatoum, Guillermo Kuitka, Rene Green, Cai Guo Qiang, Pepn Osrio, Yinka Shonibare, Lorna Simpson, Coco Fusco, Moshekwa Langa, Xu Bing, Oladle Ajiboy Bamboy... and countless others. The reasons for Portugal's self-exclusion from these debates remain little analysed. But the truth is that, at least in the area of the visual arts4 these concerns remain almost invisible. At a time when art has loosened its grip on a formalist bias and become increasingly issue-based to a degree that is itself sometimes problematic Portugal's relationship to its ex-colonies remains blotted out by a kind of amnesia. It seems that the processes of culpability and mourning that accompany the process of 'anamnesis' the 'working through' and restoring to memory of painful facts previously suppressed has not yet occurred in this country. While it is true that the pitfalls and dangers of issue-based art are that it should slide into unadulterated pamphleteering or ideological reductionism, it is also true that art remains one of the most potent tools for the holding together of contradictions and conflicts. But in order for this to happen, personal idioms must be forged. To adapt Mikhail Bakhtin's formulation about language, one might say that an artistic idiom only becomes 'one's own' when the maker/speaker populates it with his or her own intentions and voice. The use of unadulterated, approriated idioms is an expression of the 'cultural cringe', equivalent to the sublatern's mimicry of the lord, the colonised of the coloniser. This shadow of the Other is evident in many though certainly not all work by artists in Portugal who have adopted the various International Styles of photography/video/text or installation, ventriloquising the concerns with, say, gender/sexuality or ambiental/political issues espoused by a small coterie of high-profile 'International Artists' without in any way digesting that language and making it their own. I am thinking, say, of Paulo Mendes' work on Timor at the Jornadas do Porto of 1996 laudable in intent, perhaps, but too unmediated and simplistic in realisation or of the work 'Bsnia-Herzegovina' by Entertainment Co at the Galeria Graa Fonseca in Lisbon in 1994. In both cases, the relationship of the artist/s to the situations imaged is compromised by an implicit voyeurism and opportunism. Paulo Carmona, Rui Toscano and Cristina Mateus all work on the nefarious effects of power on the subject, but
4

In literature and cinema, these debates are becoming fractionally more visible. See for instance the conference Novas Literaturas Africanas de Lngua Portuguesa at the Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian, November 1997

again, they seem to be formulaic or illustrative, working to some kind of recipe legitimised by other, 'international' artists, rather than forging a personal idiom. The vexed relationship between African and European art, with its attendant 'primitivisms' and 'orientalisms', has been intrinsic to the history of 20th century art and to that of modernism itself. Jimmie Durham has noted in characteristically extreme fashion that perhaps all non-European works of art in official western collections began as war trophies5. Such collections in Portugal are, for the most part, not critically revised or problematised. For instance, what began as the Museu Colonial in 1870 was later absorbed into the Sociedade de Geografia, where it is still housed today in a manner that is haphazzard and decorative. Exhibitions such as Arte Africana em Portugal at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia in Lisbon (1985), organised by the eminent anthropologist Ernesto Viega de Oliveira, or Escultura Angolana: Memorial de Culturas curated by Marie-Louise Bastin and Benjamin Pereira for the same venue in 1994, began to examine the placing of these objects in relation to evolutionist theory and questions of 'primitivism' (though not openly to declare that the Portuguese occupation in Africa may have been problematic), but these exhibitions, among numerous others in this country, dealt exclusively with traditional objects and are outside of the domain of contemporary art. For the most part, there continues to be a mystification and mythologisation of the Portuguese presence in Africa, as indeed of the Portuguese 'discoveries' several centuries earlier, reinforcing rather than critically examining an authorised nostalgia. For instance, the commercially circulated video Moambique: No Outro Lado do Tempo (Consom, 1997) was so successful that a sequel was produced almost immediatly, as well as one on Angola. A weekly piece dedicated to the Colonial Wars presently running in the newspaper Dirio de Notcias on Sundays is equally uncritical if not as blatantly nostalgic and sentimentalising as the video. The new cable TV station RTP-Africa seems to be moving in the same direction. Attempts to establish dialogue with Africa are, more usually than not, framed as 'entertainment' and occasioned by community needs. Food, dance and music from the ex-
5

'When the European states began to expand their empires, the line between art and beautiful things from other places became too fine to draw. There came to be mixtures of art, war trophies, and tourist curios, museums of collections.' Jimmie Durham, 'On Collecting', in A Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics, Kala Press, London, 1993.

colonies have become particularly popular. Theatre is perhaps an exception, establishing a bridge between entertainment on the one hand, and critical evaluation on the other, and on some occasions attempting to make communicative inroads between Portugal and her ex-colonies. The hazy umbrella term intercmbio cultural cultural exchange is invoked: a well-intended but sometimes promiscuously used term. The Malaposta Theatre on the outskirts of Lisbon held an experimental Mostra de Teatro de Lingua Portuguesa in 1995 which included theatre and dance from Angola, Mozambique, Guin Bissau and Cabo Verde. Acert Trigo Limpo is an independent theatre group based in Tondela, near Viseu, which ran two projects also involving 'cultural exchange', the one with Brazil and the other with Mozambique. Organized with the support of what was then the Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, Cena Lusofona is another scheme for the ubiquitous 'cross-cultural exchange' with Portuguese speaking countries6 in the area of theatre. Their first venture was in Maputo, Mozambique (1995) and in addition to the work of 14 different theatre companies, the programme included a Portuguese-Mozambican co-production. They came under fire, however, for reinforcing a model whereby the perspective was always hierarchically defined and fundamentally unilateral. Already in this first programme, the celebrated Mozambican writer Mia Couto warns: ' preciso cuidado para que no haja um centro que concebe e periferias que executam programas ' 'care must be taken to avoid a situation where there is a centre that conceives of programmes, and peripheries that execute them'. All criticism levelled at the productions of the Cena Lusofona have suggested that this indeed is what has taken place, though here as elsewhere, research in primary sources (such as the local, Mozambican press) is much needed. Exhibitions which have problematised issues relating to Portuguese colonialism, and attendant concerns about the nature of art collections and of museology itself, have been few and far between, and when they have existed, this has been mostly in the area of social anthropology: A Memria da Amaz nia organised for the Customs House (Alfndaga) of Oporto by Jos Antnio Fernandes Dias in 1994; Brasil dos Viajantes at the Centro Cultural de Belm in Lisbon in 1995 and the fascinating exhibition Imagens Coloniais at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia in
6

Known as PALOPs Paises de Lngua Oficial Portuguesa. . The CPLP Comunidade de Pases de Lngua Portuguesa is the official, governmental organ for this. The very notion of Portuguese as an official language as a binding term for these diverse cultures requires re-examination.

Lisbon in 1995 are noteworthy examples. The latter was imported from France and undertook, 30 years after the independence of the French colonies in Africa, to trace the history of French colonialism through the diverse iconographies of its propaganda. It left one hungrily curious for a similar analysis of Portuguese propaganda and indeed for manifestations of Portuguese ideology and popular culture in its African colonies. While these issues are being slowly, cautiously addressed in the field of social-anthropology, cinema, theatre and literary criticism, the visual arts remain far behind. But of course how can there be an examination of the notion that 'multiculturalism' (a term that has come to be problematic itself) in the visual arts can itself be a source of power for the state when 'multiculturalism' itself has hardly hit town? I am speaking about sustained and comprehensive analysis, criticism, communication, and not of the occasional flares of 'cross- cultural' events, which have usually, until now, been entrenched in marginality. The only official, public institution to deal with concerns outside of the western hegemony has been Culturgest in Lisbon. Under the aegis of Antnio Pinto Ribeiro, the programming has included numerous ventures which have attempted to open out the discourse and problematise the relationship of Portugal to its ex-colonies or indeed to other non-western cultures. The broad spectrum of programmes has included an excellent festival of African film (Cinemas de frica), organised in conjunction with the Cinemateca Portuguesa in 1995; an equally stimulating film cycle (Os rabes entre ns) was screened in 1997. A guerra da gua, a documentary by Licnio Azevedo (a Brazilian living in Mozambique) was screened in 1996 in the programme Multiculturalism e Novas Mestiagens, which also brought to this venue Deputado, precisa-se in 1997, a play staged by the Mozambican Companhia de Teatro Gungu. In 1996, a programme of animation film and experimental video from Africa was poorly attended, though the outstanding videos of South African William Kentridge (who also brought his fascinating theatre/opera production Faustus in Africa to this venue in 1995) received some acclaim in the local press. More specifically in the visual arts, Encontros Africanos was imported to Culturgest from the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and was a stimulating confrontation of work from the Magreb and from sub-Sahara Africa, between traditional modes and contemporary idioms, with an excellent catalogue essay by Jos Antnio Fernandes Dias. In 1996, I curated the exhibition Don't Mess with Mister Inbetween: Fifteen Artists from South Africa for the same

venue. Both these events found little critical response in the local press, and attempts to use the works on show to raise critical debate outside of the purely formalist analyses of the works exhibited, fell sadly flat. Presently, the exhibition of Nigerian-born Oladl Ajiboy Bamgboy (January - March 1998) is fortunately drawing somewhat more attention, possibly because, with the increasing visibility and critical if not public success of events outside of the purported mainstream (such as the Johannesburg Biennale,7) it is slowly becoming impossible for these voices to continue to be ignored. Oladl's two video triptychs, dealing mesmerisingly with an outdoor auction in Nigeria, is of special interest viewed in the context of a legitimised and legitimating art institution like Culturgest. For the most part, however, critical debates around such concerns have been a rarity, and are usually conceded marginal status. While there is a proliferation of events dedicated to Africa, these are almost always run by the cultural centres of the countries themselves or as initiatives born out of community needs. The performance-arts school Chapit ran a programme entitled Sonhar frica num Outono em Lisboa over a five year period beginning in 1990, dedicated respectively to Cabo Verde (90), So Tom e Prncipe, Angola, Mozambique and Guin Bissau. These concerted efforts emerged from a need to create a cultural context for, and to dialogue with, students of the school itself, many of who are from Africa, or of African parentage. Tchomdins, an association of young artists from Africa founded in 1995, again links the five Lusophone African countries. Members and participants are primarily young people of African origin who live in Lisbon and work in various artistic fields.8 Programmes include theatre, dance and music, as well as occasional exhibitions,9 and the Association had a particularly high profile during the commemoration of the Dia de Africa in 1997. The presence of African artists in Portugal is, however, frequently tinged by a sentimentalising nostalgia, or by a kind of commercial 'ethnic' curiosity value. Exhibitions such as the one
7

The 1997 Johannesburg Biennale was forced to close one month early owing to attendance figures not meeting expectations. This Association has established links with other related associations in Lisbon: Etnia (Iniciativas Culturais); Amigos da Terra (Associao Portuguessa de Ecologistas) ; CIDAC (Centro de Informao e Documentao Amlcar Cabral), and the Associao Ateliers de S. Paulo. The art gallery specifically dedicated to the activities of Tchomdins is AMIARTE, a space granted for this purpose by AMI Assistncia Mdica Internacional.

included in the festival Arte Lusfona organized in various spaces in the region of Sintra in 1997, demonstrate the desire for 'cultural exchange' but a lack of rigorous defining guidelines, and land up being nothing short of folkloric. Such problems are not confined to Portugal indeed they are legion when dealing with cross-cultural issues: for instance the exhibition entitled Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London as part of the Africa 95 Festival suffered from similar problems. Artists like Roberto Chichorro, Alberto Chissano or Malangatana Ngwenya, all Mozambican (the latter purportedly 'discovered' by the architect Amncio Guedes!10) are loved in Portugal precisely for popularising a soft and clichd version of 'Africanism' pandering to every essentializing and formal stereotype of art from that continent. Similarly, the painter Bertina Lopes (who was given a one-person show at the Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian in 1993) a Mozambican artist living in self-exile in Rome and purportedly displaying a 'dialectic' approach to Africa and Europe, evokes a sterotyped, touristic Africanism as it meets 50s-style western Modernism. Similarly, several artists from Southern Africa exhibited at the Galeria Moira in Lisbon through the late second half of the 80s and early 90s tended to be of the same genre. Exchange moving in the other direction (Portuguese artists looking to Africa) has been equally problematic. Even in the earlier years of this century, when the fever for exoticisms and primitivisms was running high, Portugal seems to have remained immune. The few exceptions prove the rule. I am thinking, say, of Amadeo Souza-Cardoso's 'Africanism' in the early years of this century, which drew its sustenance from Cubism rather than from a direct study of the collections at the Muse de l'Homme, while he was living in Paris. Hein Semke's bust Alzira ou filha de Angola of 1938 adopts the most commonplace of 'othering' clichs. The work of Joaquim Rodrigo, who, in the 60s, appropriated motifs from Lunda painting culled from photographic and drawn sources in a book by his friend, the anthropologist Francisco Redinha,11 as well as motifs from photos of Australian Aboriginal painting, is an unusual exception: Rodrigo uses these motifs to create something like a personal cosmology. In the 1980s, the painter Graa Morais visited Cabo Verde and dedicated a large series of works to this trip, but these works remain firmly situated in the romanticising, essentialising, 'othering'
10

Information from Jos Antnio Fernandes Dias, who was told this by Malangatana himself.

11

For this information, I am indebted to Pedro Lapa, who is currently working on a one-person exhibition of Joaquim Rodrigo, to take place at the Museu de Chiado in Lisbon in 1999.

tradition of the western tourist. There is serious need for a systematic study of works made during the Salazarist regime dealing with 'African' iconography, just as there is now a need for a more comprehensive probing of whose voices are heard where, of who speaks for whom and how, in Portugal. Of course there are exceptions. CIDAC (Centro de Informao e Documentao Amlcar Cabral), which usually dedicates its energies to political and developmental concerns, put on two interesting if low-key exhibitions of documentary photography, Cinco Olhares (1993) and Mulheres do Sul (1996). In a short catalogue text for the former, the Mozambican writer Mia Couto speaks of these images as relating to the constant need for the re-invention of identity in Mozambique, and cautions agains essentialising Africa. The most consistent attempts at bridging the Portugal/Africa gap have been effected by OIKOS, a non-governmental organization dedicated to 'co-operation' between developing countries. Involving exhibitions of art and handicraft, concerts, literary evenings, video screenings, conferences and highly popular culinary evenings, these events have ranged from the usual old stereotyping and rendering quaint of African work, to more serious attempts at analysing issues more closely connected to colonialism, decolonisation and post-colonialism. Particularly noteworthy in this respect was the exhibition On the Border of the Limit Zone by Angolan artist Annio Ole in May/June 1995 shortly after his participation in the Johannesburg Biennale of the same year. However, both the exhibition and the discussion held at the gallery between Ole and anthropologist Jos Antnio Fernandes Dias found little echo in the local press. Ole's work his combination of found objects and hi-tech materials in elaborate installations disturbingly evokes an iconography of change and migrancy in the context of war. Like the Cuban artist Kcho, Ole uses the boat as a polysemic image. He is one of the only contemporary African artists whose work is known in Portugal (the other is Fernando Alvim, also Angolan) and his work makes palpable the notion that western colonialism left radically altered every culture that stood in its path. Ole's work underlines the extent to which hybrid images have, for the most part, replaced traditional forms. Here we see the extent to which tradition might be both a legacy and a burden. Fernando Alvim who was born of Portuguese parents in Angola, and now lives in Brussels was given a one-person show at the Centro de Arte Moderna (Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian) in 1993. Here as well as in his installation at the Johanneburg Biennale of 1995, his work

(painting, installation Alvim also uses the charred remains of a burning process) is harsh and confrontational, dealing with war violence and its banalisation through the media. He will be showing in Lisbon in September this year, in the Pavilho Branco at the Museu da Cidade (an initiative of the Instituto de Arte Contempornea, founded in 1997), in an exhibition entitled Memrias Intimas Marcas . The multimedia exhibition will come to us from Cape Town, South Africa, where it stirred up a storm of controversy in 1997. The three artists involved in the Cape Town show Fernando Alvim, the South African artist Gavin Younge, and the Cuban Carlos Garaicoa explore the pathology of the Angolan War, taking as their point of departure the battle-field of Cuito Cuanavale where Angolan, Cuban and South African armies clashed in 1987. Their work will be joined by that of Sandra Ceballos from Cuba, Capela from Angola, and Moshekwa Langa from South Africa. In Portugal, only two names spring to mind of artists whose work systematically and critically deals with the relationship of Portugal and her ex-colonies in Africa, and neither of them is originally from Portugal: Roger Meintjes, a South African artist resident in Lisbon since 1992, and ngela Ferreira, who was born in Mozambique, lived subsequently in South Africa and has now been resident in Lisbon also since 1992. Having begun in South Africa as a documentary photographer, Meintjes soon began to pin his work onto a more conceptual framework, using photography to focus on the lack of neutrality of all collections, museum or otherwise. Over the past couple of years, he has focused specifically on the material traces the remains and reminders of colonialism, and on the hidden narratives of domination and repression implicit in the histories of the trade routes and their products: cocoa, coffee... Of particular import here is the powerful work Simple Collection: Customs House, Lisbon Harbor of 1994, shown at the Johannesburg Bienale of 1995. This work has all the apparent detachment of the "objective" collection of data. The 45 hugely amplified black and white photographs are of samples of agricultural, mineral and industrial products brought to Portugal from the African colonies and kept in little glass flasks at the Customs House of the Lisbon Harbour. Placed disruptively at intervals in front of these photographs is series of colonial postcards of the Angolan city of Lobito, where the viewer is shown only the reverse side, framing the colonial image with its verbal legend. The vast amplification of the original scale and the constant disruption and erasure established by the postcards instill, in this apparently cool piece, the heat of a passionate argument. This is a

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strongly felt and in visual terms a cogently articulated piece, showing the extent to which all "scientific" research is built on an ideological base. ngela Ferreira's work has evolved out of an examination of popular culture and of cultural icons, in an attempt to mine the charged iconography of her own personal trajectory: Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal... Almost her entire oeuvre has hinged about the complex relations between these three geographic points. Onto this triangular relationship, she adds layered readings of the trajectory of Modernism itself, examining the points of contact and divergence between the rhetoric of authoritarianism and that of modernism. Where Sites and Services (1991, shown at the Galeria Mdulo in 1991 and at the Centro Cultural de Belm in 1996) dealt specifically with South Africa, being based on rudimentary housing projects provided by the South African government under the regime of apartheid, later projects have articulated the complex relations between Portuguese/European identities and the African colonies which helped to form them. Exhibited in Depois de Amanh at the Centro Cultural de Belm in Lisbon in 1994 and later at the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale, Emigrao is a piece in multiple parts, using as a principle source the murals for the Maritime Hall of the Rocha do Conde de bidos (which was the point of departure for the ships taking the colonial soldiers to Africa) by the painter Almada Negreiros. In exposing, through mimicry, transformation and erasure, the relationship of referent to work, Ferreira also deconstructs Almada's modernism itself as a discourse that was not only aesthetic but that also had political implications. This work was the starting point for later works which likewise used multiple plastic expressions (often sculptural pieces aligned with photographs or video) to work through the complex iconographies of colonial rhetoric. Ferreira's work is methodical and analytical, allowing her to exercise a critique upon the sources she uses through photography and text, always making transparent her working methods and the thought processes which lead from source to object. In her contribution to the exhibition of flags at Culturgest last year (Pode a Arte ser Afirmativa?) Ferreira wove together the unravelled fabric of the three flags that constitute her own identity (Portuguese, Mozambican and South African), deconstructing and re-contextualising the flags of origin in texts placed on the flagpole (in the manner of bus-route diagrams placed in bus shelters). The flag itself is a kind of pennett, and substitutes the clear iconic definition of the flags of origin by an object whose artesanal finish cleverly mimics that of popular Portuguese woven rugs.

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Other works of relevance to this theme are Double Sided and Amnesia.. Double Sided is an elaborate piece, staged in two separate venues: the Chinati Foundation in Marfa Texas, and the Owl House in Nieu Bethesda, a remote little outpost in the northwestern Cape in South Africa. Ferreira has worked on two disparate art-narratives: that of the internationally renowned minimalist artist Donald Judd, living in isolation in Marfa, Texas, and that of the unknown, self-taught South African artist Helen Martins, living in isolation in Nieu Bethesda. The work of each of these two artists is appropriated and filtered through various systems of representation and mediation, and each was then grafted onto (and shown in) the space of the other. These crossed lines are woven together into a single narrative which exists, in various versions, outside of the physical space of each: shown at the exhibitions Jetlag (Reitoria, Lisbon, 1996), Premio Unio Latna (Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1997) and Graft (Cape Town, 1997), the full dimension of Double Sided will emerge in a book that the artist hopes will be published within a year. Finally, Amnesia (shown at the Drawing and Sculpture Biennale of Caldas da Rainha in Portugal, as well as in the Biennale of Lima, Peru, both in 1997). Here Ferreira uses as a point of departure the commercially available video Moambique no Outro Lado do Tempo (Consom, 1997). The work gathers diverse elements: the (unadulterated) video itself, three pieces by the renowned 19th century Portuguese ceramicist Rafaelo Bordalo Pinheiro caricatures of Gungunhana, the African leader whose captivity and humiliation in the hands of the Portuguese troops in the late 19th century has come to symbolise the depravity of colonialism itself trunks of wood, and the artist's parents' dining-table and chairs of 'exotic' wood (umbila) custom-made while the family was living in Mozambique during the artist's childhood. By these borrowings and juxtapositions, Ferreira probes the nostalgia implicit in Portuguese representations of 'Africa' and 'Africanness'. In this piece, ngela Ferreira frontally addresses the question not only of collective representations, but also of collective memory and of its dark other side the 'amnesia' that gives the work its title. For it is under the sign of amnesia that much Portuguese art today continues to construct its relationship with Africa. Ruth Rosengarten, Lisbon, January 1998

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 My thanks to the numerous people whom I pestered and who helped me with invaluable information in the writing of this piece and escpecially to: ngela Ferreira, Antnio Pinto Ribeiro, Antnio Tavares, Carole Garton, Isabel Carlos, Joo de Pina Cabral, Jorge Sena, Jos Antnio Fernandes Dias, Jos Antnio Sousa Tavares, Luisa Nora, Pedro Lapa.

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