Mónica de Miranda is an artist and researcher. She works and lives in between Lisbon and Luanda. Born in Porto (Portugal) with Angolan background. Her work is based on themes of urban archaeology and personal geographies. She works in an interdisciplinary way with drawing, installation, photography, film and sound, in its expanded forms and on the boundaries between fiction and documentary. She holds a Visual Arts Degree from the Camberwell College of Arts, a Master’s Degree in Art and Education from the Institute of Education London and a PhD in Visual Art from the University of Middlesex. Mónica is also one of the founders of the artistic residences project Triangle Network in Portugal and she founded in 2014 the project Hangar Center for Artistic Research, in Lisbon. She exhibits regularly and internationally since 2004. Her work is present in many private and public collections like the Fundaçao Calouste Gulbekian, MAAT, FAS, MNAC, PLMJ, AML e Centro Cultural de lago , Collection Fernando Figueirido Ribeiro. Her solo exhibitions include: Geografia Dormente (Galeria Municipal de Arte, Almada, Portugal, 2019); Tomorrow is another day (Carlos Carvalho Gallery, Lisbon, 2018); Panorama, Banco Económico (Luanda, 2019); Atlantic. A Journey to the center of the earth (Galería Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, Spain, 2017). Panorama (Tyburn Gallery. London, UK, 2017) Arrivals and departures (Palácio D. Manuel, Évora, 2016), Hotel Globo (Museu Nacional de arte contemporânea do Chiado, Lisbon, 2015) Arquipélago (Galeria Carlos Carvalho , Lisbon, 2014), Erosion (Appleton Square, Lisbon, 2013), An Ocean Between Us(Plataforma Revólver, Lisbon, 2012); Novas Geografias (198 Gallery, London / Plataforma Revólver, Lisbon / Imagem HF, Amsterdam, 2008). Her exhibitions include: African Cosmologies- Foto fest, (Houston, USA 2020), South circular, Maat (Lisbon, 2019), Utopia and Dystopia in Contemporary Landscapes at Bienar du Sur, MAAC ( +Guayaquil, Ecuador,2020 ); Taxidermy of the future, Biennale Lubumbashi (Congo, 2019); Architecture and Manufacturing, at MAAT in Lisbon (2019); Doublethink:Doublevision (Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey, 2017) ,Daqui Pra Frente (CAIXA Cultural. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2017), Le jour qui vient (Galerie des Galeries. Paris, France, 2017),Bienal de Fotografia Vila Franca de Xira (Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal,2017), Contemporary African Art and Aesthetics of Translations (Dakar biennial, Dakar, 2016);Telling Time at the Rencontres de Bamako Biennale Africaine de la Photographie 10éme edition (Mali, 2015); Ilha de São Jorge at the 14th Biennial of Architecture of Venezia (Italy, 2014); Do you hear me at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal, 2008) and United Nations at the Singapore Fringe Festival (Singapore, 2007).

Mónica de Miranda has participated in various residencies in institutions such as the Tate Britain, French Institute, British Council/Iniva, Instituto Camões

Works

Hotel Globo, 2014

Hotel Globo, Mónica de Miranda, HD video, colour, sound, 9′27´´, 2014

Miranda’s Hotel Globo is also, or even mostly, about that passage, intimately connected to the spatial and architectural, the temporal and historic, the identity-based and diasporic: the bodies’ performative passage through the affective and mnemonic, personal and political spaces of architecture and landscape. In their meditative and transitory dislocation, without possession or property, these bodies nonetheless re- appropriate space in a manner which is passive only in appearance; they undertake an active reinvention, even when languid, of dwelling. In this, they replicate the constant reinventions which the passage of several generations of guests through the Hotel Globo inscribed on the skin of its walls, on the skeleton of its doors and staircases, corridors and elevators, verandas and windows, and in the content of some of its rooms, abandoned by guests. From best hotel of the 1950s colonial Luanda and meeting point for businessmen coming from the provinces, to accommodation space for Soviet pilots managed by the estate company Anghotel in the post- independence period (marked by the beginning of the civil war in a Cold War context), and secret shelter of UNITA refugees in the beginning of the 1990s, the Globo was never really a touristic inn. Besides its foreign guests, it always received, for the most part, Angolans coming from the interior or the diaspora, like, for example, the anthropologist, writer, film-maker / image-maker  and painter Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941-2010) after his move to Namibia in his last years, passages he recorded in watercolour. The protagonist couple of Hotel Globo’s video – the artist herself and a friend collaborator and curator André Cunha – evokes vaguely the couple behind the building’s construction. Their bodies do not cross paths inside the 1950s modernist architecture – neither in each of the projections that make up the video diptych, nor in the visual encounter that the double projection could prompt on the gallery wall – except for a moment in the beginning of the video when the female face, on one side, and the male body, on the other, emerge simultaneously but no less isolated, phantasmatically reflected  on window panes . Just like the Globo itself, bodies still waiting or already apart. Witnesses to Luanda’s contrasts, alien and frozen in time (to use the phrase with which Almeida describes the Globo in his account), these guests of history and memory become loose characters of actional narrative, resistantly horizontal visitors even when they move vertically, who try to map in vain the contradictions of an almost unrecognizable city through the modernist lenses of the Globo’s verandas and windows. They cartograph Luanda’s urban landscape with their gaze, but always from the very activity of mapping with their own bodies the interior architecture of the hotel, slowly walked across and inhabited, from dawn to dusk, from the intimacy of the room to the panoramic view of the veranda on the upper door. The resulting map or cartography makes up a rhythmic collection of visual and auditory fragments shown in a diptych format.