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Transplanting

Mónica de Miranda

2024 00:13:35 PortugalColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Nature, Post-colonialism

Description

Transplanting is a video performance film looking at the connection between the movement of plants and bodies within the contemporary post-colonial context. Set in Lisbon’s botanical garden and urban gardens built by African migrant communities, the film reflects on colonial exploitation and displacement. It begins with the botanic garden, representing the forced transplantation of plants and diasporic bodies due to colonialism. The narrative then transitions to the forest, a historical refuge for revolutionaries and marginalized individuals, a space for resistance and revolution, away from the impositions of colonial powers. Finally, the film culminates in urban gardens, which mirror the Creole Gardens as spaces of cultural resistance and belonging for migrant and diasporic bodies. Transplanting intricately weaves the interconnected histories of humans and nature, highlighting their shared experiences of displacement and adaptation.

About Mónica de Miranda

Mónica de Miranda is a Portuguese/Angolan visual artist, filmmaker and researcher whose interdisciplinary and research-based practice critically looks at the convergence of politics, gender, memory, space and history. Her work encompasses drawing, installation, photography, film and sound, on the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Mónica investigates strategies of resistance, geographies of affection, storytelling and ecologies of care.

She is the founder and the artistic director of Hangar (2014), an art and research centre in Lisbon. Hangar’s programs provide spaces where artists, curators and researchers, mainly from the global south, can co-create and build social and creative networks to benefit their communities.

Her work has been presented at major international events such as: 1st Malta Biennale; 3th Lagos Biennale; 6th Lubumbashi Biennale; 12th Berlin Biennale; 12th Dakar Biennale; 5th International Biennial of Casablanca; Bamako Encounters – 13th African Biennale of Photography; 14th Venice Architecture Biennale; BIENALSUR 2021; Houston FotoFest 2022; 18th Fotografia Europea, Reggio Emilia. She represented the Portugal Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2024.

Solo and group exhibitions have taken place at: Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, Wexner Art Center, Ohio; Photo Ireland, Dublin; Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Gulbenkian, Lisbon; MUCEM, Marseilles; AfricaMuseum, Tervuren; MAAT, Lisbon; MUAC, Mexico City; Barbican, London; Autograph, London; Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes; Uppsala Museum, Sweden; MNAC, Lisbon; Camões Cultural Institute, Luanda, among others.

Mónica de Miranda received the Soros Arts Fellowship (2024) and La Caixa Foundation Fellowship (2022). She won the Expanded Photography Prize in Torino (2024), and was nominated for the Louis Roederer Photography Prize for Sustainability (2024), EDP Foundation’ New Artists Award (2019) and Novo Banco Photo Prize (2016).

Mónica de Miranda is also a researcher with the Foundation for Science and Technology (2013-2024) in the Center for Comparative Studies at University of Lisbon where she coordinates the cluster Post-Archive: Politics of Place, Memory and Identity.