Portugal’s Pavilion Unveils a Dynamic Intersection of Nature, History, and Identity
LEFT TO RIGHT: Mónica de Miranda (Courtesy of Jahmek Contemporary Art), Sónia Vaz Borges (Photographer: Argenis Apolinario), and Vânia Gala Rui (Photographer: Sergio Afonso).
Portugal is represented at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia by the collective project GREENHOUSE, led by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges, and Vânia Gala. Set against the Biennale’s theme, ‘Foreigners Everywhere,’ this innovative project unfolds within the historic Palazzo Franchetti until the 24th of November, 2024. ‘GREENHOUSE’ transcends traditional artistic boundaries, melding ecology, art, and politics to interrogate and deconstruct entrenched norms of identity, culture, and belonging. Through its four dynamic actions – Garden, Living Archive, School, and Assemblies – the project cultivates a Creole garden, a space for resistance and freedom that challenges historical narratives and reimagines the intersections of nature, memory, and collective identity. This interview explores the project’s conceptual framework, its redefinition of national representation, and its engagement with Venice’s storied past to create a robust dialogue on decolonial practices and the politics of space.
ART AFRICA: Could you elaborate on the concept of ‘GREENHOUSE’ and how it challenges established norms of artistic production and representation?
GREENHOUSE: Greenhouse interrogates and challenges curatorial hegemonies and encourages fluid modes of artistic production in a collaborative decolonial discursive space. It proposes a place of experimentation, encounters, collective possibilities, and dialogues. The project questions the construction of the exhibition space and the hierarchy between curator-artist, body-mind, and human-nature.
The exhibition came to life from an encounter between a visual artist, an academic researcher and a choreographer. We have dreamed and made a Creole garden inside Palazzo Franchetti that builds on concepts from the work of Édouard Glissant. He uses the term Creole garden to refer to the private plots tended by enslaved people as acts of resistance and sources of nourishment – the antithesis of the monocultural plantation. Densely planted and richly biodiverse, the Creole garden fosters a discursive space of liberation, multiplicity, possibility and survivance.
Our garden emerged to connect past, present and future and highlight the politics of land, memory, body and identity. Emphasising the composite histories and identities that result from colonialism and liberation struggles, Greenhouse brings together historical narratives of liberation with contemporary decolonial practices in the context of the Anthropocene. It looks at ongoing movements that advocate historical reparations, ecological regeneration and new ways of imagining the future.
Pavilion of Portugal at the 60th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia. Greenhouse by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala, 2024. © Matteo Losurdo
How does the project aim to redefine notions of identity, culture, nation, and belonging within the context of the Biennale di Venezia?
All gardens need soil. Soil is the connected ground where one stands, cares and expands like a rhizome, building horizontally, underground, often imperceptibly. Greenhouse uses this understanding of garden plots and soil as a reminder of the work of Amílcar Lopes Cabral (1924–1973), the Bissau-Guinean and Cabo Verdean anti-colonial leader, agronomist, intellectual and poet. The Creole garden offers a way to revisit the liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau during the armed, political struggle against Portuguese colonialism. In the liberated zones, working with the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Bissau-Guineans developed living sites of resistance where they envisioned and practised the future of an independent and liberated country. Bringing together diverse individuals from different areas of Guinea-Bissau and sometimes Cabo Verde, the liberated zones were Creole gardens where people built schools, debated ideas, grew food and developed new social relations. These areas and actions helped to spark other liberation movements, notably the Carnation Revolution that deposed Portugal’s dictatorship on the 25th of April 1974.
In this way, we offer an alternative narrative of Portugal’s history. There is no history of Portugal without the history of Africa and Africans, a presence that dates back to the 1400s but which has been largely forgotten in the public mind and official histories. As Jacques Depelchin noted: ‘Among those who have suffered enslavement, colonisation, steady and relentless economic exploitation, cultural asphyxiation, religious persecution, gender, race and class discrimination and political repression, silences should be seen as facts.’ Silences are, therefore, part of history and the stories that we must research, expose and narrate on our terms. Greenhouse not only makes these silences speak but also raises their volume and centres them in Portuguese national history. Greenhouse builds a home of past, present and future, containing multiple possibilities. It looks at the concept of home through the experiences of diaspora and immigration, asking questions about home and belonging tied to issues of origins and exile. The home that we invoke is a safe place where one does not need to explain oneself to strangers.
Pavilion of Portugal at the 60th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia. Greenhouse by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala, 2024. © Matteo Losurdo
The project encompasses four main actions: Garden, Living Archive, School, and Assemblies. Can you explain how these components contribute to the exhibition’s narrative and experience?
The Garden in the exhibition space is the creation of Mónica de Miranda. The Garden proposes soil and the body as a vector of decolonial and ecological expression and active agents of the earth carrying memories and stories. It is inspired by the thought and practice of Amílcar Cabral, whom we have already referenced, who proposed soil as an active agent of historical processes. Soil moves, it is constantly transformed, it is a permanent source of life that illustrates the interdependence between human actions, social and material conditions, and the condition of the land.
In the Garden, you find the Islands—shaping the Garden and setting the prologue to the exhibition. The island is a metaphor for utopia, isolation, refuge, and escape.
These islands contain the Sculptures. The sculptures are stages and vertical gardens that change configuration to host the program’s various discursive actions.
The idea is not to create a static, aesthetic experience but rather a space that can call the spectator into the action of the work of art: a discursive space for learning where practices of talking and listening can take place.
To give you an example of the sculptures that inhabit the space, one sculpture named Mirror Mirror on the Wall acts as a reflection of oneself, as a place of self-discovery, of understanding one’s identity. It depicts the idea of looking at ourselves through the eyes of the other or referring to an outside perspective in the individuation process.
The sculpture Crosstalk emits episodes of The Funambulist Podcast (which also has a magazine), a platform that engages with the politics of space and bodies. It provides a platform where activist, academic, and practitioner voices can meet and build solidarities across geographical lines.
The sculpture School of the revolution is a space of assembly, collective discussion and pedagogy, inspired by the secret gatherings of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in forests across Guinea-Bissau.
Then, we have the two video installations here. The film Transplanting a film by Mónica de Miranda, is a video performance that begins in the botanical garden in Lisbon, and it explores the connection between the movement of plants and bodies within the contemporary post-colonial context. Weaving Stories While Walking by Sónia Vaz Borges and Mónica de Miranda is a reading-performance that interweaves multiple accounts from members of the resistance against the colonial powers in Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Portugal. This assemblage of individual memories, which throughout the reading becomes a collective, is read in several languages – Portuguese, Italian, English and Cape-Verdean Creole.
Pavilion of Portugal at the 60th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia. Greenhouse by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala, 2024. © Matteo Losurdo
The Living Archive is composed of sound, movement and performance. The sound was produced by Mónica, Sónia and Felipe Ridolfi the sound producer.
This sound installation Transmission is emitted throughout the main hall, interweaving sensorially with the garden. It incorporates both natural (water, earth, air, fire) and historical (radio broadcasts, children’s songs, interviews with migrants) sonic elements to recreate spaces of resistance, referring to timeless liberation struggles against colonialism. It is envisioned as a form of caring for the well-being of the plants that are integrated into the exhibition, creating a space of intergenerational transmissions, interweaving human and non-human ecologies of resistance and liberation. Integrated into the Living Archive are also performances choreographed by Vânia Gala. Performances are taking place at specific times throughout Greenhouse’s run. Passa Folhas, produced in collaboration with the other artists, derives from the idea of the Creole garden as a counter-plantation practice of mutual distribution as well as multiple positionings and other alternative choreographies.
The School has a programme composed of Education, History and Revolution. Here, the garden becomes a school with a creative programme of workshops and research. It proposes a Programme-Action to create a revolutionary school for the present and the future. These schools reflect the militant education project-process developed by the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde), intended for children and young people, as well as adults, and involving three aspects: technical training, political training and the transformation of individual and collective behavior.
Lastly, the garden is–a stage for discursive actions and a public programme of Assemblies for the Public and Communities. The Assemblies activate the Greenhouse through various actions by collectives, associations, artists, curators and researchers from Portugal, Angola, Cabo Verde, Brazil, Benin, Nigeria, Berlin, France and Italy, among others, resulting in an artistic proposal that is transdisciplinary and trans territorial. Based on a critical look at history for possible futures, the aim is to create a network of international dialogues, reflecting on a common historical space and current contemporary artistic practices, that resonate with aspects of nature – namely the rhizome, the biome, pollen and the bulb. These terms, associated with botany and ecology, inspire us to think about natural phenomena, adapting our theories and praxis.
Pavilion of Portugal at the 60th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia. Greenhouse by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala, 2024. © Anna Jarosz
4. The “Creole garden” concept is intriguing. How does it serve as a space of resistance and freedom, and what kinds of interactions or experiences do you hope visitors will have within this space?
Mónica de Miranda had the idea of creating a Creole garden as a space representing home as a place of multiple possibilities and different times. It looks at home as an “imagined return” where the questions of diaspora, immigration, home and belonging relate to issues of origins and exile. We were inspired by Edouard Glissant’s notion of the Creole garden, biodiverse gardens created by enslaved people, contraposing the monocultural production of the plantation. The Creole garden is another name for what Sylvia Wynter called the plantation “plot:” small gardens that enslaved people tended and where they could grow edible and medicinal crops.
5. Can you discuss the significance of exhibiting at Palazzo Franchetti and how the venue contributes to the presentation of GREENHOUSE?
In the recent book African Venice: A guide to Art, Culture and People, we learned about the existence of a banana/plantain tree in San Marco; a garden of palm trees in Giudecca; the Venetian trade beads used in African commerce, and the African presence at the Biennale, which has involved racist exclusion, curatorial interventions and many other controversies. In relation to this question, we were reading about palaces and their problematic imperial history. The Creole garden is inside a palace, more specifically on the third floor of the Palazzo Franchetti, where there used to be a library and archive made of exotic wood, but which also used to be a seed bank, according to records. The Creole garden comes to question these places by introducing active agents – the plants, the soil, the people, the multiple possibilities, the reflections, encounters and dialogues. With this space, we question the hierarchies we mentioned at the beginning, challenge curatorial hegemonies, and encourage fluid modes of artistic production in a collaborative decolonial discursive space.
Pavilion of Portugal at the 60th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia. Greenhouse by Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges and Vânia Gala, 2024. © Matteo Losurdo
Another way of seeing or interpreting it is to look at the historic gardens in Venice, such as The Royal Garden from 1807, the Savorgnan Gardens from 1826, or the Papadopoli Gardens from the 1930s. Gardens are not places to just reflect and rest. They have represented and continue to represent an imperial and colonial history. To say or think of gardens as only inviting spaces for reflection, rest, or relaxation erases all the gardeners’ daily work there. It erases the immense network of knowledge collectively created there. In this way, there are two ways of accessing the garden: either as a place to reflect and rest, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively, or through work and workers and the network of knowledge and care and solidarity that happens while keeping the garden alive.
This collective action of the Creole garden includes the work between the artist-curators, the gardeners, the production team, the invigilators, the supporters, the visitors, etc. All of this involves a collective action to keep the garden alive that, of course, is used as a place to rest and reflect, as these are elements that we try to recreate in the palace. In the Creole garden at Palazzo Franchetti there is a place to learn, exchange, reflect, see your reflection on the sculptures, and question your presence in the space. The presence of the Creole garden in this space forces us to question the origins, the owners and the producers of knowledge, and where this knowledge is stored, or better, arrested.
Mónica de Miranda and Sónia Vaz Borges, who formed part of the collective project GREENHOUSE, answered the questions. The exhibition will be on view until the 24th of November, 2024. For more information, please visit GREENHOUSE.
