Epistemic Decolonization through the Colonial, Anti- and Post-Colonial Archive in Contemporary Art

This visual essay comprises a selection of works made by artists from several generations and geographies, who contribute to an epistemic decolonization in, and of, the present by means of archival research. With works by Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, 1979), Filipa César (Portugal, 1975), Olavo Amado (São Tomé and Príncipe, 1979), Ângela Ferreira (Mozambique, 1958), Eurídice Kala aka Zaituna Kala (Mozambique, 1987), Délio Jasse (Angola, 1980), Daniel Barroca (Portugal, 1976), Filipe Branquinho (Mozambique, 1977), and Mónica de Miranda (Portugal/Angola, 1976), I propose a possible reading of the various ways in which contemporary artists have been working critically with colonial archives, not only public, but also private and familial, in view of a decolonizing memorialization of Portuguese colonialism and an understanding of its profound and multifarious impact in contemporary societies – notably regarding structural and institutional racism in Portugal, and enduring patterns of coloniality and neo-colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe.

national reconciliation, as well as migration, diaspora and gender. Not incidentally, this visual essay begins and ends with images of powerfuland powerfully depictedblack African women. Whilst the former celebrates the Angolan Queen Njinga Mbandi, a 17 thcentury anti-colonial warrior represented in traditional African attire, the latter depicts an Angolan ballerina moving across the urban space of contemporary Luanda, both images countering the violence of Eurocentric and misogynist stereotypes of female beauty and strength.
Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, 1979) has appropriated colonial ruins (and their attendant ruinations) in the urban landscape of Luanda in order to "ruin" them; 1 that is, he has brought them to the surface in order to undermine whatever symbolic power they might still embody. Such leftover structures have included fallen and broken male colonial statues, "ambushed" at the São Miguel fortress by the upright solidity of Queen Njinga, who temporarily "re-enacted" her resistance against colonial occupation (Balumuka which Njinga's statue has been moved to the museum entrance, where it remains. As to the Portuguese colonial statues, unwanted and, therefore, "stranded" while awaiting some sort of final destination (in the meantime, they have been incorporated into the reopened museum's display), they have been photographed by Kia Henda amidst military equipment from the Portuguese colonial occupation and settlement, the liberation war, and the civil warcolonial, anti-colonial, and Cold War traces left on Angolan soil by Angolans, Portuguese, Soviets, Cubans, and South Africans throughout many decades.
The leftover structures examined by Kia Henda have also included the colonial pedestals left vacant by the "ambushed" and "stranded" statues, whose temporary occupation or squatting by several young performers he has been collaboratively orchestrating and photographing (Redefining the Power [2011]). Both Balumuka and Redefining the Power form an integral part of the series Homem Novo (New Man) (2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013), the title of 1 On the notions of ruin and ruination, see Ann Laura Stoler (2013).
2 Balumuka means to "stand up" or "to rise" in Kimbundo. The daughter of Ngola Kiluanji (the ruler of the Ndongo kingdom in the 16th century), Njinga Mbandi was the queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms in the 17th century and a skilled military strategist and diplomat, who is still seen in present-day Angola as a symbol of resistance against Portuguese occupation. On Njinga, see Linda Heywood (2017 which is indebted to the Marxist-Leninist conception of revolutionary subjectivity and nationhood that is still inscribed in Angola's national anthem. As a whole, the series carries out a heterogeneous, critical, and ironic investigation not only of colonial, anticolonial, post-independence, and Cold War remnants, but also of the post-Cold War and post-civil war new symbols and heroes of the nation. Real and fictive, solid and transient, stone-made, metallic and human, sculptural and performative, such old and new subjects are shown to be enmeshed in Luanda's layered urban space. They are also made visible in such a way as to upset patriarchal conceptions of manhood, including the revolutionary, by means of gender and sexuality. In The Embassy (2011), Filipa César (Portugal, 1975)  As opposed to the ruined condition of the colonial statues shown in Kia Henda's photographs and César's video, in Olavo Amado's (São Tomé and Príncipe, 1979) sartorial intervention for the camera, they seem to have risen again ([Re]Descobertos [2013]); but only apparently so, for, despite their fairly preserved condition, the artist's gesture of dressing them up in colourful African-cloth garments necessarily and humorously disturbs any heroic grandeur they could evoke, notably for their eminent placement at the entrance of São Tomé's National Museum, at the São Sebastião fortress. Amado critically acknowledges, while at the same time mocking, the prominent visibility ascribed to the statues by their location. His intervention makes them even more conspicuous, but in a non-celebratory and humorous fashion: it reverses the colonial relationship of "discoverer vs. discovered" by turning the Portuguese into the (re)discovered, as the title suggests. Also, they emerge as re-appropriated and Africanized by São Tomeans, and so much more in line with the histories of struggle and resistance told by the National Museum's display. Finally, the work's title warns against not only the untruth of the so-called discoveries, but also the dangers of ongoing patterns of coloniality and the neo-colonialism at work in capitalist forms of European "rediscovery". 5 See Amílcar Cabral (1988;. 6 See Jacques Derrida (1994); Avery Gordon, (2008 In Lisbon, artists such as Kia Henda, Ângela Ferreira (Mozambique, 1958) and others have also looked at the ways in which the violent histories and memories of slavery and colonialism continue to be denied by the grand narrative of the so-called discoveries.
Besides still thriving at all levels of public education, including many sectors of Portuguese academia, this narrative also remains deeply embedded in celebratory monuments, many of which built under the aegis of the Estado Novo dictatorial regime . Such denial obviously includes the present-day legacies of such pasts in the form of an enduring structural racism in contemporary Portuguese society, conveniently swept under the carpet of an anxiously maintained "lusotropicalism", repackaged as "lusofonia" and the idea of a benign Portuguese influence around the world. 7 Obviously, those who continue to carry the heavy burden of such a collective denial are, today as much as yesterday, non-white bodies (black, Romany, etc.) and, in particular, black women. After many decades of resistance and struggle, anti-racist and intersectional feminist grassroots organizations are bringing structural racism and the processes of memorialization of slavery and colonialism into the public sphere with increasing visibility. Padrão, pertaining to the newsreels Imagens de Portugal no. 186 (1959) and no. 193 (1960), the latter of which includes images of the making of the sculptures that became the Padrão's main decorative elements at the atelier of the sculptor Leopoldo de 7 Theorised by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, lusotropicalism was appropriated by the Estado Novo after the Second World War to justify Portugal's maintenance of its African colonies when other European countries started to decolonise. It propagated the idea that the Portuguese mixed more with the African populations they colonized and were more benevolent towards them than the other European colonizers. These ideas are still pervasive in Portuguese society. See, for instance, Cláudia Castelo (1998). Almeida. The sides of the monument, in the shape of a caravel facing the Tagus estuary, are occupied by an ascending parade of kings, conquerors, explorers, scholars and poets, led by Henry the Navigator, and sculpted in the large-scale, epic style typical of Estado Novo statuary. The façade was designed in the form of a cross, within which appears the image of a sworda powerful metaphor for the entanglements between discoveries, civilizing mission and conquest. The films by means of which Ferreira recalls these histories were also made in the context of the Estado Novo's propaganda initiatives. 9

Ferreira's video and sculptural installation Messy Colonialism, Wild Decolonization
In 1974-1975, this  Luanda. By means of photographic compositions made analogically, he juxtaposes appropriated photographs of anonymous people, mostly acquired in Lisbon's flea market, and his own images of the unrecognizable Luanda that he "misencountered" ("desencontrou") twelve years after the diaspora. 13 To these, he adds the stamps typically found in passports and visas, some of which explicitly refer to the departures from Angola and Portugal in 1961that is, to the movements of those trying to escape the "colonial" war and conscription -, while others, issued by the Immigration and Borders Service in Portugal, and the Migration and Foreigners Service in Angola, display much more recent dates. Jasse thus calls attention to the structural racism inherent to nationality laws that restrict access to full citizenship in Portugal and, more broadly, in "fortress Europe", and to mobility, migration and xenophobia across the African borders inherited from colonialism 14 .
Like Jasse, Daniel Barroca (Portugal, 1976) Neto (2007) in Jo Ractliffe (2008) and Ondjaki (2008). 21 The turning of the mausoleum into a spaceship, though obviously involving fiction, was faithful to the way it is commonly referred to by Luandansfoguetão, meaning spaceship in Portugueseand, what is more, to the fact that a spaceship aesthetics was intentional on the part of the Soviets, inspired by the renowned poem by Neto "O Caminho das Estrelas" (1953), citations of which can be read on its interior walls, among others. See Agostinho Neto (1977). For a more in-depth analysis of Kia Henda's Icarus 13, see Ana Balona de Oliveira (2019b). the architectural heritage has been increasingly replaced with gentrified, luxury high-rise buildings. In Miranda's work, the Globo, and subsequently the Panorama, as well as the Karl Marx Cinema (called Avis before independence), among others, become spatiotemporal and affective "lenses" through which her own and collaborators' bodies gaze at, inhabit and re-appropriate the multiple geographies and histories of the city. As a diasporic subject, Miranda negotiates double and doubling -or "twin", almost the same but not quiteexperiences of belonging, including the inherited, from which an unbelonged sense of shared, communal dwelling might be said to emerge. 22 Opening and closing this visual essay, the Angolan Queen Njinga Mbandi and the Angolan ballerina on Luanda's rooftop remind us, each in her own way (and despite the complexities of the former's biography), what an actual epistemic decolonization in, and of, the present must includea relentless politics and ethics of critical memory and thoughtful acts of systemic reparation.