Tatiana Macedo works across mediums such as film, video, photography and sound in their expanded fields. By immersing herself in specific contexts, she documents and discursively transforms them through the editing in a critical, sensitive and essayistic manner.
In her second solo show at the gallery, the artist, of Portuguese and Angolan ascendance, presents a reworked private photographic album belonging to her aunt Isabel (Bela). But unlike an amateur album, these are portraits of Bela that were taken by a friend of hers – an Angolan professional photographer – in Luanda in the years of 1973 and 1974. In these installations Tatiana Macedo transforms the images into a sculptural experience, reworking the album scans, timeworn, and reprinting them into various scales (after meticulously deleting all marks of deterioration from the original prints). Without any feeling of nostalgia, the artist erases the time-interval between the moment the images were captured, and their current reprinting, as if continuing the photographer’s work. He died shortly after, in 1975. Exhibited for the first time in 2016 in Berlin, and under the title ‘Bela’ this has always been to the artist, a body of work that ‘thinks through’ the migration of its central elements – thus being fundamental to have a second presentation in Lisbon. In Berlin, the artist added an element of the German consumer culture to the photographic installation – the Afri-Cola – a drink originated and registered in Cologne in 1931, which had its commercial breakthrough in the Post-War period. This reference acquires an ironic tone when we think at the cult advertising films of this drink, namely the ones directed by Charles Wilp in the late 60’s and 70’s. These films explored the exotic cliché of the palm tree image logo, which associated Africa to an idea of body emancipation (male and female) and sexual freedom in a provocative, avant-garde, pop, futuristic style. Its irreverence is incorporated in the slogan: “und alles wird afri”, “and everything becomes afri”. Later Wim Wenders also shot a commercial for the brand. The apparently disparate elements that embody this project migrate in their multiple contextual, historical and cultural directions between Angola, Portugal and Germany.
Presented here in Lisbon, the images (some shown for the first time here) return to a context that is familiar to them, whilst the Afri-Cola drink migrates to an alien context. For the Lisbon public who is unfamiliar with the German drink, it may be perceived as an African beverage (with everything it may entail in the memory of each individual). What is the role of the project’s underlining text? What kind of captions can be added? These are questions that have been occupying the debates of various institutions with ethnological collections, mostly constituted by objects that have migrated from a different culture. What sorts of stories or narratives are told by these objects/artefacts? One not only should tell the story of its usage, its geographical, historical, and ethnical origin, neither would it be sufficient to tell the story of its trafficking, theft and colonization. Clementine Deliss says that ‘these objects are contaminated’. I believe that the micro-narratives like these personal biographies are fundamental here, as much as who produced/manufactured them, who collected them, who trafficked them, what journeys have they incurred. Of course nothing exists out of context. Our understanding of things will always depend on the way we position ourselves, on our capacity for exercising our bodies and thought outside of these limits, assuming different angles and points of view. This will allow us to question what we have in front, above, below or behind us, today, yesterday or in a desired future.
Quoting David Campany,
Photographs are highly mobile images. Made at particular times, often for particular reasons they can reappear in other circumstances. Some of the most well known photos have had long lives and numerous manifestations – in magazines and books, on gallery walls, postcards and posters. Many are essentially simple, their meaning able to withstand the vagaries of cultural transit. Others are more pliable, yielding to different demands, shifting in meaning, lending themselves to different ends. Some become well known through a single, highly visible use (on television or on the cover of a newspaper). Others accrue their meaning over time.
One thing I am certain of: these are portraits made by someone who is in love with what he has in front of him - subject and landscape - someone who, in the intervals of his profession, exercises his artistic freedom, inspired by his masters. I presume this is the case for one of the pictures of Bela with her friend looking through the windows of an obsolete bus, where one can read “Autocarro do Amor”, (Love Bus), and which reminds me of Robert Frank’s portrait of racial inequality in The US, in that iconic front cover of The Americans (France, 1958). Another film comes to mind: La Pyramide Humaine by Jean Rouch (Côte d’Ivoire, 1959) – a fearless fiction and non-fiction exercise between love, youth and an Abidjan colonized by the French (already living their Nouvelle Vague). The author of the images (deliberately left unknown here for privacy reasons) exposes his emotional fragility as much as the territory that both of them stand in, is a fragile one. Any reading of a predator/prey relation is a limited one when speaking of a portrait. Even our positioning as spectators is full of fragilities. In the video-sculpture installation, everything is image and everything is landscape, in a perpetual travelling movement over a ‘palm trees field.’ I hereby see myself, once again, ironically addressing the exotic experience in contemporary art –a temporary praise without knowledge, and a production of objects that perpetuate the exoticism that it promised to criticize in the first place. But Bela is part of my biography and Afri-Cola is a politically incorrect drug, both object and image, permeable to the fragilities of their spectators – our own.
This text was written by Tatiana Macedo, in the first and third person.
Lisbon, April 2019
Tatiana Macedo
This body of work was produced with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in the context of the João Hogan Artistic Residency Grant at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2016
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