Greenhouse: Pavilhão de Portugal / Representação Oficial Portuguesa na 60ª Exposição Internacional de Arte de Veneza — La Biennale di Venezia 2024
Islands, Schools, and Gardens of Liberation
Portuguese Pavilion, 2024 Venice Biennale
To step into Greenhouse is to immerse yourself in an abundant, living testament to resistance and interconnectedness. This ambitious and collective project reflects on the ecology (from the ancient Greek word “oikos”, which means “home”) of a house, a home, which is, as theorist Gayatri Spivak puts it, a place where you don’t need to justify yourself to strangers. It is a space for encounters where the biographies and personal relationships of the three authors of the Portuguese Pavilion have served as starting points to create a space of refuge. Artist and curator Mónica de Miranda, historian and social-political organiser Sónia Vaz Borges, and choreographer and researcher Vânia Gala explore together spiral axes of time and space related to shared histories. In the year that Portugal celebrates the 50th anniversary since the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, which liberated the country from a four-decade long fascist dictatorship that was waging wars against the liberation movements in the colonies, it is an important and strong signal to have a collective from the African diaspora represent the country at the Venice Biennale.
The three artists-curators don’t come alone. With them, countless voices from the same diaspora were invited to be present in the exhibition and to participate in the programme, not as a mere addendum but as an integral part of the project. Over 45 contributors—local and international researchers, performers, curators, artists, and collectives, from long-lasting collaborators to newly established alliances—populate the various strands of the programme. They have also invited in the boundless intelligence of plants. “Plants are the very basis of life” (Shiva, 2019), says Indian environmental activist and food sovereignty advocate Vandana Shiva, one of the main theoretical influences for the way in which the artists think about the garden installation. Plants pervade the space—after all, this is a greenhouse, a “creole garden” (Édouard Glissant’s concept of a counter-plantation practice of mutual distribution), an archipelago of garden islands that we traverse with our bodies, becoming the connecting water in between, while walking on the beautiful parquet of the second floor of the Palazzo Franchetti near the Ponte dell'Accademia on the Grand Canal. The element of water might be physically absent, but it is called in, or represented, by the freely shaped island gardens, by our feeling of being outside of that which is considered mainland, or mainstream. We are between two states: the solid and the liquid, the land and the sea. There is rooting and there is fluidity—such is the condition of the diaspora.
And such is the structure that holds the plants, the herbs, selected from the memories of the artists-gardeners, referencing the way they can be used to treat illnesses of body and spirit. A diverse permaculture that brings different times together, creating the archetype of a garden comprised of various elements. The main hall, a sumptuous wooden library modernised in the 19th century in Venetian Gothic style, is flanked by smaller rooms on both sides. This context would suggest a botanical garden in colonial fashion, but the islands effortlessly resist any categorisation, interrupting the existing Western framing. Interspersed between the organically shaped islands, there are rectangular platforms that align with the wooden floor and serve as multileveled stages for the numerous performances, as well as mirrors and glasses that implicate the viewer as a responsible, emancipated participant. The dialogue between those sculptural bodies, the performers’ bodies, and the spectators’ bodies is what shapes the relations that emerge in the Palazzo, within the non-static configurations permitted by the modularity of the installations.
An elegant density propagates across the spaces, reminding us that gardens hold spaces for survival and resistance. Quilombos, communities formed by fugitives resisting enslavement, are revolutionary gardens. Vandana Shiva states: “The ecological space, where life renews and regenerates, is not a two-dimensional Cartesian space. It is a four-dimensional space of ‘desha’ and ‘kala,’ space and time, where life evolves in intelligence, vibrancy and diversity. The greater the density of interactions and relations in life’s ecological space, the more we enlarge our own freedoms and possibilities.” (Shiva, 2019) Such is the density of interactions which Greenhouse welcomes and that is at the core of the proposal—a multidisciplinary project that is a long-term unfolding of relations, planting seeds and watering gardens. Throughout the duration of the Biennale, the Pavilion is inhabited by a powerful programme of performances (living archive), talks (assemblies), readings and workshops (schools), bringing in concepts of rhizome, collective listening, ancestral cosmologies, and the breathing of life into the archive. “Real knowledge comes from experience, interconnectedness, [and] participation.” (Shiva, 2019)
Emancipatory struggles for freedom and liberation permeate Greenhouse, as the entire project is based on the thinking of agronomist, political organiser, and poet Amílcar Cabral, celebrating the centenary of his birth. To celebrate the resistance of the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean independentist leader is also to celebrate the spirit of the Carnation Revolution. As a student at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia in Lisbon, Cabral founded student movements against the Portuguese regime, advocating for the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Between 1963 and his assassination in 1973, he led a guerrilla war in Portuguese Guinea, with the goal of attaining independence for Guinea and Cape Verde, which he didn’t live to see. The concepts of common soil, as well as the format of the school in the forest, inspire the Pavilion. The forests were protective spaces that hosted Cabral’s resistance schools. Placed at one of the ends of the library, a round modular circle, the School of Revolution, proposes the rethinking of our education systems. A school under a tree, a circle without power hierarchies, a mandala that unfolds according to the inhabiting bodies and needs—a place where everyone is learning from each other, everyone is teaching the other, and all are dreaming together.
In one of the darkened corner rooms, the 30-minute film Weaving Stories while Walking by Mónica de Miranda and Sónia Vaz Borges is projected onto a billboard-like wooden structure that seems to be emerging from a small pile of earth, another island on the floor. The film starts and ends with four actors dressed in black walking determinedly on a stage, following each other. In between, they are filmed individually, each speaking in a different language (Portuguese, Italian, Creole, English), reciting excerpts from interview testimonies of events in the 1960s and 1970s. We hear stories about the Portuguese colonial wars, the House of the Students of the Empire in Lisbon, the forest schools, traditional healing practices, the sacrifices of villagers who were maimed while fighting for independence or supported the fighters with food and supplies, as well as Cabral’s dream of a cooperative democracy.
The opposite corner room, bathed in daylight, features a six-speakers installation arranged in a half circle. Entitled Cross Talk, it transmits a radio program curated by Léopold Lambert and Sónia Vaz Borges with nine different podcast episodes created for The Funambulist. During the opening week, it was broadcasting Transmission, a 40-minute sound piece with eerie sounds of radio communication, helicopters, undistinguishable voices and chants, ghostly female voices, as well as announcements in Portuguese about the victories achieved by the liberation army.
Another earth-filled room hosts the film Transplanting by Mónica de Miranda, where four performers, dressed in black, dance amidst and with different nature landscapes, at times individually, at times together. Filmed in and around Lisbon’s botanical gardens, it ends with the performers reaching and observing a housing estate nearby. Through the human interaction with these gardens, a colonial construct of tropicality and exoticism, the vegetation becomes an agent, reminding us that “nature is more than a human construct, or an object of human manipulation for short-term benefit; it is the creative force of the universe. To be alive is to live in the Ecocene.” (Shiva, 2019) The predominantly female protagonists convey a notion of sisterhood, bringing in an ecofeminist perspective that “propounds the need for a new cosmology and a new anthropology which recognizes that life in nature (which includes human beings) is maintained by means of co-operation, and mutual care and love.” (Mies & Shiva, 1993) This network of support and mutual care becomes present not only in this film but throughout the project of the Pavilion.
Mónica de Miranda is the co-founder of HANGAR Artistic Research Centre, a meeting place for artists, curators, and researchers which celebrates ten years of existence this year. Its programme, focusing on the global south and postcolonial constellations, has been an independent beacon in the city of Lisbon. HANGAR’s team is also behind the production of this Pavilion, and so is the ethos of community-building. The network built over the years visibly contributed to such a rich and collective engagement. They are part of what Shiva commends, when she writes that “people across the world are writing a new story, recognizing the brutality of colonization old and new, exploring new ways of joining the local with the planetary, linking the many creation stories of our diverse cultures, and joining our creativity and intelligence with the creativity and intelligence of every living being …, resolute in the defence of our diverse, interconnected freedoms.” (Shiva, 2019) Embodying the notion that no one is free until we are all free, the Pavilion’s team showed unequivocal solidarity towards the Art not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), which called for the exclusion of the apartheid state of Israel from the Venice Biennale due to its ongoing atrocities against Palestinians. Once again, the liberation of the oppressed and colonised shows itself as one single interconnected struggle.
“Especially in difficult times, … it is the garden that is the training ground for the creativity and wisdom that will enable us to recreate the world” (Cluitmans, 2021), affirms scholar Erik A. de Jong. We can therefore thank the team for this opportunity of engaging with the garden and thinking of gardening as a way of connecting with place, community, and ancestors. “A garden opens up space for making and experiencing. It ritualizes our existence and gives it meaning. Attention and care weave living nature together with our human condition. … This often manifests itself where the need is greatest: in the community gardens of densely populated American cities, in gardens created by the homeless, by soldiers in trenches during a war, or by refugees in their tent camps.” (de Jong in Cluitmans, 2021) Not only does gardening increase our empathy, it is also a tool for regeneration and learning about and with soil, ecosystems, and non-human beings.
In this Greenhouse, we might find angel’s trumpets, arrowroot, bamboo palms, bananas, basil, buckler ferns, candelabra aloe, cacao, coconuts, coffee, dragon trees, flaming swords, ginger, hibiscus, inch plants, jasmine, lemon balm, lemon verbena, lemongrass, miniature date palms, mistletoe figs, monsteras, never never plants, papayas, passionfruit, peace lily, peppermint, pineapples, piri-piri, rubber plants, rue, sage, sugar canes, sword fern, taro, tobacco, miracle trees, turmeric, umbrella plants, urn plants, Venus hair ferns, weeping figs, wild bananas, and yuccas. “In their refuge there is room not only for life, but also for the world.” (Cluitmans, 2021). In our difficult times, I am reminded of my mother’s garden and how it has been a source of health and abundance for her and our family, as well as a way of connecting to our roots as diasporic subjects. I didn’t pay much attention growing up. She does it naturally, almost effortlessly—a daily exercise. Now I deeply admire that space of wisdom and connection to continue recreating the world as the spirits of liberation have envisioned.
Ana Salazar Herrera (1990) is a curator and writer, founder of the Museum for the Displaced (2019-ongoing), and currently Assistant Curator at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024, Saudi Arabia. She explores nomadic, poly-linguistic, and transcultural subjectivities, proposing inventive questionings of hegemonic geopolitical mappings. She was interim Curator at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (2022-23), Germany, and Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2016-20). Ana was Curator-in-Residence (2021-22) at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Germany, mentee of the Project Anywhere programme (2020-21), and a fellow at the Shanghai Curators Lab (2018). She has an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a BA in Piano from the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa, Portugal. Her writing has appeared in art magazines, exhibition catalogues, and the academic journals Afterall and Stedelijk Studies.
Proofreading: Diogo Montenegro.
Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges, Vânia Gala, Greenhouse. Exhibition view at Portuguese Pavilion, 2024 Venice Biennale. Photo: Matteo Losurdo. Courtesy of the artists.
Mónica de Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges, Vânia Gala, Greenhouse. Exhibition view at Portuguese Pavilion, 2024 Venice Biennale. Photos: Anna Jarosz. Courtesy of the artists.
Bibliography:
Cluitmans, L. (2021). On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Mies, M., & Shiva, V. (1993). Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.
Shiva, V. (2019). Oneness vs. the 1%. Oxford: New Internationalist.