Monica de Miranda at Sabrina Amrani Gallery

Monica de Miranda at Sabrina Amrani Gallery

The advancement and proliferation of technologies of surveillance and the control of movements is a growing violation of individual and collective freedom. For many, borders are a geopolitical construct of physical and mental entrapments.

In response to this, Monica de Miranda’s 4th exhibition at Sabrina Amrani gallery, titled “The Sun Does Not Rise in the North”,  proposes one-person tales navigating between fictional and non-fictional narratives in the affective space of the border. The exhibition investigates the landscapes that witness hope, from the journeys of migration between Africa and Europe, set within a duality of existence and citizenship: one contemplating Europe and the other a return to Africa.

“The Sun Does Not Rise in the North” examines the complex diversity of personal and collective histories interconnected between the migrant and the diasporic experience in Europe. It is a continuous relational praxis that de Miranda depicts and deconstructs through counter-narratives of belonging, as well as on the (re)elaboration of memory in post-colonial discourses.

The African liberation struggles, and revolutionary movements fuel the artist’s imaginaries. The building of an archive of transnational political efforts reminds us to look onto the past for our current reflections, as a continuous entity in our horizons, and where liberation sits within the ongoing narratives of strength, resilience, and vulnerability.

In the film “O sol não nasce a norte” (The Sun Does Not Rise in the North) and photographic works, the visual narratives give (back) dignity and grace to the characters through the poetics of (body) languages. The main characters are in deep connections with the ecosystems and the landscapes: the sea, the forest, the mountains, the desert, the sand, and palm trees are mothering the fugitive and disposable bodies, waves are caressing the ears amongst ethereal soundscapes, symbolic spiritual colours of the sun, blood, water, and trees. Clad in white clothing, they are calling for the sun. The bodies are aligned with its cyclical movement. The landscapes alternate between crisp blue skies, natural fog and blurry haze depicting the start and end of the day – and of journeys leading to freedom, alienation, loss or slow spiritual death.

In the film, the man says that the body has no end, but life does. In Bakongo philosophy, at sunset and sunrise, “the living and the dead exchange day and night. The setting of the sun signifies man’s death and its rising, his rebirth, or the continuity of his life. Bakongo believe and hold it true that man’s life has no end, that it constitutes a cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change.”

The movements and itinerant passages of those that have arrived, but only to leave, are captured in the memory of the soil, of the land that is archiving each of their steps. In the film, the archaeological digging of the land, what was once there and now buried, interrogates what else is left of our bodies without the earth?