Rialto6

Campo Experimental: Ângela Ferreira in collaboration with Alda Costa takes place at the National Art Museum (MUSART) in Maputo, and is Ângela Ferreira’s first solo exhibition in a public institution in Mozambique. The exhibition explores material and environmental research carried out in the early years of the country’s independence (1975) involving different work fronts. The title of the exhibition refers specifically to the name of an agricultural learning space maintained on the campus of Eduardo Mondlane University from 1976, where staff, researchers and students worked together to produce food, design tools and structures, and train farmers, peasants and community technicians. This experimental site was coordinated by the TBARN Study Centre (Técnicas Básicas de Aproveitamento de Recursos Naturais/Basic Techniques for Harnessing Natural Resources), a broad research group formed in the early years of the post-independence revolution to, among other things, improve production and the quality of life of farmers with minimal resources. Ferreira draws on TBARN’s visual and textual traces to reveal the revolutionary spirit that made Mozambique a global centre of radical experimentation in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The project expands Ferreira’s research practice and her search for the contemporaneity of the past. ‘Campo Experimental’ emerges from the artist’s ongoing dialogue with Alda Costa, a Mozambican art historian and cultural worker whose lived experience during the period of the post-independence socialist revolution and subsequent years, as well as her later studies, make her a living memory of an incomparable moment in cultural history. In the exhibition, historical objects from Costa’s personal collection are displayed alongside Ferreira’s work. The design of these objects highlights the importance of material conditions at the forefront of cultural production in the early years of independent Mozambique. These characteristics accentuate the TBARN aesthetic present throughout the exhibition: the multifunctional use of simple materials, the emphasis on the angular shapes of objects intended for pragmatic use and the vibrant colours on the walls, based on the information pamphlets produced by the university (Queimadas, 1977). Ferreira emphasizes the experimental nature of TBARN by transforming some structures developed at the time into strictly aesthetic objects – aesthetic thinking becomes a productive method for reimagining aspects of rural life under a new model of collectivity.

Originally opened at the Rialto6 contemporary art space in Lisbon, the exhibition arrives in Maputo in an expanded format: it includes videos of musician Scúru Fitchádu in a performance commissioned for the exhibition, photographs by Kok Nam of TBARN’s experimental campus, and images used by Ferreira in the process of creating his works. Other works referring to Mozambique were included in the exhibition in this version presented at MUSART, including ‘For Mozambique’ (2008), shown for the first time in the country. Through a dialogue between diverse voices and temporalities, Ferreira’s works investigate stories that express both political pragmatism and creative playfulness, being both locally rooted and internationally far-reaching.

Álvaro Luís Lima and Paula Nascimento