Artists' records› Andrea Macdonald
› Mónica de Miranda
Audios:
Global Encounters: Mónica de Miranda and Andrea Macdonald
Mónica de Miranda and Andrea Macdonald are part of generation of young artists, who were born within the global age and ask interesting questions about universal ideas of national identities and the smaller scale boundaries of the nation-states we habit. They both produce art that is responsive to local and global social histories, and attempt to chart our current position in the compound space-time network that came along with global modernities.
On Borders
Andrea Mcdonald’s work navigates the tension between ‘belonging’ and shifting identities, induced by collapsing power relationships in a post-colonial context. The transitional era of independence has formed a fragmented space - a literal space of ‘non-belonging’, in international relations, which Mónica de Miranda also engages with, exploring the compression of time and space, made possible by modern transport and technology. The map, an expressively modern form of knowledge, is a recurring element in Monica’s work. It figures literally in pieces such as London A to Z (2007), and Lisbon A to Z (2008), or In the Back of our Hands (2007) in which she fits cartographic elements from foreign countries, into the outline of Lisbon, London, or the palms of her friends and relatives. A fundamental product of European Enlightenment, a map does not only show us how to get from one place to another. It connotes a rational ordering of space, learned and regurgitated with in particular forms of knowledge, which Mónica radically upsets.
Documenting Social Encounters
A direct engagement with histories-in-the-making by ways of collection and documentation of social encounters forms the basis of Andrea Macdonald’s work. She highlights the journey involved in mapping personal narratives across generations, starting with her own. Meeting her unknown great-grandmother, in 1998, in Barbados was a historical event on a very personal and intimate level. The house in which Mrs. Brown lived contained domestic objects evoking anarchetypal representation of a former era, a domestic space with a legible colonial past, which Andrea started to document. As the series of subsequent photographs unfold (Under the Ownership of Mrs. Brown, 1998-99), the viewer comes to realise the importance of the focal points, where personal narratives and family anecdotes intersect with History. As often in Andrea’s work, the journey, punctuated by defining encounters, ends with a sense of personal transformation and connection with people and places.
On Transformation
Re-invention, re-negotiation and transition make up the core of the experience of globalisation. Transformation informs Mónica and Andrea’s practice both, as a process, which leads to the production of new work and as the subject of thework.
Andrea’s The Island Tour (2007) series is an ongoing audio archive of recorded island tours by taxi drivers across the Anglophone Caribbean.
Like Monica’s Tuning (2007), the Island Tour charts as much of a geographical journey as a personal one: it documents the unique, evolving relationship between the taxi driver and the passenger.
In Tuning (video, 2007), Mónica documents her exploration of cosmopolitan urban landscapes (London, Amsterdam and Lisbon to date). Her ride through the city is accompanied by the soundtrack of sampled radio stations, producing a cultural portrait of the social and geographical transformations and the re-organisation of urban territories with in these cities. Exploring an unseen limit to the metropolis, where the concept of ‘boundary’ addresses modern notions of the city in relation to its adjoining suburbs, Tuning encourages us to abandon the oppositions between urban and suburban that were formed with in post-war utopian discourses on ‘green belts’ and ‘banlieues’, in order to reveal a more ambiguous ‘third space’.
Whilst a possible reading of Andrea’s Island Tour serves a resource to explore the language of contemporary and historical information tailored for the tourist and voyeur (a tour of the touristic ‘centres’ of the ‘periphery’), Tuning points towards a concern with the marginal, and the paradoxical centrality of the marginal (the ‘peripheries’ of urban centres).
While engaging in a number of interesting critiques on historical and cultural situations, Mónica and Andrea appear to reconsider conventional relationships between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and challenge the ultimate necessity of a centre. Their work also comes together in the acute critique of Eurocentric discourses produced by the Enlightenments, inso far that their legacy still affects our rapport to the world, how we form and understand relationships with ‘others’, and how we situate the self in an increasingly transitory environment. They examine how our sense of location is affected by relationships to places that are not always with in the same continent, but instantaneously reached by Skype; and subsequently produce artworks, which, like most of us today, cannot be assimilated with a neatly bounded cultural product.
Eva Langret
Biographies
Andrea Macdonald studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle, and currently lives and works in the North East of England. She is the co-founder of MAS-SAMple, an artist-led initiative embracing contemporary artistic practice and dialogue with in the Caribbean Diaspora.
Mónica de Miranda currently lives in Lisbon. She has exhibited her work widely, including Museum of Modern Art, Hertogenbosh (The Netherlands), Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), inIVA (London), ICA (London). She graduated from Camberwell College of Art in 1998.
Eva Langret is a London-based curator. She currently works for the Delfina Foundation, London.
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