A river does not explain its history to the person crossing it. It carries sediment, sound and the evidence of movement whether anyone can read them or not. In Mónica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars, the Kwanza River in Angola becomes a passage between anticolonial memory and a future that has yet to be agreed upon. A woman travels with a shadow; soldiers study a chart; a child turns toward space. The film and its companion images let those figures inhabit more than one historical time without leaving the river behind.
De Miranda is an Angolan-Portuguese artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice moves among photography, installation, film and sound. She lives and works across Lisbon and Luanda, as she says in an Autograph interview. Landscapes in her work are not empty scenery waiting for a person to enter. They hold traces of colonial infrastructure, migration, care and ecological change. A body moves through them while also carrying histories that the ground may reveal or conceal.
In Path to the Stars, a child’s desire to travel into space gives the work an explicitly speculative line. An essay hosted on the artist’s site reads its astronaut through Afrofuturism’s African and diasporic possibilities. De Miranda’s own 2025 interview describes critical fabulation and utopia as methods for projecting new futures from stories absent in official archives. The works do not ask viewers to choose between history and imagination. They use imagination to make the archive’s exclusions visible and to ask what other lives might grow from the same place.
The river also runs through The Island, a project made during the first Covid lockdown. Its shore draws on a real history of Black settlement beside Portugal’s Sado River, while its fictional island offers rest, refuge and another way of relating to land. These works are distinct in setting and form. One follows Angola’s liberation histories along the Kwanza; the other imagines an island from Lisbon while looking toward a neglected Afro-diasporic past. Both make geography a matter of relation rather than a map’s neutral outline.
The Kwanza and the stars
Path to the Stars takes its title into a field of water, sky and struggle. The Kwanza River is central to its film and installation. The artist’s project text connects it to the historical kingdom of Ndongo and to Angolan liberation, while giving it the presence of a natural force that cannot be reduced to a symbol for either. Water links the land to the sea and lets movement carry people, ideas and memories between places.
A woman named Carlota travels in the film with a figure called her Shadow. A scholarly essay hosted by de Miranda describes them seated together at a table, one in white and the other in a dark, high-necked dress, then together on a small boat. The paired figures complicate a simple heroic image. Carlota does not cross history as a single, self-contained protagonist. Her shadow can suggest what accompanies a person without being identical to her, including unlived possibilities and the pressure of stories that were never given a place in the official record.
The visual account describes moments in which actors hold still while the surrounding image moves. This method gives a person the gravity of a photograph without freezing the entire world around them. A boat can remain nearly immobile in the frame while the landscape shifts. The contrast encourages a viewer to notice how historical time can be uneven. A person may feel held by a role inherited from the past even as the world around them changes quickly.
Soldiers study a chart, trying to read what lies ahead. The project text connects the chart to the Chinese flag and the imaginary of a space race. Their attempt to measure a future belongs beside the child who decides to travel beyond Earth. These figures do not all imagine progress in the same way. A chart can promise a route that military power might use; a child’s journey can open a question about who is entitled to dream at all. De Miranda lets those futures coexist, giving the viewer no easy map for resolving them.
The astronaut matters because Angola’s anticolonial struggle is neither background decoration nor a finished prelude to a story about outer space. The film places a future-directed figure inside a landscape shaped by liberation, war and ecological life. The essay on de Miranda’s site notes that the child’s spaceward vision reminds the viewer that Afrofuturism has African as well as diasporic paths. The claim is visible in the work’s geography. Its speculative horizon begins at the river, not at a departure gate that must erase the continent.
De Miranda’s still and moving images also revise who is seen within the history of liberation. The project account discusses photographs from Amílcar Cabral’s archive and the masculinised heroic language in which armed struggle is often pictured. Her installation brings women’s presence and shadowed stories into that visual field. It asks how a future can be imagined if the archive that supplies its symbols has already left many of its makers outside the frame.
The star gives the film an image of distance without severing the earthly relation. Light reaches a viewer long after it leaves its source. Memory can work with a similar delay: an event from another time shapes what is possible now even when its original scene has disappeared. The Kwanza’s current and the star’s light offer different ways to feel time. De Miranda brings them together so that the future cannot be pictured as a straight line away from history.
An island with two histories
De Miranda began writing The Island during the first Covid lockdown, looking out toward the Tagus from her home in Lisbon. In an extended conversation with Autograph curator Renée Mussai, she describes memories of her mother and grandmother, who lived through Angola’s colonial war, meeting her own confinement. The script emerged from that pressure. A private room and a river view became a starting point for a place she could not reach by ordinary travel.
The island is fictional, yet the project also draws on research into an Afro-diasporic community beside the Sado River in Portugal. De Miranda says Africans sent to work in salt pans settled in the region during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The settlement acquired a name identifying it as an island of Black people. Rather than reproduce that place as an invented historical scene, she uses its memory to ask what an island might mean as refuge, renewal and a future space of belonging.
That double origin is important. If the island were only utopian, it might feel free of the labour and displacement that brought Black people to the Sado. If it were only a historical site, its future might be closed before the visitor arrived. De Miranda holds the historical and speculative meanings together. A shore can be reached by people seeking rest while still carrying the record of why rest was denied. The imagined refuge is accountable to a real community rather than an untouched paradise.
Water makes this place possible and uncertain. In the Autograph interview, de Miranda speaks of rivers and oceans as forces that cross borders and connect the local with the global. A riverbank may appear to define a place, but its water is always moving. The island’s edge is therefore not a hard wall around a fixed identity. It can be a point at which histories of arrival, departure and return meet.
One photograph from the project, Tide, shows twins seated in a river, according to the curator’s description. Two figures share a watery site without merging into one. The tide can rise or fall around them. Their pose offers the viewer an image of relation that remains open to change. De Miranda’s choice of twins gives likeness a visible form while preserving the fact that two people occupy the frame. It suits a project interested in shared history without the erasure of individual lives.
The artist has described the island as an ambiguous in-between place, not a single destination that solves migration. The Autograph conversation joins this ambiguity with questions of home and family. For a person moving between Lisbon and Luanda, home can be a continuous arrival as much as a stable address. The work allows that unsettled feeling to coexist with the need for comfort. A refuge need not pretend that a traveller’s history is simple.
Krull’s essay View From The Kitchen takes another route into the question of home. Its writer describes a kitchen and shared table as places where heritage becomes a present contribution to others. De Miranda’s island has a different medium and history, but its idea of refuge also depends on what people can make together. The link lets a reader move from a speculative shore to an intimate room without treating one as more real than the other.
Landscapes that keep evidence
Before The Island, de Miranda made Panorama, a 2017 series about Angola’s colonial architectural landscapes. In the Autograph interview, she says vegetation has reclaimed some of those built forms. The images are not a simple story in which nature kindly heals a violent history. A ruined building remains evidence of colonial design and use even as plants grow through it. The scene asks a viewer to hold recovery and damage within the same frame.
The word panorama can suggest mastery: one wide view in which a person sees and understands an entire territory. De Miranda’s method unsettles that promise. The landscape reveals fragments of past structures, while growth covers others. The viewer sees enough to know that a history is present, and not enough to close it. This tension later returns in her fictional river and island, where a place is never exhausted by its visible surface.
In The Sun Does Not Rise in the North, de Miranda turns toward the borders of Ceuta and Melilla. A text on her website describes film and photographs moving between fictional and non-fictional accounts of migration, freedom and the political control of movement. The work is grounded in time she spent with the territory and testimonies she gathered. Its poetic images do not erase the people for whom a border is an immediate danger. The fiction changes how their situation may be felt without claiming to replace their experience.
The film’s landscapes include sea, forest, mountains, desert and sand, according to the artist-hosted account. Bodies travel through them under changing light. A border can be drawn as a line on a map, but its force extends through these environments and through the rules deciding who may cross. The work asks how one might see that force without reducing the travellers to a familiar media image of crisis. Its attention to colour, weather and gesture makes the land a participant in the story.
The question of who can enter a future therefore runs across de Miranda’s projects. The Kwanza carries people and memories of liberation; the Sado shore holds a Black community too easily forgotten; the Tagus becomes a view from confinement toward an imagined refuge; the Mediterranean border makes mobility uneven. These waterways do not all mean the same thing. Their particular histories keep the art from becoming a general tale of migration. The speculative act is to create forms in which those histories can change what a viewer expects to see next.
A garden at the pavilion
In 2024 de Miranda was artist and co-curator of Greenhouse, Portugal’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her artist biography records both roles. The title suggests a space where growth is cultivated under particular conditions. It also invites an uncomfortable question: who controls those conditions and who is permitted to flourish inside them? In de Miranda’s longer practice, care is neither a soft mood nor an image of untouched nature. It is an activity that has to be designed and shared.
She founded Hangar, an art and research centre in Lisbon, in 2014. Its programme supports artists, curators and researchers, particularly from the global South, in making work and networks together. The institution is separate from her films and photographs, yet it gives the recurring word care a practical setting. A place where people can meet, research and make images takes time, resources and a commitment to whose ideas are supported.
In a 2025 interview with Contemporânea, de Miranda describes utopia as a critical tool for transforming the present. She speaks of narratives between space and time, body and territory, history and memory. Stories excluded from official archives become material for imagining other futures. The statement helps explain why the astronaut in Path to the Stars and the island imagined during lockdown feel related without becoming repetitions. Each is a different device for taking a history that is still materially present and opening it toward a possibility that history alone cannot guarantee.
The strength of her work is in the way that possibility remains attached to place. A child can look toward the stars from the Kwanza. An island can offer refuge while retaining the memory of Black workers on the Sado. A photograph of a ruined building can hold both colonial violence and a plant’s patient growth. De Miranda lets rivers, images and bodies carry more than one time. They move toward a future without asking anyone to leave their history at the water’s edge.