Mónica de Miranda
Inkjet prints on cotton paper and embroidered cotton thread
Composed of five meticulously embroidered photographic prints depicting a verdant landscape, Salt Island forms part of Mónica de Miranda’s larger multimedia project
The Island (2022), a space of fabulation that exists somewhere between fact and fiction and refers to the ‘Ilha dos Pretos’ (Island of Black Men), an oral name given in the eighteenth century to a community of enslaved people of African origin who settled on the banks of the river Sado in southern Portugal. De Miranda’s work considers the complex experience of Afrodiasporic lives and Europe’s colonial past through a Black ecofeminist lens, drawing on ideas of matrilineal relationships, kinship, migration, slavery and African liberation movements. Here, de Miranda furthers our relationship with nature by considering rocks and cliff formations as repositories of human experiences and memories. Intrinsically linked to colonial excavation, they are witnesses of past and ongoing ancestral and ecological trauma in the form of gender-based violence against bodies and lands.*
From the exhibition
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology
(October 2023 — January 2024)
A major group exhibition that explored the relationship between gender and ecology, and highlighted the systemic links between the oppression of women and the degradation of the planet.
Featuring around 50 international women and gender non-conforming artists, RE/SISTERS featured work from emerging and established artists across photography and film.
Works in the exhibition explored how women’s understanding of our environment has often resisted the logic of capitalist economies which place the exploitation of the planet at its centre. They were presented alongside works of an activist nature that demonstrated how women are regularly at the forefront of advocating and caring for the planet.
Reflecting on a range of themes, from extractive industries to the politics of care, RE/SISTERS viewed environmental and gender justice as indivisible parts of a global struggle. It addressed existing power structures that threaten our increasingly precarious ecosystem.
...RE/SISTERS surveys the relationship between gender and ecology to highlight the systemic links between the oppression of women and Black, trans, and Indigenous communities, and the degradation of the planet. It comes at a time when gendered and racialised bodies are bending and mutating under the stresses and strains of planetary toxicity, rampant deforestation, species extinction, the privatisation of our common wealth, and the colonisation of the deep seas. RE/SISTERS shines a light on these harmful activities and underscores how, since the late 1960s, women and gendernonconforming artists have resisted and protested the destruction of life on earth by recognising their planetary interconnectedness.
Emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, ecofeminism joined the dots between the intertwined oppressions of sexism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, and a relationship with nature shaped by science. Ecofeminist scholars have long critiqued feminised constructions of ‘nature’ while challenging patriarchal and colonial abuses against our planet, women, and marginalised communities. Increasingly, feminist theorists recognise that there can be no gender justice without environmental justice, and ecofeminism is being reclaimed as a unifying platform that all women can rally behind.
Uniting film and photography by over 50 women and gendernonconforming artists from across different decades, geographies, and aesthetic strategies, the exhibition reveals how a woman-centred vision of nature has been replaced by a mechanistic, patriarchal order organised around the exploitation of natural resources, alongside work of an activist nature that underscores how women are often at the forefront of advocating for and maintaining our shared earth.
Exploring the connections between gender and environmental justice as indivisible parts of a global struggle to address the power structures that threaten our ecosphere, the exhibition addresses the violent politics of extraction, creative acts of protest and resistance, the labour of ecological care, the entangled relationship between bodies and land, environmental racism and exclusion, and queerness and fluidity in the face of rigid social structures and hierarchies. Ultimately, RE/SISTERS acknowledges that women and other oppressed communities are at the core of these battlegrounds, not only as victims of dispossession, but also as comrades, as protagonists of the resistance.
[*Barbican Centre]
Taken in Barbican Centre
