Ângela Ferreira comments
Some notes from the text “From faktura to factography” by Benjamin Buchloch

5  June  |  17h30-18h30   |   atrium    |   free entrance

Sinopse

The starting point of the presentation will be a personal approach to the questions proposed by Benjamin Buchloh in his historical essay “From Faktura to Factography” published in 1984. If the author’s reading focuses on the hypothetical abandonment of the modernist paradigm by the Russian avant-gardes, the questions that remain and that will be enounced are: in order to understand the Russian vanguards, do we have to relate them to the Western model of modernism? Why did the West ignore constructivism until the 1960s? How to apprehend the Russian vanguards without faktura or factography?

Biography

Ângela Ferreira (Maputo, 1958), lives and works in Lisbon. She concluded her studies in Fine Arts in South Africa obtaining a master’s degree from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. She is professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon where she obtained her PhDegree in 2016. As visual artist her work is developed around the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society and her research is guided by in-depth investigation and the filtering of ideas that lead to concise, refined, and evocative forms. She represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), where she continued her research on how European modernism adapted – or not – to the realities of the African continent by tracing the story of Jean Prouvé’s ‘Maison Tropicale’. The architecture also serves as a starting point for her deepening long research on the erasure of colonial memory and the refusal of reparation, which finds its most complex materialization in A Tendency to Forget (2015) focusing on ethnographic work the couple Jorge and Margot Dias. Angela Ferreira’s sculptural, sonorous and video graphic honors have continually referred to the economic, political and cultural history of the African continent by recovering the image and work of some unexpected figures such as Peter Blum, Carlos Cardoso, Ingrid Jonker, Jimi Hendrix, Jorge Ben or Diego Rivera.