Mónica de Miranda

Title: An Ocean Between Us
Directed and produced by Mónica de Miranda
Director of Photography: Tiago Mata Angelino
Screenwriting: Mónica de Miranda
Editing: Mónica de Miranda
Sound: Mónica de Miranda
Cast: Giordano Bruno Barros Duarte and Mónica de Miranda
Duration: 6:23
Format: 16:9 diptych
Production date: 2012
Production country: Portugal

An Ocean Between Us

An Ocean Between Us is the second chapter of Mónica de Miranda’s larger project Once upon a Time, articulated as a travelling exhibition with a number of site specific stations. The body of work has been made possible by the artist’s proximity to the fluvial port of the Tejo river in Lisbon.

In the video diptych An Ocean Between Us and a set of light boxes presented at Plataforma Revolver, the fluvial port and a stationary cargo ship become the stage for metaphorical transits: as a passage between worlds the liner evokes the journeys that connected the continents through the big waters, providing a ground for the encounter of cultures and the expansion of trade. An Ocean Between Us deals in spatial ambiguity with melancholic undertones: ships for maritime travel become stages where symbolic umbilical cords unite the lost parts: an ocean and a river, a mother and a daughter, a lost love, and the promise of a re-encounter are the elements of a catharsis. The various chapters of this travelling exhibition aspire to present an archaeology of the self through passages and landscapes. In it, travel becomes a vehicle of knowledge, where representation can never be trusted as the depictions of places reside within the realm of the unconscious, and memories are the tools for an exercise of healing the personal – and colonial – wound.

Mónica works with her own personal and emotional archaeologies, which she represents through fictional expressions that are recreated from the documentary and the subjective. The artist starts out from her own biography so as to carry out a series of artistic strategies that reflect her “place” and the stories and experiences of these places.

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