Paper short abstract:

Mônica de Miranda's installation "Path to the Stars" and the Memorial António Agostinho Neto is discussed via metaphors of terrestriality and flight in Angolan Independence-era imagery and discourse.

Paper long abstract:

The Agostinho Neto Mausoleum in Luanda, Angola is an enormous structure that people there call a “rocketship.” Made out of concrete and in enormous proportions, it has elements of late Soviet architecture that have often been read as folly in its context. Unlike Soviet architecture, the Neto Mausoleum doesn’t house a television tower, concert hall, or airport, but a deceased poet who wrote of the “path of the stars” being via land and its animal inhabitants. Neto is, as it were, interred in a structure that is both bound to the land and seeks to depart from it. Neto’s poem, which inspired the monument’s design, uses metaphor as a departure from the immanence of language, much as the astronaut was a metaphor of departure. Africa’s “terrestriality” was most recently taken up in Monica de Miranda’s installation at a collateral exhibition to the 2022 Venice Biennale called “Path to the Stars.” It features a film that follows a woman freedom fighter in the Angolan war who boats up the Kwanza River. The river, as it does in Alfredo Jaar’s Muxima (2005) is metaphoricity: a traversing of language that acts to link sites of meaning with flights of interpretation. Two women recur throughout, one draped in fatigues (technology of war) and the other in a space suit (technology of information). The characters’ use of prose throughout the film gives us further insight to the function of terrestriality and flight in Independence-era imagery and discourse.