Artist:
Ângela Ferriera (born 1958 in Maputo, Mozambique; lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal).

Description:
“The project was the official representation of the Portuguese Pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia… Angela Ferreira’s Maison Tropicale reflects on colonial history and its contemporary, post- and neo-colonial resonances. Amidst the territorial reorganisation undertaken by the colonial powers in Africa after World War II and following a public tender process, the French Overseas Ministry, through collaboration with the French designer Jean Prouvé, saw the possibility to further develop modernist ideas of conceiving a series of aesthetically sophisticated homes, that could be mass-produced and that would give people greater access to well-designed, high quality architecture based on prefabricated aluminium modules. Prouvé’s ideas never took hold in Europe, but the possibility to install a large number of his houses in the African colonies led to the development of his Tropical House. Of the thousands of units originally envisaged, only three prototypes ultimately left Prouvé’s workshop. In 1949, the first Tropical House was transported by plane to Niger and installed in the capital, Niamey. Two other houses were transported to the Congo and installed in Brazzaville in 1951.”
—”Angela Ferreira: Maison Tropicale / Museion Bolzano; Bozen, Italy / Interview,” vernissage.tv, May 27, 2008.

“The installation at the Portuguese Pavilion in Venice presents us with the displacement of these houses, not located in France, the United States, Niger or the Congo, transforming them into containers of history, in transit between the worlds of the colonisers and the colonised, the de-colonised and post-modern worlds with their realities of post- and/or neo-colonialism. Angela Ferreira recreates the places where Prouvé’s houses were originally installed, highlighting their absence and the traces left behind, evoking the structures themselves through the sculptural objects produced by the artists modular form of architecture resulting from the accumulation of objects in a claustrophobic space and remaining permanently adrift.”
Press release, Portuguese Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, May 29, 2007.

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