In plain sight: Sandra Paulson

This work is an archival piece of information explored through documents, artefacts, garments, moments, headlines, oral tradition, historical data, that define the sociocultural, economic, political, ethnic and cultural landscape of Angola, focusing in Luanda. It operates as an instigator for action towards progress by creating an opportunity for individual agency for one to ‘discuss their own story’ and by all means tell it.

AN ANGOLAN ARCHIVE (AAA) is an assemblage of around 200 pieces of information in the form of written texts, research images, garments, voice recordings, drawings, wood artefacts, installation, photography, performance and video works. This is an on-going project that similarly to my practice in general, utilizes a selection of common household Angolan items to discuss the relationship between family and inherited societal memory from colonial Angola and the civil war. Aiming to dismantle contemporary Angola through semiotics studies of such ordinary objects as actors in cultural and political on-going transformations. Here all items are studies not only in a material level, but mostly in a material culture perspective. What is the individual’s/society relationship with the material information?

The task of decoloniality is central to this work, as the notion of African led own Archives is still to confront the current realities being depicted by external bodies.

It is important to mention that this work has now been developed for around a year having experienced the world health crisis of Covid-19 and the current also globally changing fight for the end of racial constructs and discrimination within the West.

The world changes and it is crucial to change the narratives.

She has an interesting process, and the format of "an archival piece of information explored through documents, artefacts, garments, moments, headlines, oral tradition, historical data, that define the sociocultural, economic, political, ethnic and cultural landscape of Angola, focusing in Luanda."

She uses a lot of symbolism and metaphors in her work, something I also would love to utilise in my own practice.

I love her research process and the presentation of all the information she has gathered.

My work discusses the political, cultural and socio-economic landscape of Angola as a case study to analyse the relationship between History, oral tradition and global political structures.

My practice utilizes family and inherited societal memory from colonial Angola and the civil war to dismantle contemporary Angola through semiotics studies of ordinary (cultural) objects such as household items as actors in political and cultural ongoing transformations. Which inherently draws the questions posed by the work to the task of decoloniality.

My body of work recurrently revisits the body as a liminal space for discussion, operating in an inter-disciplinary way through mediums such as writing, photography, hyper-annotation and documentation, mixed media, collage, drawing, print making, performance and video. Having fashion as a form of investigation that acknowledges the artefacts in close proximity with the body, my practice heavily delves into garment making and garment misplacing.

it is interesting how she talks about using angola as a case study for the relationship between history, oral tradtion and global political structures.

I also enjoy incorperating ordinary household items in my work, and what they represent to utilise them as symbols.

‘Hope As A Praxis’ focuses on the forms that ‘necessity’ takes, particularly on its capacity as ‘ability’. Need as ability has been highlighted in mass by the changes the world has been subjected to, demonstrating the symbiosis between crisis and resourcefulness. In Luanda anything and everything has for long been a resource, and the concepts of upcycling, recycling, and juxtaposing the worthless have continuously been the reality. This work of investigation of Luanda’s livings and multiple realities, looks closely at the material culture value of common household items that most of the population own, across classes, and that are subjected to people’s response to their material properties.

The site-specific installation comprises 17 iterations of chairs in the process of breaking. The chairs are made of green satin fabric, and were pattern cut, sewn and hardened based on the most common plastic chair used across the continent in people’s households. In Luanda when a plastic chair breaks, and they really do break all the time, people keep them in the house. Hoping to fix them by juxtaposition with another plastic chair broken in a different part, two broken chairs lead to a much stronger new one.

The reality is, these chairs are the core home furniture of most of the population, and therefore used beyond its ‘garden chair’ purpose. In Angola, people call this furniture ‘espera condição’ which translates to ‘wait for conditions’, the living conditions that often do not arrive. The work therefore, exists in the space between lacking and having. That space is the hope. Hope As A Praxis. The continual and essential belief that something will improve.

This project aims to be a work of investigation discoursing on the semiotic and factual presence of western institutions across the Globe, while discovering or revisiting information and un-archiving knowledge on the relations of coloniality between the West and African Nations since their independence. It probes into my research of a particular aspect of my most recent project An Angolan Archive (2020): the semiotic presence of saviour entities in the context of post-conflict territories, such as post-colonial nation-states, as is the case of Angola.

Gathering thoughts

As the investigation for a previous project (An Angolan Archive 2019- 2020 ) continued it became reoccurring in my methodologies, to isolate particular objects and further interrogate their meaning, networks and role. It was also recurrent that such items seemed to me as naturalized objects, that were originally implanted in the territory that now, lacking another way to describe I will refer to as Angola. Such objects have in common the fact that they become more familiar to the local landscape than to the geographies they come from. Often western countries. At the time, I found another imported physical artifact, which was the ‘EU flag Polo Shirt’ worn by farmers in the northern Angolan territory of Cabinda, which I have explored in my Thesis ‘The White President T-shirt – Semiotics in post colonial Angola. (The white polo shirt, states at the back ‘Clube de Agricultores Familiares Cabinda’ – Club of Family Farmers of Cabinda, just above a European Union flag that occupies most of the width of the back of the garment.)

In Halo We Trust equally explores an object brought into the territory by an European organization, which then becomes part of the local landscape and societal memory, while at the same time, often almost not recognizable in the countries that run and fund the organization. ( The Halo Trust has been demining Angola since 1994, to possibly have their work completed by 2070 if the current pace of work is maintained. It currently employs about 700 people amongst many women and it is mainly funded by the UK, the USA, and an array of international oil companies. Overall the organization is also funded by Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Germany, among others)

The Halo Trust Waist Coat is the core piece of protective equipment worn by people mapping and removing landmines in Angola since 1994. It is originally of a sky blue colour and states the logo of the Halo trust at the centre inside a white cotton fabric rectangle. It usually has in the chest area, the flag of the country the demining is happening, and depending on the occasion, the flag of a country that funds the process in that region. This work becomes particularly interested in the semiotic value of such signs as actors in the course of personal actions, social practices and the study of societal memory form a decolonial standpoint.

It initially delves into the visual presence of ‘The Halo Trust’ in the country, and the popular understanding of the Halo Trust waist coat in our collective memory. During my research, I learnt that the most licensed image hash tagged #Angola, at the biggest world corporation for image licensing, was the photograph of Princess Diana walking through a minefield in Huambo, Central Angola in January 1997.

This visual piece of data has been continuously the most published and disseminated reference to the country in the international media, including newspapers, online articles, books, documentaries etc. Such a discovery brought questions regarding the body, context, visual semiotic representations, and both historical and contemporary networks at play between alleged ex-colonies and colonial empires.

The work starts then interrogating the trajectory that leads to the implementation of the object (colonialism x the war for independency x the civil war x the cold war x the external interests in the civil war x Cabinda immense Oil reservoir x the imported landmines funded with that oil x the need to rebuild x and never ending cycle of coloniality). It interrogates its meaning locally versus globally, and what happens to such values when the object is removed from its visual currencies, namely the logo stating the name of the Halo Trust, the colour, which helps trigger the memory regarding it’s purpose, and most importantly, the space. The space where the waistcoat has lived and existed more than in minefields in Angola, the body of Diana. The body that has represented the Angolan war, the country, the rebuilding of the country. A body with an ability to communicate and disseminate the local reality through 1 image. But, was it able? What happens to the object and the course of history it attempts to impact, when removed from the space that allows relatability? How can the local stories contribute to writing history? What is our history?

This text (as this work) represents a process of thinking out loud and sketching possibilities to be explored.

It is very helpful and interesting to have an insight look into her process and her way of thinking.

Part 2 Research

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