Este quarto parece uma República! (2025)Eng.: ‘This bedroom looks like a republic’‘
This bedroom looks like a republic!’ was the sentence used by my father to tell me off about how messy my room was. I knew that it was an instruction for me to tidy up, but as a kid it took me some time to relate republic to chaos.
Reflecting on spaces of intimacy as central spheres for political consciousness, these series of objects exert Poulson’s continuous investigation of power relations, semiotic distribution and the fluidity of value codes. With focus on exercising a sense of collusion between auto-ethnographic narratives and historical contested narrations, the work operates as a series of footnotes to a seemingly absent main body. The quasi-arbitrary assemblage of individual objects takes reference from a ‘short story’ as a possible literary genre that recognises interruptions in knowledge, and facilitates the space for plural and factitious versions of reality. In the words of historian Marissa Moorman, ‘The short story might be the genre that best represents Angolan contemporary life. This work examines the heterogeneous space where different ideas, desires and narrative systems gather and looks through the lenses of material and object as embodiments of notions of fetish. The latter, as argued by William Pietz may have originated from the pidgin word fetisso, which in turn has developed from the Portuguese term feitiço in the cross-cultural spaces of the West African coastin the XVI and XVII centuries.
As noted by Pietz, at the very core of the development and use of the object of ‘fetish’ lays the capacity of any material thing to embody social, political, religious, commercial, aesthetic and sexual value. This very ability lays at the core of the exercise of recalling recent history, as its physical objects are still contemporary to our lives, but their irreducible materiality is not always noticed. However, as the notion of fetish grants the translation and transvaluation of these objects between radically different social systems, the object itself or a sign, manifests outside of its context, revealing the agendas o fthe object-maker. ‘I remember seeing for the first time images of Cabinda farmers wearing a European Union flag printed and stamped polo shirt’.
With reference to Luandan vernacular building techniques for survival, where found objects, mainly wooden boards, doors, corrugated aluminium and polyester sheets are used as cladding, the wooden object assemblages in the work emerge. These pieces provide a contextual framework that returns the artist to the very city where multiple personal stories of political domesticity took and continue to take place. These board-like elements are constructed with reappropriated vintage Dutch furniture fabricated from tropical wood from territories such as Angola, reflecting on ideas around extraction, exploitation, nation-building and their abstraction within the domestic and familial spaces. The furniture was sourced by the artist in the Netherlands, and the wood species used bridge with the ‘Angola’ imperial timber section at the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute. The work eventually centres on fragmented objects , such as the toilet, from Poulson’s grandparents’ house and propaganda t-shirts distributed for free with highly disseminated logos of organisations, political parties, institutions and corporations, that play a central role in surveilling and constructing the fetish of ‘the ideological’. Effectively, such symbols play on the idea of naturalising and territorialising value codes, as they find themselves in motion between radically different social systems. The sound element of the in the work is a stream of the official ceremony of signing of the Alvor Agreement (January 1975) between the Portuguese Government and the movements for Angola’s liberation – MPLA, FNLA and Unita. Alongside an interview on the same day and place of Dr. Savimbi.-Sandra Poulson
(1) Marissa Moorman review of ‘Angola is wherever I plant my field’- João de Melo(2023)
On my Grandma On 27 May 1977 in Luanda, Angola, as soon as family friends started ringing my Grandparents’ landline with warnings about a possible coup d’etat and advice on not leaving the house, my grandmother immediately started raiding everyone’s wardrobes looking for t-shirts and hats with any political slogans on it. She quickly gathered everything, threw it on the toilet and set it on fire. The heat broke the ceramic toilet and made it explode, leaving the house without a loo. According to interviews conducted by Lara Pawson that same day, it is believed that across the country an estimate of 30,000 people were taken from their family homes and never came back. 1 Many people were suspected of being involved with the coup d’etat against the party in power, and frequently the evidence of their involvement was the Little Red Book ‘Quotations for Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’, which was carried in the pockets of most anti-government faction individuals and quoted by their leader Nito Alves in his public speeches. 2 Another object that could have been identified as a proof of evidence of their beliefs was the left-wing propaganda t- shirts.
-Sandra Poulson
1 Pawson, 2016, p.22 – ‘In the Name of the People- Angola’s forgotten massacre'
2 Ibid., p.147
This bedroom looks like a republic!’ was the sentence used by my father to tell me off about how messy my room was. I knew that it was an instruction for me to tidy up, but as a kid it took me some time to relate republic to chaos.
Reflecting on spaces of intimacy as central spheres for political consciousness, these series of objects exert Poulson’s continuous investigation of power relations, semiotic distribution and the fluidity of value codes. With focus on exercising a sense of collusion between auto-ethnographic narratives and historical contested narrations, the work operates as a series of footnotes to a seemingly absent main body. The quasi-arbitrary assemblage of individual objects takes reference from a ‘short story’ as a possible literary genre that recognises interruptions in knowledge, and facilitates the space for plural and factitious versions of reality. In the words of historian Marissa Moorman, ‘The short story might be the genre that best represents Angolan contemporary life. This work examines the heterogeneous space where different ideas, desires and narrative systems gather and looks through the lenses of material and object as embodiments of notions of fetish. The latter, as argued by William Pietz may have originated from the pidgin word fetisso, which in turn has developed from the Portuguese term feitiço in the cross-cultural spaces of the West African coastin the XVI and XVII centuries.
As noted by Pietz, at the very core of the development and use of the object of ‘fetish’ lays the capacity of any material thing to embody social, political, religious, commercial, aesthetic and sexual value. This very ability lays at the core of the exercise of recalling recent history, as its physical objects are still contemporary to our lives, but their irreducible materiality is not always noticed. However, as the notion of fetish grants the translation and transvaluation of these objects between radically different social systems, the object itself or a sign, manifests outside of its context, revealing the agendas o fthe object-maker. ‘I remember seeing for the first time images of Cabinda farmers wearing a European Union flag printed and stamped polo shirt’.
With reference to Luandan vernacular building techniques for survival, where found objects, mainly wooden boards, doors, corrugated aluminium and polyester sheets are used as cladding, the wooden object assemblages in the work emerge. These pieces provide a contextual framework that returns the artist to the very city where multiple personal stories of political domesticity took and continue to take place. These board-like elements are constructed with reappropriated vintage Dutch furniture fabricated from tropical wood from territories such as Angola, reflecting on ideas around extraction, exploitation, nation-building and their abstraction within the domestic and familial spaces. The furniture was sourced by the artist in the Netherlands, and the wood species used bridge with the ‘Angola’ imperial timber section at the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute. The work eventually centres on fragmented objects , such as the toilet, from Poulson’s grandparents’ house and propaganda t-shirts distributed for free with highly disseminated logos of organisations, political parties, institutions and corporations, that play a central role in surveilling and constructing the fetish of ‘the ideological’. Effectively, such symbols play on the idea of naturalising and territorialising value codes, as they find themselves in motion between radically different social systems. The sound element of the in the work is a stream of the official ceremony of signing of the Alvor Agreement (January 1975) between the Portuguese Government and the movements for Angola’s liberation – MPLA, FNLA and Unita. Alongside an interview on the same day and place of Dr. Savimbi.-Sandra Poulson
(1) Marissa Moorman review of ‘Angola is wherever I plant my field’- João de Melo(2023)
On my Grandma On 27 May 1977 in Luanda, Angola, as soon as family friends started ringing my Grandparents’ landline with warnings about a possible coup d’etat and advice on not leaving the house, my grandmother immediately started raiding everyone’s wardrobes looking for t-shirts and hats with any political slogans on it. She quickly gathered everything, threw it on the toilet and set it on fire. The heat broke the ceramic toilet and made it explode, leaving the house without a loo. According to interviews conducted by Lara Pawson that same day, it is believed that across the country an estimate of 30,000 people were taken from their family homes and never came back. 1 Many people were suspected of being involved with the coup d’etat against the party in power, and frequently the evidence of their involvement was the Little Red Book ‘Quotations for Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’, which was carried in the pockets of most anti-government faction individuals and quoted by their leader Nito Alves in his public speeches. 2 Another object that could have been identified as a proof of evidence of their beliefs was the left-wing propaganda t- shirts.
-Sandra Poulson
1 Pawson, 2016, p.22 – ‘In the Name of the People- Angola’s forgotten massacre'
2 Ibid., p.147