(A)pós após Reflections on Transformation | Angelina Nogueira

(A)pós após Reflections on Transformation | Angelina Nogueira

Gallery Duża Scena UAP, 24 Wodna Str.
Opening:12.04.2025, 18:00
Duration of Exhibition: 12 – 23.04.2025

ANGELINA NOGUEIRA
(1986)
Lives and works in Porto (Portugal). She works mainly in the field of textile art,
installation and performance. In her work she addresses themes and concepts
related to time and its influence on matter/object, as well as issues related to the
geological territory and process as a creative act. In 2015-2018 she collaborated with
SINTOMA (FBAUP experimental group dedicated to performing art and “live art”), in
2018-2019 she taught visual arts at Colégio de Benguela (Angola). Currently she
coordinates a project of artistic workshops for excluded social groups.
The exhibition (A)pós após. Reflections on Transformation refers to issues
related to time, in the sense of the past that lasts forever. Through the exploration of
the subject, the artist focuses and creates realizations through dust, stones, sand or
dyes, and shapes forms through performative gestures in the scope of tireless,
seemingly monotonous repetition of movements. In the intentional dimension, it
refers to the autobiographical perspective of exploring natural matter, space and
areas of burnt and dried-out earth, which was once fertile and now only is. For
Nogueira, the multi-stage observed separation of us, people, societies from natural
ecosystems is a pretext for reflection on the role of territory-space in the scope of
archaeology, anthropology and cultural identity. Thus, the following slogans appear:
body/earth, matter/spirit, durability/finitude, and the Artist herself tries to be a
mediator between body and earth, in the spirit of creating an archive of memory. For
her, the dry patches of soil become an autobiographical memory, a return to the past,
to heritage, because it was her playground. I grew up near a slate quarry. So, her
works, as she says, refer to her private past, but at the same time they are a broader
story about the territory.
Nogueira’s use of natural materials in her work – dust, sand, mud, pigment – is
a field of experimentation and constant testing, it is also a game with the past, which,
transformed and filtered by adulthood, becomes new. Although, as she herself
mentions, she tries to build coherent scenarios that are to lead her through acts of
the unknown, she nevertheless deviates from the previously marked path and
searches anew.
She returns to the structures of play that she used to occupy her time with in
childhood, i.e. simply rubbing stones on a cement floor, which resulted in learning
about texture, hardness, colour, and chromatic diversity. Sometimes she uses
produced dusts, powders – natural pigments to decorate her body, like make-up,
which, as she says, she did not have access to in her childhood. Other procedures
that are close to her and that she still forms from natural raw materials are sculpting,
grinding, and even more – laborious rubbing, so that the matter takes on a specific
shape resembling small objects, boxes, houses, figurines, amulets, in other words, all

the so-called treasures of childhood. Some of the stones, during this persistent,
sometimes mantric, self-destructive procedure, simply disappear, turn back into dust.
The artist does not stop in her creative path only at the performative
“processing” of stone, but she reached for fabric, natural canvas, so that the
previously processed material could be used in the form of pigment, dye. She calls
the resulting works, fabrics, “false” stones.
From a technical perspective, which is important for the Creator, the materials
are dyed with stone pastes, then samples, scraps, and fragments of the canvas that
correspond to individual natural solids are sewn together with gold thread. As she
says, “The allusion to gold is not particularly well thought out – the spool of thread
was given to me for another work – but in the end it made a lot of sense, because the
mountain range around Porto has a rich history of gold mining.”
In other works, Nogueira has reached for a material derived from nature, but
still made by human hands. The cement forms she obtains for further processing are
advertised as “stone” structures, which is an ironic principle of shaping our reality,
and in her artistic works it is a medium connecting the two worlds in which we exist.
Another path taken by the Artist is generating sensations that are a resultant of
sounds when stones are rubbed against each other. This area of ​​the so-called
“voices of stones” was initiated by her during her artistic residency at Campus Cunha
e Silva. She decided then to transfer the burden of acquiring sensations to another
sphere, because it was no longer just about the physical exploration of matter or the
production of pigments, but above all about listening itself – recording the sounds that
are emitted by individual forms, types, kinds of stones, through the aural tracking of
transformations of movement and changes. As she says: “Thanks to the artistic
residency at Campus Cunha e Silva, I was able to explore this topic [sound] in
practice. I had a space – empty, clean, free from unnecessary stimuli, only with
stones and fabrics. It was important for me to understand their impact on the space,
to be able to organize them freely, to create compositions, to catalog them, take care
of them, clean them, photograph them and give them names. It was then that I
realized how important it was for me to study sound.”
Angelina Nogueira does not stop searching, she is still experimenting with the
topic related to territory, soil/earth, and more broadly – with the game of memory in
relation to childhood. She is active, inscribing her work in various fields of art, not
stopping only in a chosen sphere, she is an intermedia and interdisciplinary creator.
And although the materials she uses are basic, one could say primitive, she extracts
from them a whole spectrum of various connections and references.