Ana Guedes is an artist born in Portugal and based in the Netherlands. Her artistic practice ranges from sound, video, installation and performance. Inspired by the interplay between personal and political history as reflected in her family archive, Guedes reflects on and explores the capacity for sound and music to convey the complex political and social constructs embedded in the archival material. Her work centres on the question which stories are passed on and which are lost.
She was artist in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2018-2019), followed by a Master’s in Artistic Research at the Royal Conservatory and the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag. Her research follows a body of works that deal with a fragmented family history and its engagement with the political entanglements with European Colonial and Post-Colonial narratives.
She participated in the XVIII Bienal de Cuenca, Prémio Piedra de Sal, Cuenca, Ecuador (2018) and New Artists Award 2017, EDP Foundation – MAAT Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2017). Her works, performances and installations were shown in Botchaft Berlin-Camões Berlin / MAAT Museum, Berlin, Germany (2019), Frequencia Singular Plural, Centro-Centro Madrid, Spain (2019), Next Arts Festival, Kortrijk, Belgium (2019), Sonic Dawn – Huomo Novos Festival, Riga, Letonia (2019), November Music Festival, s’Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands (2019).
Vol.7 n.17 007 | 30’07” |121169_tape loop_7’13”_fragments of Lepanto_part I (2021)
Sculptural sound installation
1.57 x 1.20 x 2.72 m
The starting point of the installation Vol.7 n.17 007 | 30’07” |121169_tape loop_7’13”_fragments of Lepanto_part I is the record collection of the artist’s Portuguese family, which reflect the migration of the artist’s family across three continents. The first records were purchased in Angola in the 1960s, after war broke out in the former Portuguese colony, and the collection was expanded with vinyl from Portugal and Canada until the 1980s. The records are scratched and their covers are moth-eaten, indicating the passage of time. As a whole, the family archives become a fragmentary map of displacement and a witness to the complexity of Portugal’s contemporary history.
The multi-record sound piece created from the archive material resonates in a 3D-printed chamber, the fragment of the Lepanto wreck , a former Dutch vessel wrecked on the Angolan coast. Beside the archival sound material, the artist also incorporated an organ sound piece made for the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam and overlapped the sculpture with a projection of 3D reconstructions of beached vessels, echoing the ghostly colonial history of the Oude Kerk
Vol.7 n.17 007 | 30’07” |121169_tape loop_7’13”_fragments of Lepanto_part I was first exhibitied at the Oude Kerk (1 – 31 Oct. 2021) as part of the Special Project 2020/21. The exhibition at Oude Kerk opened with the concert Silence #31: Ana Guedes and Hampus Lindwall. Ana Guedes’ work merged with Phill Niblock’s composition Unmounted/ Muted Noun, played on the church’s organ by Hampus Lindwall.