PAVILION OF ANGOLA
Egas Chagas in Conversation
Pavilion of Angola - 55th International Art Exhibition- la Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy
Luanda, Encyclopedic City is the First Pavilion of the Republic of Angola at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia and the first African Pavilion that wins the Golden Lion.
The Pavilion, commissioned and supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Angola, is curated by Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera (Beyond Entropy Ltd).
The Pavilion continues the research initiated by Beyond Entropy at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition and develops a reflection on the theme of “Encyclopedic Palace” through the work of Edson Chagas, a young Angolan artist.
The Encyclopedic Palace has been given an impossible task: no building can contain a universal multiplicity of spaces, possibilities, and objects. When a building tends towards the encyclopedic, it becomes a city. The city includes multiple conditions in the coherence of form— even though this is an urban, conflict-ridden form.
Edson Chagas focuses on the complexity of Angola’s capital, Luanda, which derives from the presence of unpredictable spaces and the coexistence of irreconcilable programs: city and country, infrastructure and habitations, garbage tips and public spaces. Luanda is an encyclopedic city. How can the knowledge of a city be organized through the taxonomy of its spaces?
Central to Edson Chagas’ work is a reflection on the ways in which images are used to give form to the way the city is experienced. Edson Chagas’s Found Not Taken series concentrates on the systematic cataloguing of abandoned objects that are repositioned within an urban context to create new relationships between the objects and their context, form and its codification.
What relationship is created between spaces and their images? What role are imagination and creativity allowed to play in this urban taxonomy? In the ambiguity of a vision which uncovers and nonetheless reconstructs, what is delineated is an urban cartography mixing documentary-like precision and poetic reconstruction: a new way of observing the encyclopedic wealth of spaces around us and, perhaps, a new way of inhabiting these spaces.
Luanda, Encyclopedic City is an installation composed of 23 large-format photographic posters open to the interaction with the public, invited to reflect on the theme of the palace Encyclopedic also through the ability to create their own personal encyclopedia urban of Luanda, in a stimulated comparison with the Collection of Ancient Art exhibited in the Galleria of Palazzo Cini.
Edson Chagas was born in Luanda in 1977. He completed his studies in photojournalism at the London College of Communication (LCC) in 2007 and subsequently attended the documentary photography course at the University of Wales, Newport, until2008. Chagas’s work has since developed a more introspective focus beyond the standards of photojournalism. Exhibitions include the 2nd Luanda Triennial, Angola, 2010; SP-Arte 2011, São Paulo, Brazil; the MABAXA project in Luanda, Angola and RAVY – Rencontre d’Arts Visuels, in Yaoundé, Cameroon, both in 2012. In 2011 he also took part in a workshop in Ethiopia, invited by the German organisation GIZ – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, which culminated in various exhibitions, in 2012 at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany, the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa and later in Angola. This year, Edson’s work was part of the exhibition NO FLY ZONE Unlimited Mileage with a group of five other Angolan contemporary artists at Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon, Portugal. Also in 2013, Edson Chagas has participated in a group exhibition entitled “Landscapes” at A Palazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy. Edson Chagas lives and works in Luanda, combining his artistic work with the job of image editor for the Angolan newspaper Expansão, where he has worked for the past two and a half years. More than “portraying” reality or what that means for a large audience, Edson Chagas is interested in social issues and the relationship between time and space; his work can be considered abstract, but without disregarding a social context.
Education
09|2007 || 06|2008| Studied Documentary Photography at University of Wales, Newport
10|2005 || 06|2007| FdA degree Photojournalism at University of the Arts London; London College of Communication
09|1999 || 06|2002| ETIC – Escola Técnica de Imagem e Comunicação, Portugal; Photography course (advertising, Art and Photojournalism).
09|1998 || 01|1999| CCA – Centro Comunitário de Arcena (community centre), Portugal: three-month course in audio and video. (photography and audio)
Exhibitions
03|2013|Italy: Landscapes, A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia
01|2013|Portugal: No Fly Zone. Unlimited Mileage, Museu Colecção Berardo, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon.
10|2012|Germany: Zukunftsentwickler/Future Makers, LVR-LandesMuseum, Bonn.
12|2012|Nigeria: Live Festival, Lagos.
04|2012|Cameroon: RAVY-International Visual Arts Festival, Yaoundé.
01|2012| Angola: MABAXA project, photographic exhibition, video and installation, Luanda.
05|2011| Brazil: SP ARTE & SOSO Arte Contemporânea Africana; collective photographic exhibition, São Paulo.
11|2010| Angola: 2nd Luanda Triennal, SOSO Arte Contemporânea Africana ; video, photography and installation, Luanda
10|2010| Angola: 2nd Luanda Triennal, Natural History Museum – SIEXPO (Salão Internacional de Exposições); Angolan Photography, Luanda.
Images from Edson Chagas, 'Oikonomos' Series (2011)
