GOLDEN VISA 

or the disposing of the discredited* 

The governmental invitation directed at wealthy non-Europeans to ease residency permits in Portugal when the applicant plans to invest over half a million Euros in the country, is linked with tax privileges and what is called the “Golden Visa.” Simultaneously, the government publicly invited unemployed and less privileged Portuguese citizens to migrate elsewhere. Two invitations, one entrance. 

With Golden Visa or the disposing of the discredited as the title and entry piece to the show at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, César is pointing out that a visa functions as a magnet, a transit, a passage, a permit and a privilege that necessary implicates its reverse, the migration politic within the borders of gated Europe in the midst of economic crises. Here, golden also refers to the material and immaterial aspects of the primary subject of the works presented in the show ¬– soil. 

Thus, disposing of the discredited can be analyzed as a multidimensional European project, rich in public/private partnerships: it involves letting African migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea, making life unbearable for allegedly undesirable populations such as the Roma, pushing an increasing number of insufficiently malleable employees to suicide, erasing all traces of a large proportion of the unemployed from official registers, and, in some countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland, encouraging more and more young nationals to migrate. 

*Michel Feher, 2014 

The exhibition comprises two further interrelated bodies of work that range from collages, research material, experimental film, sculptural objects to an opening lecture. 

The film essay Mined Soil takes us on a wandering path to revisit the work of the Guinean agronomist Amílcar Cabral, studying the erosion of soil in the Portuguese Alentejo region at the end of the 40’s through to his engagement as one of the leaders of the African Liberation Movement. This line of thought is intertwined with current documentation on an experimental gold mining site operated by a Canadian company and located in the same Portuguese area once studied by Cabral. The essay explores past and present definitions of soil as a repository of memory, trace, exploitation, crisis, arsenal, treasure and palimpsest. In the exhibition the film essay is presented in a spatial installation where the formal framework is a physical platform citing the shape of one of the many areas licensed for gold mining in Portugal. The installation continues with handcrafted, simulated “mock” mines that are modeled on the ones found in mined fields. 

The paper works Operations are extracted from research material such as technical drawings from the Portuguese military on the composition of land mines – and their strategic mapping on the battlefield – placed by the Guinean guerrilla forces during the 11 year long liberation war and photographs taken during César’s research in Guinea Bissau and military archives. The collages themselves refer to living crystalline structures and geometrical operations, reflecting a multi-faceted approach towards “fixed” subjects and narratives. 

From the entrance wall piece Golden Visa, through the installation and film Mined Soil and the series of works on paper Operations, César uses various concepts of soil to expose the possibility of challenging historical narratives, soil as an operational metaphor that unfolds how natural resources are implicated within a complex set of geopolitical conditions that inform contemporary life. Through the combination of re-activated archival material and recently shot material, César continues her careful work of an uneasy alliance of subjectivities, story telling, chronicle, documentary and experimental film.