Contemporânea

“Remember to remember to forget,” Eunice Pais whispers in her film Rosa-Zita: Um espaço liminal [Rosa/Zita: A liminal space]. I have had this phrase on repeat at the back of my mind ever since I first saw the 17-minute short that is the centrepiece of Pais’s first solo show Sea Skin, curated by Patricia Coelho, at Galeria Municipal do Porto. With her mother as the protagonist, Pais’s film tells a story of migration, with all the sorrow, grief, longing, and transformation that reside in the migrant body, alongside agency, masking, and resilience. It is also the anchor of the artist’s ongoing exploration of a parallel between her family's story of migrating from Mozambique to Portugal and the migratory story of kelp, sargasso: on the back side of the screen, we find sculptures of sargasso out of aluminium and tree branches the sea brought ashore in the winter storms.

I met up with Eunice over a cup of tea to hear about the myriad references she’d woven into Sea Skin. Confident, soft-spoken, and with a wealth of knowledge to share, speaking to her it soon became clear how well thought-through and precise her works are. Rather than a young artist holding her first solo show, she gives the impression of someone who knows exactly what she is doing, telling her stories with honesty, ease, and grace. Just like the artist herself, the works have a wealth of stories and reflections to share, first and foremost emotionally: it brought me back to the story of my own migration, the migration of my parents, as well as other stories of travel and transformation. How do we adapt to new contexts while holding our past within us, or that of our ancestors? What do we do with our selves, our identities, when we arrive in new contexts with new cultures, ways, bacteria, growths, lives? In seeking to understand these questions, we find a vision of duality across the show: Rosa/Zita in the film, Portuguese/Cisena in the soundscape, and land/sea in the sculptures. For Eunice, acknowledging and holding both is a way to navigate (and resist) systems that demand fixed identities.

Behind the film lies the real story of the Pais’s family’s migration, beginning in the period following the independence of Mozambique, when those with Portuguese nationality were required to leave the country under tight restrictions—often within 24 hours and with limited belongings, in what became known as the “24/20” order. Her grandfather, a professor, later obtained dual citizenship after the war of independence, which allowed him to remain in Mozambique with his younger children. Eunice’s mother, Rosa/Zita, initially travelled to Lisbon with her older sister, followed by two of her siblings. Four of the five younger siblings later joined them, all living near one another in Barreiro, while Eunice’s grandfather, grandmother, and youngest uncle remained in Mozambique.

While this upheaval took place before Eunice was born, she lived in the aftermath of this journey, with her own forgotten memories to uncover, both from her mother’s archives and from growing up watching her. The film performs this very uncovering with love and respect, weaving in other understandings that the artist has acquired. The idea of remembering to forget, for example, came from Eunice’s university studies in neuroscience: the frontal cortex remembers new actions, which, once they have been repeated enough times, are stored in the motor cortex instead. In other words, there has to be a moment when repeated actions shift their place in the brain from the frontal cortex to the motor cortex memory—the moment when we forget to remember. In the film, this fluctuation of memory sets the tone for the second chapter, which shows Rosa/Zita waking up, washing her face, braiding her hair, hanging laundry, washing dishes, cooking, caring, and repeating this over and over again, in an increasingly fast rhythm, and then slowing down, and finally dancing. With the artist narrating the actions, the viewer ends up in a space of overwhelmingness and loneliness reflected in a variation of the phrase: remember to remember to forget who you are. (Where you are from.)” This feeling of loss or dispersal of self is universal, though many of us who migrated find it showing up over and over, countered by, and perhaps even coexisting with, feelings of agency, perseverance, and resilience. These sister feelings are present in Rosa/Zita dancing, just as they are in her choice to leave, to continue to care, to choose to remember, and to choose to forget.

The film’s preceding chapter introduces the story of Rosa/Zita’s migration as we see her on the roof in Barreiro, amidst capulana (traditional Mozambican fabrics) drying in the wind, while Eunice reads a letter from herself to her mother (“Now that I am a woman, I understand you, I see you. Now that we are women, we create”). Later, we are on the dunes of Apúlia, which Eunice intuitively chose, not knowing of their resemblance to the Mozambican landscape. Here, Rosa/Zita places photographs and memories into a sculpture of a sargasso container while Eunice reads two letters from her grandfather to her mother, one congratulating her on the birth of her brother and one saying he will, after all, not come to Portugal upon his wife’s death. “Have you told him [your husband] of my flaws?” the grandfather asks his daughter. There is a blunt honesty in this question, a self-awareness and care that is unusual for a patriarchal figure. It is beautiful of Eunice to pick up this letter, to highlight this phrase.

Rosa/Zita places the memories, together with a black mourning scarf, into the container, and puts it into the shallow sea, letting the water hold them, reorganise them as it pleases and contaminate them with all the other memories, histories, and bodies that have passed through it. Later in the film, these changed memories are uncovered by Eunice herself as she fishes the container out of the water. “I returned to listen,” she says as she puts it to her ear. In the final chapter, versions of Rosa, of Zita, of Eunice transcend memories and spaces as Eunice pledges: “With me, I carried other presences left behind. … I recounted what you left. (I imagined your memories.) I unfolded your unrest before carrying your separation. I carry your memories (or forgettings?) I keep this carefully. … With the same care with which you care for me.” To echoes of earlier clips from the film, Eunice empowers her mother: “(Stop). (Wake up). Does it hurt? Untangle yourself. (Untangle us.) (Return.) Revisit yourself. … Re-remember yourself. (Re-remember us.) Refuse (Rosa). (Zita) Rebel. Those nebulous places (that you remembered to forget). They are landscapes you inhabit, even after leaving them. … (Close your eyes and return to a place.)” With this final sentence, suddenly, it is sargasso that we see floating underwater, inhabiting yet other liminal spaces.

Eunice explains to me how, in her mind, Rosa was always her mother’s Western self and Zita her Mozambican. At first, her mother would use both names: Zita for family, Rosa for strangers. When Eunice’s father died, something changed—perhaps because of how grief manifests culturally. In Africa, she explains, grief is joyful: “You wear colourful clothes, go to the water, sing to the water.” In Portugal, grief is shameful, sad, dark. As a child, Eunice didn’t understand why her mother would put on black clothes to go outside, until a friend explained that, here, people wear black to mourn. This duality, this masking of at-home and outside, also came with a name change, as her mother began to ask everyone—except her daughter—to call her Rosa. In Eunice’s understanding, Rosa and Zita never resolved into one identity but remained parallel presences in ongoing negotiation. “This negotiation,” she tells me, “can be understood as a form of agency, where opacity becomes a choice rather than a condition imposed from outside.”

As we talk in the coffee shop by Campanhã, I tell Eunice about my own migration story and how my name, too, was something that changed and always felt very intimate. We speak about what it means to be of both cultures, neither here nor there, of changing identities, of grandfathers who tell our mothers not to speak the local language in the hope of a better future for them (Mozambican, for her mother; Yakut, for mine). We speak of homeland as a land that never was, as something mystical, filled with a longing that can never be quenched. As she explains the details of the story, Eunice suddenly asks, “Am I talking about my mum? Or am I talking about sargasso?” Visually, the sargasso appears in the film at the very end, swimming underwater just as Rosa/Zita is, as well as in the strange sculptures on the other side of the screen. I would almost say that, in the work, sargasso functions as an ancestor whose memories the artist is trying to uncover.

Sargasso came into Eunice’s life after she moved to Apúlia, a fishing village north of Porto, where women traditionally harvest it from the sea to use as fertiliser for their gardens. Its journey, she soon found out, is multifaceted. Forming at deep levels on the seabed, the sargasso begins in the Caribbean and then attaches itself to the Gulf Stream, crossing the ocean underwater before becoming visible again upon arrival. Its role shifts as it travels: at one point, it is visible and considered “invasive,” as it covers coral reefs from the sun, inhibiting their growth; deeper underwater and invisible, it filters the ocean of heavy metals; finally, it becomes visible again as it is harvested as fertiliser. “Isn’t it incredible that over there they say it's invasive, and here it is so important for sustenance?” she asks enthusiastically, noting how, during the dictatorship, sargasso was all the more important, and how people used to grow vines on the dunes to keep them in place and catch the sargasso in the small valleys they formed.

The connection between visibility and invisibility is key, just as migrant bodies are made visible and invisible by the white gaze: sometimes described as “invasive,” sometimes seen as useful, sometimes simply accepted. In making this connection, Eunice’s work follows a contemporary movement that parallels human and more-than-human migratory bodies.1 For Eunice, what matters is that, regardless, sargasso keeps showing up. It may be invisible for part of its journey, it may be wanted or unwanted, it may be labelled invasive, it may be used or not, in symbiosis with humans or not, but it keeps showing up. It is this persistence, this presence in duality and contradiction, that sets it apart and makes it so relatable: not just a potent metaphor, but a more-than-human us. By creating this shared experience, the work allows us to take a step further, seeing visibility and invisibility not as imposed conditions but as strategies for navigating and resisting systems of extraction, categorisation, and ultimately domination.

Rewatching the film now, for the seventh time, I find myself once again heaving a big sigh—a sigh of longing, of a never-ending sorrow, but also a sigh of rebellion and determination to continue to show up the same but different, remembering the same but in other places. Just like sargasso: visible and invisible, present and absent, remembered and forgotten. I also find myself smiling in gratitude, as the work has healed something deep inside me, and reminded me of something very dear and important. Soon, there will be more, as Eunice builds upon Sea Skin as a prelude to her exploration of sargasso, the poetics of migratory bodies and speculative ecologies, with Sargassum bringing together speculative films and a sculptural installation this December at PADA.2