Contemporânea

Staging Haunted Returns: Historical, Political and Artistic Resonances in Yonamine’s Memória Fantasma

As I read the two words that compose the title of Yonamine’s exhibition, memória and fantasma (memory and ghost), I thought that they work well in tandem; while their meanings might seem distant, they both name forms of persistence, ways in which something that should be over continues to exist.

Ghosts have long inhabited ambiguous places between worlds: not quite dead, not quite alive, faceless or bodiless, they often slip in and out of sight, invisible to most yet sensed by a few. Whether or not they truly ‘exist’ is uncertain, but what is undeniable is that they have persistently lived in human imagination, across cultures and eras, assuming a wide range of forms and functions. Memories, too, possess many of these same qualities. They can be material or immaterial, invisible yet often very vivid, resurfacing in unpredictable ways through fragments, sensations, or images. Like ghosts, memories move across time, often coming from unresolved pasts to shape our presents.

From the late 1980s onwards, ghosts escaped the realms of stories and myth and entered theory, influencing the way we understand the past. No longer just spooky figures, they became metaphors for narratives, ideas, and cultural conditions that refuse to fade — a phenomenon called haunting. This shift is often traced back to Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, written at the moment when Marxism, and even history itself was blatantly being declared officially over1. Derrida went against these oversimplifying claims, arguing that as long as the questions it raised — about justice, equality, responsibility — remain unresolved, it will continue haunting politics. More broadly, this spectral turn also understands traumas and memories as operating in this ghostly way: unresolved, recurrent, and operating through the paradox of absence through presence.

It seems to me that the exhibition Memória Fantasma by Yonamine unfolds precisely within this condition of haunting, operating across several registers at once. The show appears to propose an understanding of history, artworks and objects not as concluded entities, but as unstable and unfinished processes marked by return rather than closure. In this way, Memoria Fantasma unfolds as a constellation of returns: a device through which narratives, ideas and materials from different temporalities re-emerge, not to be resolved or nostalgically recalled, but to be revisited, remixed, and confronted in order to interrogate the now. This idea of the return seems to take concrete form in different Yonamine’s working gestures: the reuse and alteration of old newspapers, the incorporation of discarded materials and objects sourced from the street or fleamarkets, the reappearance of images and slogans from past political conditions, the decision to rework his own earlier pieces, or the inclusion of artists no longer among us. All of these decisions seem to follow the logic of haunting. They stage the past not as a closed temporality or a museum of inert memories preserved in amber, but as a restless force that continues to interact with our contemporary times.

The first return is twofold. In Memoria Fantasma, Yonamine revisits the history of his country while simultaneously returning to an earlier work in which he had already done so. Most of the pieces presented here are revisited versions of works first shown in 2013 at the Museu Coleção Berardo, for the group exhibition No Fly Zone. Unlimited Mileage2. On that occasion, Yonamine created a series of large cardboard panels composed of different manipulated fragments of the Jornal de Angola of 1976 —the first year of independence of the country under a Marxist government. ​​More than a decade after these works were first shown, during the year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Angola’s independence from Portugal, Yonamine decided to ‘update’ these works to make them speak again about the reality of his country and the twisted world in which we live.

Returning to one’s own completed work is far less common than revisiting and altering archival materials or newspapers. While other fields more readily accept revision after publication, visual art—much like writing—tends to treat finished pieces as closed forms. I recall here one of my favourite sayings, which I often use to somehow poetically justify my delayed text submissions due to painful ouroboros of self-doubt and compulsive revisions: “A text is never truly finished, merely abandoned.”3 We can return to recurring themes or motifs, or keep perfecting one’s creative endeavour, but as it is declared ‘finished’, or better, ‘abandoned’, it is often treated as something sealed, untouchable, like a Pandora’s box. In music, by contrast, there is greater openness toward the rigid status of the end product. Songs often circulate without any curse through different versions, recordings, alternate takes, and remixes. While Yonamine’s main reference for revisiting this series of works is certainly Paulo Kapela—an Angolan artist whose presence is evoked throughout the exhibition in different forms — his approach also recalls musical practices, particularly that of Lee “Scratch” Perry, the legendary Jamaican musician and producer to whom Yonamine has previously paid homage4. Perry pioneered the transformation of existing recordings through editing, reverb, electronic effects, reworked rhythms, versioning, and self-sampling—what he famously called “vocal cannibalism.” Finished tracks were not endpoints, but raw material for ghostly returns. In these works, Yonamine adopts a similar logic: the cardboard pieces and the news they contain, like the past itself, are treated not as fixed artifacts but as compositions that need to be remixed in the tempo and key of the present.

The act of revisiting old newspapers certainly allows one to reconstruct a specific political, cultural, or media moment; through distance, gaps, and unsettling similarities, more than a nostalgic exercise, it becomes a way of reading our times. It is precisely in this temporal delay — in what is missing, repeated, or unexpectedly familiar — that the archive stops being a neutral document and turns into a mirror. In this sense, both the selection of news and Yonamine’s recent interventions on the cardboard works trace such a temporal arc, inviting us to look at how certain ideas continue (or not) to haunt our times. While the original digital collages—built from enlarged, cut, and recombined newspaper fragments—offered a personal yet deeply political reading of Angola’s turbulent post-independence years, the 2025 interventions Yonamine has developed for this exhibition carry this temporal remixing further. Through subtle yet incisive gestures—precise cuts that release ghostly figures from the surface, or the inclusion of stickers, labels or images gathered from flea markets or objects trouvé — the works reactivate the archival material, granting the news renewed and distinctly contemporary meaning. The logic of return mentioned before is not only visible in the presence of past news but embedded in the materials of the works: in the fragile, recycled cardboard supports and in the discarded objects that re-enter circulation, carrying with them traces of other lives, other economies, and other realities.

I have the impression that in many recent interventions, Yonamine employs satire and irony as the preferred instruments for engaging with history. It seems that the artist understands humour as a tool to be used for expressing dissent, frustration and skepticism toward power and official narratives, as well as for reflecting on the past and its reverberations in the present. The comparison may seem unlikely, but Yonamine’s methods here remind me of the syntax of memes: as he also employs collages and textual insertions to destabilize official images and assemble semantic mosaics in which objects, cutouts, transfers, texts and brand labels collide in the original photographs to generate new, layered, and politically charged meanings. I use this far-fetched analogy, having in mind Metahaven’s essay Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?5, in which the Dutch design collective takes irony seriously, arguing on how satire and memes can serve to expose hypocrisy, circulate dissent, and foster shared forms of political awareness.

This satirical logic crystallizes in a sharp way around different works. In the work that opens the exhibition, we find Cold War geopolitics, postcolonial dictatorship, Western complicity and memetic collages, are condensed into a single visual field. This vertical cardboard features the news of a breakfast “matabicho”6 between Giscard d’Estaing and Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese dictator whose long rule became an emblem of postcolonial tyranny, propped up by Western powers in the name of Cold War stability and economic extraction — a familiar political script. Here Yonamine inserts a “Seko” sticker, the brand of agricultural machinery (perhaps hinting at ruthless extractivism) every time the dictator’s name appears, as well as a Marlboro label beside the headline. As the artist explained during a guided tour of the show, the reference points to long-circulating rumours about Ku Klux Klan markings on Marlboro packs —not to suggest Mobutu’s affiliation with the KKK, but to link both as figures of organized violence and terror.

The work is presented next to a well-illuminated image of five girls giving from the Mocidade Portuguesa giving a Nazi–fascist salute7. Initially, I could not tell whether it was a projection or a static image. Only after moving closer did I realize that it is painted directly onto the wall and then covered with a thin white layer. This simple gesture creates an interesting ambiguity: is the image fading into the surface, or emerging from it? Elsewhere in the exhibition, we find similar interventions with fading paint, but these clearly suggest disappearance: decorative vase motifs, or incisions made on women's skin, are painted on certain walls of the space. However, these interventions clearly evoke ideas related to disappearance, residual traces of Angolan traditions eroding over time. But the same cannot be said for the image of the five Portuguese girls. Considering the unsettling déjà vu that we are living in, with repression and fascism increasingly being normalized, with Nazi salutes resurfacing not only among fringe and bald extremists but also among billionaires close to the centers of global power, that image does not appear to be fading; on the contrary, it seems to be resurfacing from the wall with a renewed haunting force.

This sense of historical return extends beyond fascism to the ideological frameworks that once promised emancipation in Angola. In the piece The power of the pussy, we encounter a letter from Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, in which the first clarifies that the idea of social classes was not invented by him and his contribution lay in articulating a materialist reading of history8. Read today, the statement remains unresolved: extreme concentrations of wealth persist, while the promise of equality recedes. Angola’s history can be read through this haunting framework, where Marxism was adopted before the independence as a language of emancipation, then gave way to a protracted civil war (1975–2002), then was gradually abandoned as new neoliberal reforms shaped the country. Yet Marxism, just like colonialism, survives not as a stable ideology but as a ghost that continues to linger within the political imaginary of the country — perhaps here Derrida’s claim that Marx would continue to haunt political thought appears prescient. In the same work, we also find a list of urgent telephone numbers that retain colonial traces—with names such as Hospital Maria Pia— another form of haunting, this time of Portuguese symbolic force. Nearby, the phrase Power of the pussy is carved alongside two figures that resemble the pussy riot protest group, together with black and white photographs of women the artist bought at the Feira da Ladra, likely dated to the same period as the newspapers. Their uncertain origin—Portuguese or Angolan?—becomes part of the work’s ambiguous ghostly logic.

Another piece bears the headline Israel, South Africa and Rhodesia constitute the pillars of racism. While apartheid has formally ended in the latter two, the same cannot be easily claimed for the first. Beneath it, a wartime photograph is subtly altered: here, Yonamine replaced the faces of two characters so that a young José Eduardo dos Santos, newly involved in the MPLA after studying petroleum engineering in the Soviet Union, occupies the position of the authority giving the speech and showing his comrades the strategies to be followed on the map, in which the artist has carved out different oil platforms in the map. These two interventions allude to the following subordination of the revolutionary ideals to economic interests, as well as to the fact that the once revolutionary Dos Santos would later preside over Angola from 1979 to 2017, a period marked by corruption and the expansion of the oil industry. In the same room, we find another cardboard piece, Keep AKA. Here the  title itself operates as a wordplay, merging Cinema Kipaka, a well-known cinema in Luanda, with Keep AKA—“keep your gun”—a reference to the armistice following Angola’s civil war, after which weapons were never fully surrendered. The piece presents the carved out logo of the cinema together with the news on the seizure of a marijuana plantation, revealing Angola’s abandonment of long-standing tradition of cannabis cultivation in favour of Western prohibitionist models. The article even absurdly attributes Jimi Hendrix’s death to the substance. Yonamine intervenes by adding a to the farmer’s head, a headdress made of thirty-three joint ends —not a casual number, a charged one, invoking Masonic symbolism, Christ last year, as well as the amount of rolling papers in a standard pack.

The final hauntological return staged within Memória Fantasma is that of Paulo Kapela, whose presence is announced before his works appear, through an altar installation occupying one of the exhibition’s rooms. Kapela (1947, Uíge – 2020, Luanda) was an Angolan artist who became both a reference point and an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Yonamine, as well as for an entire generation of Angolan artists, thanks to the force of his work and to a charismatic, almost prophetic figure—one that, in this sense, recalls Lee “Scratch” Perry. The altar created by Yonamine is more than a citation of Kapela’s practice; it constitutes an appropriation of his aesthetic that operates simultaneously as homage and as a form of temporal and architectural doubling. Their renewed proximity here at ZDB suggests that these works are not meant to stand alone, but rather to be activated through the continued presence of their mentor.

At the threshold of the altar installation, Yonamine marks the outline of a former doorway with red circular dots painted using the same pigment found on matchbox striking surfaces. Here, before entering the room, visitors are invited to do three actions: lighting a match, firing a candle and making a wish. The presence of the candle introduces a ritual dimension to the show that brought me back to Gaston Bachelard’s reflections on this object as a sacrificial offering to the gods9. While in the past this practice took the violent form of animal offerings, the candle replaces it as a quieter negotiation between desire and renunciation. After I sparked the match against the wall and lit the candle, I inevitably observed the scene with the filter of Bachelard’s poetic insights: the fire slowly melting the wax, consuming, deforming and silently sacrificing matter, while the flame rose upward, carrying my wish above, until the candle would eventually collapse dead on the ground. I don’t remember what my wish was, and even if I did, I would not share it here. What I do recall is the expression Yonamine used to describe the effort required to arrive at this composition, as he said it took him a while to “tame” the materials present there. In fact, the installation is composed of a different array of objects: buoys, nautical knots, alcohol bottles, rolling papers, football shirts, flags, film posters etc. We do not need to know the reason why each one of them is there; their individual meanings remain opaque, mysterious, yet collectively they generate a dense field of accumulated temporalities, lives, and forms of resistance drawn back into circulation.

Significantly, this installation precedes the final room, where two mixed media works by Paulo Kapela are presented. They all have dual dates, subtly revealing where Yonamine got the idea of coming back to his own works, and underlining the exhibition’s recurring temporal layering. One of these works is Yonamine’s own artist certificate, made by Kapela himself. Here, more than the criticism of the bureaucratization and commodification of artistic legitimacy within Western educational systems, what I found deeply moving was the sincere human and artistic connection it underlines. There is something profoundly generous in the act of placing the work of one’s maestro—even more depicting his own certificate—at the center of the exhibition’s final room, a rare gesture that foregrounds camaraderie, lineage and transmission over individual authorship.  Memória Fantasma seems to advance here the idea of artistic mentorship itself as a form of positive haunting—an influence that persists beyond proximity, collaboration, or even life itself.

Even though this work left a strong impression on me, I ultimately left the exhibition thinking most about the altar installation and the gesture of lighting the matches. Considering the exhibition’s historical and political tone of the show, I was trying to read this act of firing a match less in spiritual terms but as a historical metaphor for resistance and revolution: a match produces flame through a chemical reaction triggered by friction, but what is friction, if not resistance? Perhaps the installation points to that moment when individual desires present in the candles become collective, that’s when the light of revolution is produced: candles turn into beacons, capable not of chasing ghosts away, but of illuminating a path through them, toward a future still to be shaped. It is within this brighter horizon that I would like to encounter Yonamine’s cardboard works again. Just as Paulo Kapela’s pieces sometimes bear three dates, I wish to see the works of Memória Fantasma to be released back into circulation—perhaps at a future anniversary of Angolan independence—so they may continue to speak, hauntingly and insistently, to whatever present awaits them, hopefully this time carrying better news.

Yonamine

Galeria Zé dos Bois