Resumen

This article discusses two artworks – The Miner, sound design performance, 2020 and Fragments of the Cage, multimedia installation, 2021 – that address and explore artistically the archive of the mining work from São Pedro da Cova, the role that the evocation of these workers memories represents and, therefore, the meanings present in both works that, through sound and image and their relationships, have used the heritage of memory to invoke the identity and path of the miner’s life.
Thinking of memory as a space for reflection becomes relevant in the environment of a contemporary world that often leaves us both alienated and besieged. In the context of contemporary artistic creation, and particularly the space of performance and installation, the archive has a central contribution in the necessary “emotional inscription” of memory as a vehicle for the awareness of reality.
The evocation of the miner occupies this space of consciousness, since the history and memory of these workers, and what unites them in the past as in the present, are, after all, their consciousness that they spent their lives digging up wealth that only brought them misery. Through the analysis of John Akomfrah’s film works, his vision of the artistic treatment of the archive, and the extensive heritage of documentary films about the workers from the São Pedro da Cova’s mining exploration, the realization of both artworks prospects the archive as vehicle for allegorical associations and discursive formations, seeking through sound and image the presence of another body of memory.