Joana Vasconcelos: War Games

A History of the World in Spy Objects - Episode 12: Joana Vasconcelos - War Games

NARRATOR: What are the forgotten tools of tradecraft? Which objects might unlock the hidden history of espionage? I’m Alice Loxton and this is A History of the World in Spy Objects. The history of espionage is full of enigmatic objects - items whose meaning and purpose are hidden, obscure - until placed in the right hands. Exactly the same can be said of the world of modern art.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: I'm Joana Vasconcelos. I'm a Portuguese artist. I'm talking to you from the studio here in Lisbon. I work mainly with the Portuguese tradition, with Portuguese crafts, but I also use a lot of technology within my work. So I integrate different materials and I connect them, creating normally a new object in a new dimension. 

NARRATOR: Joana Vasconcelos is lauded the world over for her spectacular, large-scale sculptures. It’s one of her own works that she’s introducing to our archives because it deals, in part, with her country’s own history of surveillance.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: War Games is a piece that I've done with my first car, a Morris Oxford from the ‘60s.

NARRATOR: The 1960s were a time of great cultural change in Portugal. The final years of the Salazar dictatorship that had defined the nation for four decades. Joana was born just as that dictatorship was collapsing. Her grandfather on her mother’s side had worked for the military, under Salazar’s rule. He died just after Joana was born so she never had the chance to ask him anything about his life. But, growing up, she heard stories, mostly from her grandmother who survived him.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: She will always talk about the beauty of my grandfather, how he would dress in white, how he was good with the horses. Like any regular family, you hear how your grandfather was a very just man, very intelligent. He knew a lot about mathematics and he was a special man, as everybody told me, he had many people coming to him for advice. My grandmother would always describe the big parties that she would hold and all the receptions, the lunches, the dinners, and she would organize very large parties. And I never understood why because, in a way, my grandfather never had a big ranking. Officially, he was military but he never got to be a General. He had the post before that.

NARRATOR: Something didn’t add up. Her grandfather’s military rank didn’t justify all the grandeur. It was only after her grandmother passed away that more clues came to light.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: When my grandmother died nobody else was there but I was there the day that she died and they asked me to stay. And I was with my cousin. And we went to her room and when we moved around things, her closet and everything, we moved around the mattress of her bed. And when we moved the mattress, we understood there was something underneath it. So when we lifted up, there was this frame full of medals. It had red velvet behind these traditional frames. And then I understood there were some Portuguese medals and Spanish medals and I said, “This is really strange. He had the most important medals from the Portuguese government and from the Spanish government, the highest rankings.” And I understood that his military rank didn't justify those medals. And that's how I started asking and thinking… What happened here?

NARRATOR: Joana’s first thought on discovering a secret collection of medals beneath her grandfather’s bed was to offer them to her mother - they had belonged to her father, after all. But Joana’s parents were dyed-in-the-wool rebels. At the time of Joana’s birth in 1971, they lived in Paris, a hotbed of revolutionary politics, where Joana’s father was part of the Portuguese anti-colonial movement, supporting independence for Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Portugal’s other colonies. Joana’s mother had come to join him against the wishes of her father - the beautiful military man dressed in white. The young couple only returned to Portugal when the dictatorship was all over. Suffice it to say, Joana’s mother felt ambivalent about the mysterious prizes from two dictatorships that had been hiding under the bed.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: My mother and my two uncles had a big discussion over those medals that I will never forget. It was one of the biggest discussions I've seen. Who would take the medals? Nobody wanted it so I ended up guarding the medals myself for a while.

NARRATOR: The secrets hidden in those medals loomed large in Joana’s conscience. What had her grandfather done to earn them? Why would no one in her family tell her?

JOANA VASCONCELOS: Nobody talked about it until I started understanding that my grandfather had worked for the two dictators. And when I started understanding that he had a life of being a personality that was behind the scenes, giving a lot of information regarding the civil war in Spain and the colonial war in Portugal. And nobody really wanted to talk about it.

NARRATOR: As Joana dug for answers, pressing relatives for information that they’d rather hold onto, gradually a clearer picture began to emerge. Her adored grandfather had played a very specific role in his secretive military career.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: I discovered that he was a specialist in ballistics and that he was the advisor for both dictators in preparing the attacks, the military attacks.

NARRATOR: The impact of the revelation left Joana awestruck. Her grandfather had been an adviser to both Salazar and General Franco’s military dictatorships, furnishing them each with intelligence to facilitate violent acts of oppression. Oppression against his own people.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: And that brought a lot of sadness because many people died because of the intelligence of my grandfather. And we had to look into that and think, “Wow, this leaves a lot of pain and leaves a lot of unpleasant memories.” I think my grandmother had to find a way to deal with all that, creating this imaginary beautiful world that in the end was a kind of fairy tale of parties and an ‘influencer’ personality. But behind that, there was another personality that had a military purpose and a completely different aspect of life.

NARRATOR: So this is how Joana’s sculpture ‘War Games’ emerged: an artwork that’s about two lives, two worlds.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: I covered the car completely from the top to the bottom with these plastic shotguns. And I put them, all of them, in the back of the car. And so the car became a war machine. Inside it’s full of all sorts of colors because on the back seat of the Morris it is full of Disney toys. And so you have Cinderella, and you have all sorts of Mickey Mouse and all of them. And on the top of the inside of the car, hanging, you have these animals moving around. There are like little pigs, penguins, and monkeys. So inside is very colorful and it looks like any kid’s room all over the world. So it's fluffy, it's colorful, it's soft, and the outside is all in black, which is the color of the Morris. And you have all the shotguns pointing on the back and you have the red LED lights doing as if there were bullets going to the back. So the War Games piece is about those two sides, the paradox of private life - the family, where you project a kind of kindness and a kind of softness, and the more public life where you have all the guns shooting in your back. This idea of war in the sense of, in a way, intimate war that you can have within yourself. So it's like your private life, your public life, and how you deal with all that. In my grandfather, there was an extreme relationship between the two. And in a way, I think all of us tried to get that together in a better way. But he had two different lives. 

NARRATOR: In War Games Joana depicts the contradictions of her grandfather’s life, of her family’s history, in a bold, explicit way. She’s not shy in facing up to it.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: You cannot hide violence with softness. And so, in a way, it's better to see it and to acknowledge it than to cover it. So in my family, it did a lot of damage covering it. And what I can learn today is that it's better to accept and to forgive than to keep on hiding it. It’s a trauma that continues in the families that doesn't stop. It goes on from one generation to the other. I'm part of this family and I also share the past of this family so I find my own way to deal with it. And people think, “Oh, it's only the moment, then the war goes away and that's it.” No, it doesn't. What I learned from my family is that it doesn't. So the wrongdoing of somebody, of your grandfather, will affect you. And how you deal with it, that’s the big question. And through my work, I try to talk about things that people connect to because many other families have this problem. So in a way, through my work, I can deal with certain issues, which are personal issues, of course, but I can always touch other people.

NARRATOR: Spain and Portugal both continue to be affected by the legacy of their respective dictatorships. The lingering trauma has torn communities - and families - apart.

JOANA VASCONCELOS: Each one of us has to learn to see and to forgive and to acknowledge that and there's always your share of it, which is you are part of that family, too. So in a way, how you deal with your past is there's many ways, many techniques. I do a lot of therapy and I do a lot of other things. I even did a family consultation about the subject, and it was quite interesting because we understood the extension of the death that my grandfather caused. And I'm sorry for all the families that lost their own loved ones. And I'm sorry that he was part of that. And I hope that there’s a kind of transformation you can help to be part of.

NARRATOR: It’s Joana’s hope that her art will help families like hers face up to the complicated realities of generational trauma. But what about her own inheritance of violence? What happened to the medals?

JOANA VASCONCELOS: At the beginning, I look at them as a recognition of his values. And only later, I understood that they were also responsible for a lot of death. At that moment I said, “I don't want these medals anymore.” So they were given to the military museum.

NARRATOR: Which is where they have stayed, in unflinching light - their truth finally exposed, once and for all. I'm Alice Loxton. Be sure to explore the other enigmatic items in our archive, and join me back here, next week, for more.