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When the Black political philosopher Angela Davis arrived in East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport in September 1972, she was met by cheering crowds. While Davis was imprisoned in America on terrorism charges, thousands of East Germans, including many children, had taken up her cause and written postcards calling for her release. In the state organised ‘One Million Roses for Angela” campaign, the Marxist philosopher and civil rights activist Angela Davis was portrayed as a ‘heroine of the other America’.

Angela, a video sculpture by artist Angela Ferreira, was inspired by the historical documentation of Davis’s tour of thanks and images from the campaign. This work was commissioned for the Albertinum exhibition 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis in 2020. In a replica of an industrial printing press from those days, Angela Ferreira presents a collage of film sequences and photos. The printing press offers a metaphor for the complex nexus between news and propaganda, truth and lies – in the GDR, but also in our world today.

Ferreira, who was born in Mozambique in 1958, locates Davis and her lifelong struggle for freedom and justice in a range of diverse contexts. In her video work, a black square fades into an interview with Angela Davis, now a distinguished professor emerita. In spring 2020, as a gesture of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, that black square was posted on social media. In the video, the scene then shifts to flashbacks of Paul Robeson, the American singer and civil rights activist – and also an iconic figure in the GDR. From Robeson, Ferreira leads us to the Mozambican poet Noémia de Sousa and an image of a performance initiated by Ferreira in Lisbon in 2018. Reading a poem by Noémia de Sousa dedicated to Paul Robeson, a young woman performer stands in front of a Lisbon memorial to the colonial ruler Dom Carlos I, King of Portugal.

Although the video collage only alludes to the events and their connections, it stimulates viewers to reflect on and rethink more intensively the histories of this topic and its continuing relevance today.