Giving the voice as an act of radical care: the case of Ângela Ferreira's towers

This paper takes as its starting point Portuguese multimedia artist Ângela Ferreira’s series of towers, building on her initial three-part installation For Mozambique (2008): Talk Tower for Ingrid Jonker (2012), Talk Tower for Diego Rivera (2017), and Talk Tower for Forough Farrokhzad (2020). The towers, employing Ferreira’s continuous navigation between sculpture, installation, and architecture through a decolonial perspective, are highlighting the work of past activist artists working in diverse historical, social, and geographical circumstances, whose voices were suppressed and censored when appearing in their original contexts. Building on Hobart and Kneese’s definition of radical care as essential yet “underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds” (2020, 2), this paper aims to examine Ferreira’s towers as acts of radical care, enabling the activist voices to bridge the temporal and spatial gaps by reaching contemporary audiences, as well as emphasizing the need for collective attention to dangers of various forms of oppression and censorship. The purpose of this critical analysis is to therefore investigate the ways in which Ferreira’s caring for the voices once silenced balances between past and present, foregrounding the importance of activist artistic work and arguing for its necessary protection.