Mónica de Miranda — Beauty, Tomorrow Is Another Day

Mónica de Miranda’s work always feels like wandering through memories and forgotten spaces. She photographs, films, and reconstructs sites that are abandoned but with history like hotels, colonial buildings, ruins that carry layers of memory. Her practice makes me think about fragility and impermanence, about how a space can remember even after people leave. Working across photography, video, and installation, she explores themes of migration, diaspora, and the ways spaces hold stories long after people have moved on. 

One artwork that resonates strongly is “Beauty, Tomorrow Is Another Day”, a video installation with wood, mirror, and curtain. The piece transforms the gallery into a reflective, immersive environment. Layers of mirrors, wood, and moving curtains interact with projected video, creating an oscillation between presence and absence, reality and reflection. The viewer is forced to negotiate space, moving through partial reflections, shifting images, and physical obstructions. The video imagery evokes landscapes, urban ruins, and domestic spaces that feel both intimate and distant.

The wooden structures and mirrored surfaces multiply reflections, fragmenting the space and the viewer’s perception. The curtain introduces movement and rhythm, responding to the audience’s body and shifting light, making the installation performative in an unexpected way. Moving through the work, you become part of it, your own reflection intertwined with the layered images and objects, collapsing distance between viewer, memory, and narrative. It’s a meditation on presence, absence, and the ephemeral nature of both people and places.

I feel like this work of hers is a gentle collaboration between object, video, space, and viewer. It becomes its complete self only when the audience navigates it, triggering movement in curtains and reflections, responding to their body and gaze.