Hello everyone -

here’s a quick update on my project ‘the dead have secrets too’. I am going to send out an update outlining what we have achieved so far, and what still needs to be done.

 As you may know, I am a visual artist with a 20 year practice* of creating films, videos, and installation artworks which explore familial and ancestral trauma resulting from my ancestors' survival of state sanctioned violence. My latest work is an installation which uncovers a lost family secret, that of my great-grandfather’s (Francisco Rafael de Sampaio aka Miguel Ferreira) alleged committing of a murder in 1890, and his subsequent flight through the smuggling routes of Portugal into Spain and back. 

This event has shaped and framed my family’s destiny, and I am still living with its reverberations today.

Your generosity so far has enabled the following to happen:

• Flights to Portugal in January 2022 for a camera operator, sound recordist and I.
• Shipment of equipment to Portugal including 16mm cameras, timelapse units, film stock, tripod etc.
• A driver and vehicle in Portugal to access remote locations with the required equipment, to film the trajectory traveled by Francisco Rafael Sampaio aka Miguel Ferreira in 1890.
• Accommodation whilst in Portugal.

Thanks again for everyone’s generosity. 

I apologize that my updates haven’t been as frequent as I would have liked. I hope you will appreciate that a project of this scale, which is so personal, brings up a lot of trauma for me which I need time to process and work through. I have also made many new discoveries in the archives, which in turn lead to new routes of research and exploration which themselves take a lot of time.

I am going to post a separate update on where this project will go next, and I continue to ask for your support in whatever ways you can. 

From the bottom of my heart I want to thank each and every one of you for what you have enabled to happen so far!

Bem Haja,

Miriam

My ancestral history is one of perpetual exile. My family has been subjected to generations of political and religious displacement, oppression, and marginalization.

If it wasn’t for him (Francisco Rafael de Sampaio aka Miguel Ferreira) and the fact that my great-grandmother joined him later I wouldn’t be here.

My ancestors had to practice Judaism secretly in Portugal (due to the Inquisition which began in 1496). I am descended from Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity to escape persecution from the Inquisition, but who continued to practice Judaism secretly and were known pejoratively as Marranos (Crypto-Jews) . A second Inquisition in the 1600’s saw new levels of persecution leveled against these ‘New Christians’. Nearly five centuries later my parents reverted back to Judaism. 

My father then escaped a similar level of persecution in Portugal as as anti-fascist. He had been detained by the PIDE (the secret police) in the 1960’s under the Salazar dictatorship, forcing him to flee the country and obtain political refugee status in Canada. Although this is an historical tale of my ancestors, it reveals secrets shared by a great number of families of the same origin.

My artistic practice and textual research, primarily in archives, is a result of specialized, personally developed techniques. I am driven by a natural intuitive instinct , which has pushed me deeper in how I see things and how to work with them in film & photography, and in this area I have worked in collaboration with a select few artists such as James Holcombe. Beyond the traditional way of looking at things. I am an archaeological forensic detective delving into things that are so painful. I work with psychic mediums both from home (Jordi Rosen), and from abroad (Hernan Coroneo).

This is not a documentary in the traditional sense of the word. It is an experimental film installation. I will have to work really hard with sounds and images to let some of these secrets out. I am a great collector of ideas, and documents. One of my primary goals is to speak or show via images what my great grandfather lived through on his trajectory, what was passed on to me as phantoms from unresolved experience. So much of my work is about memory and trauma, and how this is passed on through the generations.

This journey is a work of the heart. Each revelation of historical information touches a nerve that ignites emotions, most of which are intense. There were so many times that we would be searching for specific locations, guided by Jordi Rosen’s psychic communications with my great grandfather, that would lead me to all sorts of surprises. Once we stopped to take a break, only to realize that we were exactly at one of the mapped-out spots on the GPS. Another day, after hours of driving, we arrived in Torres when we stopped for a break. There we saw an expansive piece of privately owned land, upon which an elderly couple appeared driving a tractor with which they were working the land.

I asked their names and told them that I was doing research, asking for their permission to be on the land. The man’s name was José Martins, which was my maternal grandfather’s name.

Thus another layer unravels for me to add to my research. Everything happens for a reason.

I am truly hoping that your interest in my practice will motivate you to make a donation towards the realization of, the dead have secrets too .

I am familiar with financial struggles. This makes me as appreciative to a person who shares my story as I am to someone who donates.

Any and all donations are equally appreciated and honored. I will update you as regularly as I can on the progress of my work. I will highlight your support at every one of the exhibits of the completed project.

Above all I am eternally and infinitely grateful for your support. Please share this campaign as far and wide as you can.

Many, many thanks.

*In the last 10 years these have included a major film installation at Galerie Dazibao called ‘I am the Daughter of Dead-fathers’ which was a reworking of super 8 footage shot at the former PIDE detention and torture centre in Portugal. A feature length article on this work was included in the London Moving Image Review & Art Journal (Miraj Volume 9: Issue 1, 2021) by Dr. Althea Greenan.