Postcolonial Frequencies: The Sound Is the Monument

On a quiet afternoon in Almada Velha, beneath the waning sun of early summer, the echoes of Angolan semba and psychedelic garage rock flutter across the tiled facades of Rua Leonel Duarte Ferreira. If you follow the sound down the narrow lane to the decommissioned municipal swimming pools of São Paulo — a ghostly remnant of Estado Novo-era architecture — you’ll find something extraordinary: a monumental speaker, geometric and abstract, sitting where a diving board once stood. It doesn’t demand reverence. It plays music.

This object — an acoustic plinth, half-pedestal, half-sound system — is the centerpiece of The Sound Is the Monument, a new exhibition by the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, on view until November. Its premise is both simple and radical: what if we stopped carving memory into stone and started letting it vibrate through the air?

Kiluanji’s work is often described as postcolonial, speculative, and archly humorous. This exhibition is all of those things — and something more. It’s an attempt to reassign the function of the monument itself, stripping it of its imperial gravitas and rebuilding it through music, memory, and imagined futures. The result is neither nostalgic nor utopian. It is, instead, insurgent — an act of sonic sabotage aimed at the edifice of colonial history.

The statue that fell

The story begins not in Almada, but in Luanda. In 1937, the Portuguese colonial government inaugurated the Monumento aos Mortos da Grande Guerra — a statue commemorating the Portuguese soldiers who died in World War I. Known colloquially as Maria da Fonte, it stood in the city center, its neoclassical form intended to project imperial dignity. But dignity is brittle. In 1976, a year after Angola gained independence, the statue was dynamited by a group of Angolan and Cuban soldiers. It exploded into a mess of carved stone. The pedestal, however, remained.

Kiluanji, born three years later in the newly sovereign Angola, grew up in a world of fragments — architectural, political, emotional. In interviews, he often returns to that pedestal. “It was like a ghost without a body,” he once said. “A silence you could stand on.” For years, the leftover plinth remained in Luanda’s downtown, untouched, unresolved.

In The Sound Is the Monument, Kiluanji picks up that unresolved gesture and runs with it — not by reconstructing the statue, but by exploding the idea of the monument itself. He translates stone into sound.

Imaginary bands, real histories

Before you reach the speaker-plinth in the central pool, you walk past eight colossal posters, printed on vinyl and mounted like concert advertisements. Each one features a different fictional music group. The names are playful: The Plinthonics, Fragments of a Nation, Maria Dissonante. The designs are dizzying, layered with collaged images from Angola’s revolutionary period — soldiers with AK-47s, shattered statues, and fragments of classical drapery arranged like instruments on a stage.

These posters look like album covers or gig flyers from an alternate timeline — one where the aftermath of decolonization was narrated not through treaties or textbooks but through garage punk, free jazz, and afrobeat. Kiluanji calls these images “archaeologies of imagination”, and they’re central to his practice. They don’t document history. They mock its rigidity.

Each fictional band represents a different facet of cultural resistance: one evokes the underground music collectives that formed in Luanda during the 1980s civil war; another is a nod to Cuban-Angolan solidarity. The effect is oddly moving. You begin to wish these bands existed. You begin to hear them in your head.

Then, as you approach the speaker, you hear the real music: a looped playlist curated by the artist, featuring Angolan musicians across generations — Bonga, Waldemar Bastos, Aline Frazão, Nástio Mosquito. Together, they form a counter-archive, songs that survived regimes, coups, and cultural erasure. They are not background noise. They are the monument.

Rethinking memory

The idea of replacing statues with sound may seem fanciful — even unserious. But in Portugal, where debates over colonial memory are increasingly heated, Kiluanji’s work lands like a subversive whisper inside a shouting match.

In recent years, Lisbon and its satellite cities like Almada have become contested zones of memory. Activists have protested the continued public presence of colonial figures like Padre António Vieira and Afonso de Albuquerque, while new monuments — such as the controversial Memorial to the Victims of Slavery, planned for Lisbon’s Campo das Cebolas — spark fierce debate about how, or whether, a nation should commemorate its violence.

Kiluanji doesn’t offer solutions. He offers disruptions. Instead of calling for new statues, he proposes a new format: music. Unlike marble or bronze, sound is impermanent, migratory, hard to police. It resists borders. It can be turned off — or turned up.

In this way, The Sound Is the Monument is not just about Angola’s post-independence memory; it’s also an intervention into how Europe — and Portugal specifically — continues to relate to its imperial past. Almada is an apt site for this. Just across the river from Lisbon, it’s home to a large community of African immigrants and their descendants. And yet, in many parts of the city, colonial amnesia still hangs in the air, like dust on forgotten stone.

A monument that sings

To stand beside Kiluanji’s plinth is to feel the contradiction: it is massive, yet intangible; shaped like power, but pulsing with something less stable and more alive. When the music plays, the air in the former swimming pool seems to ripple. The old diving board rusts silently in the background. You imagine it used to launch bodies into water. Now it seems like a perch from which to listen.

The music changes track. Bonga's “Mona Ki Ngi Xica” plays — a song of exile, longing, and resistance. You watch a group of teenagers drift in from the street. They linger. One leans against the pedestal. Another starts dancing, subtly, like a flicker. No guards stop them. No plaque scolds them. There’s nothing to deface. Only the sound remains.

In an age when we are constantly being asked to remember — to never forget — Kiluanji Kia Henda invites us to remember differently. Not with monuments, but with movement. Not with stone, but with sound.

The Sound Is the Monument is on view through November 15, 2025, at the Antigas Piscinas Municipais de São Paulo, Rua Leonel Duarte Ferreira 4, Almada Velha. Open Thursday to Saturday, 2pm–6pm.