Chaos. Stillness. Extinction. Fragments. Fingerprints. Amnesia. Flight. Belonging. Survival. Translation.

It’s a lot to weave from silence.

Timor-Leste’s inaugural representing artist at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Maria Madeira, sits in momentary silence, threading thoughts with memory.

'Everywhere I go there is always this question: Where are you from?'

WARP

Madeira was born in the coffee growing district of Ermera in the central highlands of the 22-year independent island nation of Timor-Leste, an hour out of the country’s capital, Dili. Her identity is formed by cumulative cultural, political and geographic fragmentations of experience, tragedy and assimilation. 

Timor-Leste’s particular tragedy emerged in the slipstream of one country’s hegemonic collapse and another’s ruthless expansionism, caught between the disintegration of Portuguese colonialism in late 1974, and Indonesia’s brutally violent 24-year occupation.¹

The canopy of coffee plantations of Madeira’s birth-place became a haven of strategic resistance, concealment, threat and attrition. Her family splintered in late 1975 and scattered across countries and cities, a complex geographic sanctuary. Madeira and part of her family initially settled in refugee camps in Quinta da Graca and Vale do Jamor in Portugal before, in 1983, moving to Perth, Western Australia.

‘That’s the thing’, Madeira says, her left-hand cradling three extended middle-fingers on her right hand as a crucifix at her neck bounces with her enthusiasm. A Tais headband frames eyes that glisten with nostalgia—‘I look at the three countries like this: Timor is Mum. Portugal is Godmother and Australia is adopted mother.’

She pauses and lets her generous smile spread.

'And I belong to each one of them in a different way.'

This year’s Venice Biennale attends to Adriano Pedrosa's curatorial theme of Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere. Madeira’s participation in the inaugural Timor-Leste pavilion—curated by Australia’s Natalie King OAM—is layered in its response to Pedrosa’s provocation.

Kiss and Don’t Tell, Madeira’s immersive, site-specific installation and performance for the Biennale, has its origins in the dark annals of Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste and the subaltern narrative of survival that stretches, under-accounted for, through the nation’s history and cultural identity.

Women accounted for 60 per cent of resistance cadres throughout Indonesia’s occupation, yet their representation in official accounts and their contemporary valorisation remains negligible.²

In the 22 years since independence, the collective identity of Timor-Leste has remained predominantly male-centric, perpetuating a narrative of national identity synonymous with the blood and suffering through a principally male lens, structurally bound to the common occurrence of post-war societies privileging a militarised masculinity.³ ‘The narrative is very male orientated’, Madeira confirms.

She stabs her hand along an imagined line.

'And then. It goes through. Every facet. Of Timorese society.
The women did so much for independence. Where is their story?
So, I said to myself: this needs to be spoken about.'

She composes herself before repeating a gesture of leaning into our conversation then swaying back, her body a metronome of memory accentuating particular words as she articulates. 

'And this is how Kiss and Don’t Tell came to be.
A lot of the women suffered.
A lot of the women offered their bodies
to stop the Indonesian military from killing as they thought,
If they could keep them (the Indonesian military) occupied then
They won’t be able to be killed…
They were made to put lipstick on.'

WEFT

In Timor-Leste, silence is many things, always in contrast to the din of daily life. Kiss and Don’t Tell is the poiesis of the portentous silence of suffering.

Studious in aesthetic and form, Kiss and Don't Tell sees multiple media—betel nut and earth—dissolve into the canvas, evoking more than their marks. Integrating a specific cultural materiality through her use of media, along with the Timorese woven textile, Tais, Madeira weaves tradition and nature through historical narrative, which reveals itself as a lattice of vision, vocation and valour.

‘I consider myself an artist of tradition. So I use my tradition to speak with a contemporary expression.’ She releases her smile again, the tips of her lips exclaim her enthusiasm.

‘The Timorese see the Tais as an extension of the country. It was such a plight just to save it. Like to save our Tetun.⁴ To save our children. The Tais was to save our family. Our culture. It’s our visual Lia nain.’⁵

The Tais holds more than the coloured cotton threads that constitute its form. In its weave, a connection between history, the roots and the routes of story (an oral tradition), family and kinship are held. Produced solely by women, the cultural representations woven into the Tais affirms existence and is an analogy for the country’s own tenacious survival. Its production during decades of oppression is indicative of some measure of finding sanctuary.

‘The accumulation of my identity is survival. It’s trying to survive. I’ve been a foreigner everywhere who hasn’t had a voice’, Madeira offers.

The still air is gently ruptured as Madeira’s loosely clenched hand begins flicking open and closed at her mouth. 

‘For my work, when I use my lips, I kiss the canvas. But, you know, I cut a little lip from the Tais and I stick it to the canvas. It becomes as important as my lipstick.’

Madeira’s decision to perform as part of her installation in Venice, where she will kiss the pavilion’s walls and sing traditional songs in Tetun, transposes her embodied protest of the spectral narrative of women in Timor-Leste’s resistance history into the exhibition space.

Madeira’s performance, practice and protest materialises from spaces of silence and resilience, shaped by experiences of political resistance. In a country where ritual often locks-step with performance, creative practices and cultural expression emerge across domestic, public, sacred, ceremonial and communal spaces. Art as a language of protest and a living through—not just an approximation to—life, underpins contemporary art in Timor-Leste.

Her performative gesture for Venice might allow the silences of women’s bodily occupation, abuse and trauma in Timor-Leste’s history to resonate beyond academic discourse; beyond legal commissions seeking truth and reconciliation; beyond obligatory, yet scantily attended to war crime tribunals; beyond the grave. To kiss and sing is a proposition that emerges from her own observation of the relationship between protest and art during and beyond occupation. 

With the 2024 Venice Biennale comes a pavilion for her pursuit and articulation of under-represented history, as much as it is a critically engaged space for her aesthetic and pedagogical threads to commune with an international audience. 

'While Timor was under occupation I used to go to a lot of protests. But I noticed… you go to a protest, then the news comes on and you see it for three seconds on the news and then it’s gone. But once I started doing exhibitions, there became longer conversations and I discovered that art was a more effective way to talk about Timor-Leste than it was to protest… The Tais continues speaking and storytelling. By allowing people to see then people can’t be silent anymore.'

She draws silence between our digital divide.

‘I can show you what I want to tell you. Now I can tell you want I want to show you’, Madeira’s lips smash the silence.