Sometimes, a dazzling artistic adventure is based on the impossibility of realizing a previous idea. This is what João Pinharanda (Mozambique, 1957), director of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) from Portugal, when he evokes the seed of the new exhibition on African diasporas called Black ancient futures (former future blacks). Under his management, they wanted to bring the facility to Lisbon Chain reaction (chain reaction), by the American artist Nick Cave (Missouri, 1959), which speaks of the desperation of a community, with the reproduction of the head of George Floyd, murdered by an officer in an act of police brutality in 2020, but They gave up because of the costs. Renouncing the consecrated members of the international black contestation led them to bet on another generation of artists… And discover different creative responses to the current events that are projected, with fluidity as a hallmark of the present.
Curated by Camila Maissune and Pinharanda himself, the collective Black ancient futures —which opened on September 19 at the MAAT in Lisbon— is, therefore, built on the manifestations of a dozen visual artists from African countries or the diasporas of Brazil, the Antilles and Europe, who were mostly born in the decades of the eighties and nineties, and narrate new imaginaries of blackness and the continuity of mestizaje, in the shadow of the long experiences of emigration, exile or slavery of their ancestors.
Among all the subjective, creative and social intersections that come together in this generation, the fluidity of genders and identities stands out, between one’s own biographies and ancestral experiences. Thus, Jota Mombaça (Natal, Brazil, 1991), Jeannette Ehlers (Trinidad and Tobago, 1973), Evan Ifekoya (Nigeria, 1988), Sandra Mujinga (Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, 1989), April Bey (Bahamas, 1987), Gabriel Massan (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1996), Baloji (Lubumbashi, DRC, 1978), Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, 1979), Nolan Oswald Dennis (Zambia, 1988), Tabita Rezaire (Paris, France, 1989 ) and Lungiswa Gqunta (Gqeberha, South Africa, 1990) expand through the rooms of the remodeled building of the old power plant, with fewer explicit discourses and without so many dividing edges, in interdisciplinary works, some highlighted in major world exhibitions, and others created specifically for the Lisbon space.
For the management of a large contemporary art space like the MAAT, located at the original confluence (geographical and historical) of a good part of the colonial expeditions that sustained the slavery industry, approaching the Afro-descendant collective entails, in addition to due recognition, a change in the composition of the museum’s public, as Pinharanda points out.
“The idea was not to forget the historical wound that was always there,” says Maissune. He explains it as a way to access some of the “knowledge and spirituality” with which Africa can contribute to “healing” (not only through mythologies, but also with works of science fiction and Afrofuturism) and stop thinking about that continent as “explorers”, or in terms of “what is missing”.
Were we the same before the Atlantic?
The tour of the exhibition—which will be open to the public until March 17, 2025—can begin, precisely, with The welcome, part of Resonant Frequencies, one of the works of Evan Ifekoya (a non-binary artist present this year at the Venice Biennale), talking about water, specifically the abundance of the Atlantic Ocean, with all the wealth and well-being that this resource brings and, paradoxically, with the symbolic shadows of those who were forced to cross it, due to the unscrupulous ambition of others. “Who were we before this breakup?” he asks.
In front of one of his installations in this exhibition, made of a large octagonal container containing water (nothing less than “cleansing and letting go”), Ifekoya says “look back to think about the future.” In this work, he has drawn the space on the geometric patterns of nature and the wisdom of his ancestors, in environments that may allude to Yoruba rituals, for example, but that also speak of “the projection or that in which we could reach convert us.” Author Octavia Butler resonates among the voices that help her imagine other worlds.
Approaching the Afro-descendant group entails, in addition to due recognition, a change in the composition of the museum’s public.”
João Pinharanda, director of MAAT Lisbon
There is also fluidity, in this case, between play and political reflection, in Gabriel Massan, another artist queer which tests the adult viewer in a room where you have to take off your shoes to live inside a multimedia fantasy of stuffed sculptures – full of eyes, spores or wounds – and devices for remote play, but which takes itself very seriously inequality in Latin America and the responsibility that each person must assume in decisions about their habitat. The screens of Third world: the bottom dimensioncreated by a mostly Brazilian programming team, reproduce digital rivers, with waterfalls through which everything slides, within a world that is sometimes lilac, and at other times, a devastated land.
At each layer of the interactive game—a commission from the Serpentine Gallery of London—the difficulties can increase, as happens with the levels of toxicity (prejudice and violence) of everyday predators, while you are “aware that you are being observed,” in the words of Massan, who cites the feminist, black perspective as inspiration and anticolonial of the philosopher Denise Ferreira Da Silva.
The notion of continuity between the earth and one’s own body is also present in His Sangue É Terra que Ninguém Pisa by Jota Mombaça, a Brazilian trans creator who has recorded her burials as poetic rituals that allow her to “return home” after emigration: “We are made of the same materials” as the soil, she explains. Mombaça states: “Europe is becoming increasingly harsh towards immigrants, but our territories of origin also practice this colonial violence”; hence she sought to “imagine a form of return that was not to a nation state, but rather to return to the land and try to relate to it.”
In his video art piece, he finds something nourishing in the act of burying himself, while denouncing the expulsions of native peoples and detailing his explorations of different continuities that transcend the mundane and the human, because “the earth will not ask me what it is.” my gender”, he ditches.
Hair and barbed wire policies
The continuity of bodies is also evident in the work of Sandra Mujinga, in her series And my body carried all of youwith sculptures made of large metal and textile casings, which could be skeletons and torn skin of something that perhaps breathes. A concept also present in reflections on the inheritance of physical features and policies on Afro hair, according to Jeannete Ehlers. This artist afropea proposes a work within MAAT Central and a performance live, We’re magic, we’re realon the exterior walls of the museum, with the choreography of three people united (or trapped) by their braids to the building itself, which highlight the intersection of lineage with new identities and demands.
“Other ways of learning from the ancestors” and going “with them” are captured in the imposing installation Sleep in Witness, by Lingiswa Gqunta, in which the fluidity between the dream and wakefulness stands out, since she is a “sleeping witness” of a dream in which the living and the dead occupy the same time and space. Clay plateaus on which rise, like blue waves, meters of coiled and lined barbed wire, but which are still sharp, like those of prisons, borders or the fences of neighborhoods fearful of their neighbors.
“Europe is becoming increasingly harsher towards immigrants, but our territories of origin also practice this colonial violence.”
Jota Mombaça, Brazilian trans creator
However, here and there there are reassuring objects such as crystalline stones (reminiscent of a story by Ursula K. Le Guin) or old family photos on a South African beach, whose sociopolitical context is not intuited in the joy of those portrayed next to the ocean. . The ancestors of dreams may share that desire for “our systems of knowledge” to exist beyond the galleries and institutional academic spaces, of which Gqunta speaks. “I have an oral history and references made from stories and songs that are as important as quoting someone,” according to a “Western European method of knowledge production,” indicates the artist.
Finally, probably the most enjoyable and reflective part of the great exhibition are the audiovisual pieces by the multifaceted Congolese artist Baloji. He talks about love and its mirages in Altar/Peu de chagrin (Altar/ a little sorrow), but also of contemporary anxieties linked to digital technology, while drawing a sarcastic portrait of the protagonists of neocolonial inequalities on the continent, in Blue of Night (night blue).
Stilt-walking characters and traditional masks emerge among wreaths of flowers, banana leaves and ubiquitous plastic containers from the North: everything is used in the styling of its audiovisual pieces in an absolutely captivating and innovative way. The Congolese artist invites us to dance to very good music—also composed by him—in a universe of conceptual Afrofantasy, both glamorous and realistic, with the background landscape of any dirt street littered with garbage in Kinshasa.
In short, new generations of artists lay out bridges between mythology and ecology, positivist knowledge and ancestral spirituality, traditional art and futuristic narratives, with a view to the unknown contemporary continent that is, in reality, Africa. Against prejudice.
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