Kilomba Grada, unnatural history of destruction

Madrid,

Four years ago, at the premiere of the season in the Madrid galleries, the Nieves Fernández Gallery brought together the work of Ângela Ferreira, Rogelio López Cuenca and Grada Kilomba in an exhibition, “Pretérito Perfecto”, in which each of these artists investigated around different moments in history in different geographical contexts, such as Spain, Portugal, Mozambique or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fundamentally adopting approaches linked to postcolonialism, censorship and states of exception and defending the review of that past from positions contrary to hegemonic ones.

To the Lisbon-based Kilomba, established in Berlin, who for decades has used texts, interpretations, videos, soundscapes and scenic installations for these purposes, in accordance with a multiform process that she herself calls Performing Knowledgewe find it now in the Reina Sofía Museum, where the exhibition “Opera to a Black Venus. What would the ocean floor tell us tomorrow if it were emptied of water today?”, curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, brings together the largest selection of his works compiled so far in Spain.

Her production has stories as raw material and the mark of her style in her personal way of transmitting them: this Portuguese author is interested in what stories are told, how and by whom, and in this research the barriers between disciplines are diluted. His readings on the issues discussed are marked by philosophical or psychoanalytic perspectives, but these are always subsequent to investigative work in which he seeks to analyze the dominant systems of knowledge production and propose options for unlearning the mostly accepted narratives.

The title of this exhibition is the project that Kilomba has been developing for two years with the collaboration of the Reina Sofía and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden: he has imagined a futuristic scenario consisting of an arid landscape in which the disappearance of the sea has left the discovered traces of human existence; That is, for the artist, large bodies of water can be interpreted as a cemetery for the lives lost over the centuries, due to an infinite number of causes, most of them avoidable, such as the slave trade, colonialism, war, change. climate or forced migrations. In short, it wants to consider what messages could be extracted from the emptied oceans of a hypothetical future in relation to the societies that we are and that we were.

It is a large video installation that brings to the stage what is proposed as the first part of a contemporary opera starring a black Venus who lives, precisely, at the bottom of the ocean and who acts as an oracle of a series of messages linked to memory and resilience. She worked on its creation with artists of this genre from the outskirts of Lisbon, where she herself grew up: sopranos, contraltos, tenors, percussionists and ballet dancers. The latter develop before our eyes a hypnotic choreography that simulates taking place underwater, to the rhythm of a requiem for those who succumbed at sea, performed on the piano, and four hands, by Kilomba and his daughter.

Kilomba Stand. Opera to a Black Venus, 2024

The rest of the installations that are part of the tour also seem to take us under the sea and combine poetry with the use of materials such as fabric, burned wood, stone, sand and glass; With them Kilomba generates possible scenarios for the previous opera. Yeah 18 Verses (2022) is the cartography of a shipwreck from which we will hear powerful voices and instrumental sounds, Sounds of Water (2023) composes a poem that demands help with neon lights and Labyrinth (2024), a spatial textile installation, outlines dead-end paths towards a liberation from an unfortunate destiny. It also dates from this same year Compressed Time (2024), which consists of contrasting massive stones and polished black cubes and invites viewers to pause at the intersection of past injustices and future possibilities.

As for less recent works, the video installation has landed at the Reina Sofía A Word of Illusions (2017-2019), which transfers the myths of Narcissus, Oedipus and Antigone to a postcolonial era, linking them, respectively, with the politics of distortion and invisibility, violence and genocide, and the politics of memory and mourning; The Desire Project (2016), a three-channel video installation in which words become moving images, and percussion, a way of narrating (it was one of his first proposals where the texts became performative); and Table of Goods (2017), another installation integrated by land, sugar, coffee, cocoa and chocolate, in reference to the cycles of exploitation.

Kilomba exhibits at the Reina Sofía after presenting his work last spring in Inhotim (Minas Gerais, Brazil). The Boatan installation in the shape of a slave ship in which seventeen artists entered who, through dances and choirs, traced a history of the violence and fear suffered on those ships.