Roselín Rodríguez Espinosa speaks with Cuban artist Susana Pilar Delahante about her profession and the work she introduced on the twelfth Berlin Biennale, which shall be open by September 18, 2022. Learn full interview at C& América Latina.
Susana Pilar sees her physique as an archive of the compelled displacement of individuals from Africa and Asia to Cuba. Her performative works, typically in-situ, are charged with the historical past of the place the place they’re made. On this interview, the artist talks about empowerment and the conflicts she confronted together with her participation within the twelfth Berlin Biennale.
C&AL: In your work, you’ve got gone by initiatives on affective and household reminiscence, and firstly of your profession you turned to efficiency as a solution to current your personal physique as an archive and because the power of these reminiscences. If we consider a context like Cuba, the place the insurance policies of forgetting are systematic and decide day by day life, reinventing reminiscence and the archive is a crucial key, much more so within the case of a migrant physique like yours. How have you ever developed that have in your work with efficiency?
Susana Pilar Delahante: Reinventing reminiscence and the archive are tremendous necessary in my analysis and inventive apply as a result of some in energy have erased the details. My physique, a descendant of forcibly displaced migrants from Asia and Africa to Cuba, is my archive and my reminiscence. My household’s oral narratives (since we had been denied the proper to jot down our Historical past and as we speak we’re reclaiming these rights) are my textbook. My ancestors inhabit my physique and I generate actions that reclaim what we’re.
C&AL: How have you ever been constructing your personal methods to decolonize and depatriarchalize reminiscence archives? How did these concepts find yourself forming a part of your inventive apply? Are there phrases or associated concepts that information you in this kind of work?
SPD: I don’t know at what level it began, I don’t keep in mind. All I do know is that the “Archive” doesn’t characterize me in the identical approach that I see myself. I’m not a quantity, not I, nor those that got here earlier than me. I understood that this actuality, written by the identical hand that erased my ancestors, was not mine and I needed to search for solutions elsewhere. And the elders arrived, with all of the tales stored of their hearts, and I realized that I come from Congo and Sierra Leone; {that a} Chinese language man left Canton and ended up in Matanzas to turn into my great-great-grandfather; that we weren’t slaves however enslaved; and way more. Resistance, wrestle, household archive, moms, Black girls, Negritude, are a few of the phrases that information me.
C&AL: A few of your current works set up an incisive dialogue with the bodily and architectural areas the place they’re on show and enchantment to reminiscences related to these areas. I’m pondering of your interventions on the Venice Biennale (Dibujo intercontinental /Intercontinental Drawing, 2017) and on the Dakar Biennale (Historias negras / Black Tales, 2022). What had been you interested by highlighting or underscoring with these? How does the historic burden of the place have an effect on the conception of your items?
SPD: There may be suggestions between what I need to talk, the context wherein I’m and the instruments I take advantage of. Lots of my performances are in-situ and are charged with the Historical past and the power of the place the place I make them. Intercontinental Drawing and Re-territorialization happen in a rustic that maintains massive numbers of unprotected migrants in a state of limbo, most of whom are African. The boat I’m towing is my heritage, my Historical past, my ancestors, the journey they had been compelled to take… and the hairs that I pull out characterize involuntary displacement, dislocation and uprooting. Black Tales takes place in a rustic from which my ancestors had been kidnapped and enslaved, with no proper to return. [. . .]
Learn full interview at https://amlatina.contemporaryand.com/editorial/susana-pilar-reclaiming-space-through-performance/
[Photo above by Marnix van den Berg: Susana Pilar’s “Dibujo intercontinental [Intercontinental Drawing],” 2017, efficiency. Courtesy of Galleria Continua, San Gimigniano.]