Roselín Rodríguez Espinosa talks to Cuban artist Susana Pilar Delahante about her career and the work she presented at the 12th Berlin Biennale, which will be open until September 18, 2022. Read the full interview at C & Latin America.
Susana Pilar sees her body as an archive of the forced displacement of people from Africa and Asia to Cuba. Her performance works, often in-situ, are charged with the history of the place where they were made. In this interview, the artist talks about the empowerment and conflicts she faced with participating in the 12th Berlin Biennale.
C&AL: In your work you have gone through projects about affective and family memory, and early in your career you turned to performance as a way to present your body as an archive and force of these memories. If we consider a context like Cuba, where the politics of forgetting are systemic and define everyday life, the reinvention of memory and the archive is an important key, even more so in the case of an immigrant organism like yours. How have you developed that experience into your performance work?
Susana Pilar Delahante: The reinvention of memory and the archive are very important in my research and artistic practice, because some in power have erased the facts. My body, a descendant of immigrants forcibly displaced from Asia and Africa to Cuba, is my archive and memory. The oral histories of my family (since we were denied the right to write our History and today we are reclaiming those rights) are my textbook. My ancestors inhabit my body and I generate actions that reclaim who we are.
C&AL: How have you constructed your strategies to decolonize and depatriarchalize memory archives? How did these ideas end up becoming part of your artistic practice? Are there related words or ideas that guide you in this type of work?
SPD: I don’t know when it all started, I don’t remember. The only thing I know is that the “Archive” does not represent me in the same way as I see myself. I am not a number, neither I nor those who came before me. I realized that this reality, written by the same hand that erased my ancestors, was not mine and I had to look elsewhere for answers. And the elders arrived, with all the stories held in their hearts, and I learned that I come from the Congo and Sierra Leone; that a Chinese left Canton and ended up in Matanzas to become my great-grandfather; that we were not slaves but slaves; even more. Resistance, war, family archive, mother, black women, Negritude, are some of the words that direct me.
C&AL: Some of your recent works create a deep dialogue with the physical and architectural spaces in which they are exhibited and evoke the memories associated with those spaces. I am thinking about your interventions in the Venice Biennale (Dibujo intercontinental / Intercontinental Drawing, 2017) and in the Dakar Biennale (Historias negras / Black Stories, 2022). What are you interested in highlighting or highlighting with them? How does the historical charge of the place influence the conception of your pieces?
SPD: There are feedbacks between what I want to communicate, the context I’m in and the tools I use. Many of my performances are in-situ and are charged with the history and energy of the place where I make them. Cross-continental drawing and reterritorialization takes place in a country that holds large numbers of vulnerable migrants in a state of limbo, most of whom are African. The boat I am pulling is my heritage, my History, my ancestors, the journey they were forced to take… and the hairs I pull out represent displacement, displacement and involuntary uprooting. Black Stories takes place in a country from which my ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved, with no right of return. [. . .]
Read the 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, performance. Courtesy of Galleria Continua, San Gimignano.]
