Curated by Suset Sanchez Sanchez. The slave trade ships that triangulated the Atlantic space to plot the expansionist enterprise through which Spain exercised dominion and colonial violence over Africa and Latin America, moved millions of black bodies from one continent to another.
As a result of this traffic in human beings, the griots arrived in the Caribbean, mostly male individuals who had an important social function in their original communities as storytellers, social mediators, transmitters of knowledge and collective memory.
The brutality of the uprooting imposed by colonialism on millions of transplanted lives, which constitute the so-called African diaspora, led to the invention of strategies of masking and survival through transcultural and syncretic practices in which the subaltern voice and ethno-racial resistance of Africans and Afro-descendants against white hegemony and power was expressed.
The images that this exhibition highlights from the Luciano Mendez Collection through the works of Jose Bedia, Moises Finale, Santiago Rodriguez Olazabal, Eduardo Roca (Choco), Manuel Mendive, Carlos Quintana, Roberto Chile, Ricardo Elias and Roberto Diago, explore that unavoidable presence of Africanness in the construction of the narratives of the Cuban nation, which is found in the spirituality and popular culture, in the complexity of Afro-Cuban religions and in the denunciation of racism that these artists express, recovering from the past the songs of the griots that coloniality could not silence.
Taken from Domusartium2002.com