Contra la raza [Against Race]

Matadero Madrid presents Contra la raza [Against Race] within the framework of PHotoESPAÑA 2021. Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of The Showroom, London, Contra la raza [Against Race] is a multidisciplinary initiative incorporating a video-based installation and live programme focusing on futuristic imaginaries expressed through poetics of the black experience that generate forms of global and egalitarian humanism.

Matadero’s Nave 0 will host a multimedia installation of Relic Traveller by Larry Achiampong, alongside a group screening loop of 18 audiovisual works by artists Romane Anderson, Rubén H. Bermúdez, Sally Fenaux, Amartey Golding, Jérôme Havre, Julianknxx, Katia Kameli, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Grada Kilomba, Mónica de Miranda, Nástio Mosquito, Paulo Nazareth, Heidi Ramírez, Sara Sadik, Berni Searle, Cauleen Smith, Camille Turner and Belinda Zhawi. This group of international artists all explore ideas of identity politics from a geopoetic perspective—from the individual to the collective, the domestic to the spectacular. On Tuesdays to Thursdays a four-hour screening will play whilst on weekends this programme will loop twice, creating more possibilities for viewing, listening and making connections. 

Contra la raza [Against Race] is a platform questioning how imagery in audiovisual formats communicates a global Black and Pan-Africanist perspective. It is inspired by the eponymous book by British historian Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000), which addresses the fundamental role played by anticolonial and antiracist movements in both the historical and contemporary struggle for human rights. Avoiding a single linear narrative that transcends pre-established limits and ideas in terms of how race, identity or territory is conceived, this exhibition primarily uses moving images to tell a multiplicity of stories that create a constellation of personal, historical, real and imagined scenarios in which different narratives concerning blackness will generate a common liminal space based on different notions of solidarity.

Larry Achiampong’s solo presentation from the Relic Traveller series serves as both a physical platform and a speculative landscape for Contra la raza  [Against Race], centring multidisciplinary approaches in telling decolonial narratives about identity, migration, technology and imagination. Through two videos—the first in the series, Relic 0 (2017), and the most recent Reliquary 2 (2020) composed in direct response to the artist and his children’s enforced period of separation during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. These bookending videos are activated by paraphernalia, conceptual imagery illustrated by Wumi Olakisibian and fabrications from the second series of The Pan African Flags For The Relic Travellers’ Alliance, setting the stage for an immersive call and response between colonial ghosts to future progeny. With this agency in mind, Contra la raza [Against Race] seeks to provide a space to cross time zones, geographic borders and ancestral generations—a call to action in order to foster a communal understanding of what cross-culturalism means today.

From October 26 to 30, Matadero will host a live programme of screenings, talks, performances and live music; a video art programme curated by Associação Cultural Videobrasil; and a film series in collaboration with Cineteca Madrid and the Locarno Film Festival. Amongst the unique screening events is Taxidermies of the Future curated by Paula Nascimento and Bruno Leitão which brings together works by three multimedia artists, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Grada Kilomba and Mónica de Miranda.

Contra la raza [Against Race] is curated in collaboration with The Showroom, London, with co-curator Katherine Finerty, and supported by Raúl Muñoz de la Vega. It is presented at Matadero Madrid with partners Cineteca Madrid, Associação Cultural Videobrasil and Taxidermy of The Future.