Quilombo

SALTS (CH) and Waza art center Lubumbashi (DR Congo), with Lago Mio Lugano artist residency (CH), are delighted to announce the coalition-based research project «Quilombo», comprising an exhibition, a three-month residency in two Swiss cities, and a catalog. «Quilombo» is presented in collaboration with Culturescapes 2021 Amazonia.

This project is developed out of a personal invitation between the Swiss-based institution SALTS and the Congo-based Waza art center, in order to collaborate, exchange, and learn from each other during a full year of co-programming and co-curation. The foundation for an intensive collaboration with the artists within the project «Quilombo» is laid in the partnership with the artist residency Lago Mio Lugano on the Swiss border with Italy.

Once synonymous with escape and resistance, ‹quilombo› today stands for a Brazilian settlement of African descent. Anthropologists and historians meanwhile have arrived at a new understanding of these rural communities, calling for a broader definition: Regardless of their specific history, quilombos share collective identities and notions, linking them to their African roots and making them fight common battles as people in DRC, Switzerland or anywhere else: against capitalism and racism, and for the equitable distribution of resources.

The project «Quilombo» attempts to build on the idea of a «Black Atlantic», coined by British-Guyanese historian and writer Paul Gilroy in 1993 as a «Counterculture of Modernity» in the relations between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Can we activate aesthetics sensitive to common concerns, taking advantage of the digital age’s challenges, particularly in the unexpected connectivity of our pandemic era? Social injustice has its roots in the history of exploitation of natural resources and human labor and continues to this day. How can this be undermined by an alternative reading of human relations between the three continents, imagining an ecology that empowers humanism and diversity?