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Artist Grada Kilomba brings installation about slavery to Lisbon

Artist Grada Kilomba will open the fall exhibition season at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon with "The Boat", the first large-scale performance installation by the Portuguese artist living in Berlin, Germany.

: Lusa
Lusa  

Besides the artist, with origins in São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola, the new programming of the museum, located in Belém, includes the installation "Dia", by Carsten Höller, and the new public programs "Meditations 7,83 Hz", curated by Mariana Pestana, and "Vulnerable Beings", curated by Andrea Bagnato and Ivan L. Munuera.

"The Boat/The Boat," which addresses the history of slavery and the heritage of Afro-descendant communities, is an installation that extends across the museum campus, along the Tagus bank, forming a boat-shaped "memory garden," recalling forgotten histories and identities, and will open on September 3.

This installation by artist Grada Kilomba is composed of 140 blocks, which form the silhouette of the bottom of a ship and minutely draw the space created to accommodate the bodies of millions of Africans, enslaved by European empires.

"In the Western imagination, a boat is easily associated with glory, freedom and maritime expansion, described as 'Discoveries,'" but in the artist's vision, a continent with millions of people cannot be discovered, "nor can one of humanity's longest and most horrific chapters - slavery - be erased," the museum points out in a note about the programming.

This first large-scale installation by Grada Kilomba, stretching over a 32-meter length next to the Tagus, invites the public to enter a memory garden, where poems have been inscribed on blocks of burnt wood, recalling forgotten histories and identities.

"What stories are told? Where are they told? How are they told? And told by whom?", are questions that the artist intends to ask visitors who enter this installation.

Grada Kilomba inaugurates this work with a performance in three acts, in which several generations of the Afro-descendant communities are the central performers.

With musical production by Kalaf Epalanga, "O Barco"/"The Boat" becomes "a place of recognition, a garden of memory and contemplation of the future.

Commissioned by BoCA - Biennial of Contemporary Art, this project will be presented at the MAAT Square, in front of the Central Station, between September 3 and October 17, 2021, in a partnership with the Lisbon City Hall, in the scope of Lisboa na Rua'21.

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