Artists: Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo in conversation with Bettina Spoerr

The black dome of the Secession attracted everyone's attention in June 2024. The work, entitled Statement, was a highly visible symbol of the dignity of black women. It was part of the exhibition Achievement by Cuban artist Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, whose work articulates feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial counter-visions, highlighting the achievements of black women and advocating a form of healing. In this conversation with Bettina Spoerr, recorded on 21 June 2024, the artist talks about how she fell in love with the golden dome of the Secession and was inspired to activate the architecture.

 

Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo

Achievement

21.6. – 8.9.2024

 

The reinvention of memory and the critical engagement with archives are central to Delahante Matienzo’s research and a strategy that lets her recover the identities and legacies of people who were denied the right to record their own histories. As a Cuban-born artist with African and Chinese roots, she knows from her own family’s experience that, for the longest time, oral traditions were the only available sources on which to draw for one’s lineage and heritage. In Achievement, she presents a fictional and speculative archive that features Black women as prominent, affluent, and esteemed members of society and as hardworking and self-determined businesswomen. In so doing, she not only undertakes a critique of history, she also takes a vital step toward a more nuanced consideration—ultimately, a reprogramming—of beliefs that have seemed impossible to dislodge. Defying the colonial gaze, the artist charts assertive alternative representations.

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Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, born 1984 in Havana, Cuba, has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 2021. She describes her work across photography, video, and performance as a preoccupation with creating “symbolic solutions and personal responses” to the history of violence against women. She sees her body as an archive of the forced displacement of people from Africa and Asia to Cuba. Her critical works take a personal perspective as a starting point. Resistance, struggle, family archive, mothers, Black women, Negritude - these are the themes along which the artist’s profound work unfolds.

 

Collaborating in close dialogue with artists to conceive and realise exhibitions together, and reflecting on the impact contemporary art can have on our society are key to Bettina Spörr’s practice as a curator and writer. Recent collaborations include Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo and her spectacular intervention on the Secession’s golden dome (2024), or the Secession exhibition of Delaine Le Bas (2023) for which the artist has been nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize.

 

Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.

Programmed by the board of the Secession

The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.

 

Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard

Editor: Paul Macheck

Production: Bettina Spörr