Plantation Memories

A talk with celebrated interdisciplinary artist and author Grada Kilomba for the release of her groundbreaking book Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism, published by Capovolte Edizioni

Who can speak? What can we speak about? And what happens when we speak? These are some of the recurring questions that characterize Grada Kilomba's work. Her work interrogates contemporary subjectivities and her initial engagement with a rich body of psychoanalitic literature led to a consistent engagement with the ways in which spaces are occupied, made and reproduced across time via an artistic practice anchored in performance and storytelling.

In Turin, Grada Kilomba will be in conversation with Johanne Affricot, artistic director of SPAZIO GRIOT, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marcella Beccaria, director and chief curator of Castello di Rivoli respectively, for which the artist is producing a new work related to her latest work, O Barco | The Boat, presented at the BoCA Biennale in Lisbon, 2021 and MAAT.

Grada Kilomba

(b. 1968, Lisbon, Portugal) is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work draws on memory, trauma, gender and post-colonialism, interrogating concepts of knowledge, power and violence. Who can speak? What can we speak about? And what happens when we speak? are constant questions in Kilomba’s body of work, to revise post-colonial narratives. Kilomba subversively translates text into image, movement and installation, by giving body, voice and form to her own critical writing. Performance, staged reading, video, photography, publications and installation are a platform for Kilomba’s unique practice of storytelling, which intentionally disrupts the proverbial ‘white cube’ through a new and urgent decolonial language and imagery. Her work has been presented in major international events such as: La Biennale de Lubumbashi VI; 10. Berlin Biennale; Documenta 14, Kassel; 32. Bienal de São Paulo. Selected solo and group exhibitions include the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Bildmuseet, Umeå; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; The Power Plant, Toronto; Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin; MAAT-Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; Secession Museum, Vienna; Bozar Museum, Brussels; PAC-Pavillion Art Contemporanea, Milan, Palais de Tokio, Paris, Castello di Rivoli, Turing among others. Kilomba’s work features in public and private collections worldwide.