UNTIL SUNDAY 8/12
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
The same image can be resignified depending on the time and context in which it is used.. It can have one meaning and its opposite, It may be the shameful proof of the most supremacist European colonialism (friend of decontextualizing, satirize and subvert otherness), or a call for equality in a combative anti-colonial environment marked by cultural and identity affirmation. George Specht and León Poirier were in charge of photographically and cinematographically documenting the raid Citroën's La Croisière Noire automobile that traveled 28.000 kilometers from northern to southern Africa in the 1970s 1920. One of the photographs they took froze the profile of Nobosudru with his characteristic headdress (a status marker), a Mangbetu woman from the Congo who became an icon of colonial Black Africa and saw her image reproduced in ethnographic archives, stamps, postal, “colonial exhibition” posters, propaganda, sculptures, tobacco packs and consumer products such as jewelry, anthropomorphic ashtrays or flower pots. The IVAM exhibition brings together eighty of these pieces from the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to review the powerful semantics that this stereotyped profile has had over the years., as part of an artwork by Carrie Mae Weems denouncing colonialism, inside the spanish magazine Chronicle of 1934 highlighting “the exoticism of black beauty” or like a character from the Marvel movie Black Panther. The same image can be resignified depending on the time and context in which it is used.. S.M.
