Teresa Kutala Firmino’s family history is a complex one, with both sets of her grandparents having fled civil war. Firmino was born to a Congolese father and an Angolan mother in 1993 in Pomfret, a town in the North West province of South Africa, where many of the former soldiers of the country’s 32 Battalion—a unit of the South African army founded in 1975 that fought in Angola—settled after the Angolan war. She tells the story of how her Congolese grandmother, while hiding out in the forest, having fled not just the war but also an abusive marriage, fell into a dreamlike trance in which she saw humanoid figures that were so tall she could not possibly see the tops of their heads. Many other women in Firmino’s childhood community have similar stories of these figures, whom they called “owners of the earth.”
Firmino’s work starts at the point where trauma begins to fracture reality, opening up the possibility for a plurality of worlds. The latest installment in an ongoing series, her exhibition “The Owners of the Earth Vol. 3: Owelema” was an extended attempt to give the dream image tangibility—a face, a form—using speculative fiction and fantasy to explore ideas of what the spectral beings of her grandmother’s lore might look like, who they might be. The characters in Firmino’s paintings, mostly women, radiate otherworldliness. They are strange and impractical, sometimes one-eyed or contorted in unlikely positions, reposing on clouds and falling from black skies, but they are always unquestionable presences dominating their settings, impossible fantastic spaces. One cannot help but think of Aimé Césaire’s assertion that the inferiority of myth is in the degree of its precision, but its superiority is in its richness and sincerity. Firmino reaches into the mythical plane of her forebears’ stories and creates an eclectic ensemble. In a direct reference to the reconstruction of identities that her grandparents had to undertake after escaping the conflict, Firmino uses collage to represent parts of the characters: eyes, fabric, jewels.
The show’s subtitle, “Owelema,” is an Umbundu term referring to a lack of light. The titles of the twenty paintings that were on display form a poem. Read together, two works in particular capture perfectly the spirit of Owelema. Both depict figures that can be interpreted as deities emerging from a pitch-black background. The one-eyed being in My subconscious cuddles you / For your touch is familiar (all works 2023) surveys three characters in a place that blurs the domestic and the wilderness. Two women recline facing away from this deity, calling to mind Firmino’s grandmother’s experience in the Congolese forest. The artist uses African masks for her protagonists’ faces, in particular the Congolese fertility mask, which evokes and takes seriously the survival strategies of her matrilineal ancestry’s histories and knowledge.
Your embrace is comfort / Your presence is home shows a being draped in a blue-bedazzled robe, seated cross-legged. The figure looks down, observing people suffering the many consequences of the war. One turns their head away, perhaps in despair or resignation, while another looks to the presiding being, as if to ask for salvation. Firmino’s work broods over a silenced and traumatic history whose aftermath is still very present, and it attempts to embody the madness of that history. It does not shy away from its long and difficult consequences but rather beautifully sinks into them and sits with the darkness.
