Manuela Moscoso is a curator, an editor, and a critical producer. She is the curator of the Eleventh Liverpool Biennial, 2021.
1
THE 11TH BERLIN BIENNALE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART (CURATED BY MARÍA BERRÍOS, RENATA CERVETTO, LISETTE LAGNADO, AND AGUSTÍN PÉREZ RUBIO)
The extraction economy has been operating for centuries, destroying soil, rivers, oceans, and forests, as well as the bodies—gendered and racialized—of people whose lives are deemed disposable. In different ways, the Covid-19 pandemic, the powerful protests demanding social change and antiracist action led by Black Lives Matter, and the horrific climatic events of recent months exposed the absolute existential urgency of changing our way of being in this world and of relating to one another. My selections for this list (presented in no particular order) all seem to respond to this urgency. The Eleventh Berlin Biennale carried out the vitally important work of amplifying the worldviews and experiences of dissident bodies, combatants against patriarchal and colonial violence, spiritual healers, and redistributors of affect and solidarity (including Teatro da Vertigem, Edgar Calel, Aline Baiana, and Museo de Imagens do Inconsciente, Rio de Janeiro). This well-crafted exhibition could not have expressed better the necessity of looking to other systems of thought, and other conceptions of being, to imagine abundant futures.
2
LAMIN FOFANA, DARKWATER (BLACK STUDIES)
In 2019, Sierra Leonean artist and musician Fofana released Black Metamorphosis, a record inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished manuscript about the Black experience in the West. Darkwater, the next installment in a planned trilogy, is a rich, dense record, a sonic reflection on W. E. B. Du Bois’s eponymous collection of essays and poems on white supremacy, colonialism, beauty, and capitalism, among other subjects. Fofana invites listeners to submerge themselves in a journey of history, movement, currents, and rhythms.
3
COLECTIVO LASTESIS, “UN VIOLADOR EN TU CAMINO”
By now we’ve all heard of Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in Your Path), famously performed in Chile by demonstrators on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in November 2019 and subsequently repeated around the world. Its title playing sardonically off an old slogan of Chile’s notorious federal police force (un amigo en tu camino, meaning “a friend in your path”), the piece, created by the collective Lastesis, is both a clear denunciation of systemic violence against women and a collective feminist enunciation that crosses all borders.
4
BLACK LIVES MATTER
The uprisings led by Black activists and protesters after George Floyd’s murder also resonated across borders, sparking global protests against the erasure of the atrocities of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism; against capitalism’s destruction of nature and its transformation of people into things that may be exploited and thrown away. BLM made the imperative clear: We must resist systemic violence. We must fight on multiple fronts.
5
DHAKA ART SUMMIT 2020 (CURATED BY DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT)
This year’s edition of the Dhaka Art Summit explored fault lines and interlocking tectonics within disparate practices, discourses, and histories—environmental, social, and geological, colonial and modern—through the work of artists, academics, activists, curators and others. There were more than five hundred practitioners involved (including Annalee Davis, Candice Lin, and Apnavi Makanji, to name a few), offering important perspectives from parts of the world still too often viewed as peripheral.
6
FRANCESC RUIZ (CENTRO DE ARTE DOS DE MAYO, MADRID)
Gathering works spanning twenty years, including monumental new commissions, this show illuminated Ruiz’s singular practice, which is dedicated to expanding the comic book’s aesthetic and political possibilities, mobilizing its capacity not only to tell stories but also to reveal the apparatuses through which identities are constructed.
7
“RAUPENIMMERSATTISM” (SAVVY CONTEMPORARY, BERLIN)
Transitioning from a small to midsize institution, SAVVY Contemporary has moved into a new building, a former casino. Its growth is great news for the city of Berlin. Directed by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, SAVVY understands exhibitions as a form of research, experimentation, and knowledge production that can encompass discussions, performances, publications, radio shows, and more. “RAUPENIMMERSATTISM,” the first show in their new space, surveyed practices concerned with growth and degrowth, the endless cycle of unsustainable consumption and the precarious labor that sustains it. I was especially impressed by the ephemerality and the poetics behind Yasmin Bassir’s clay objects and the fantastic 2016 podcast The Money Show, by Afropop Worldwide.
8
RADIO ALHARA (YAMAKAN.PLACE/PALESTINE/#)
During lockdown, I was fortunate to be introduced to Radio Alhara by artist Ayesha Hameed, who was part of a program with Simone Bertuzzi, Oceanvs Orientalis, the Funambulist, and other constructors of fantastic auditory universes. Broadcasting from Bethlehem and Ramallah, and inspired by Radio il Hai (Beirut) and Radio Alhuma (Tunis), Radio Alhara is a collectively run station-cum-project that invites listeners to stay tuned, to be surprised, and to become part of an incredible sonic community without borders.
9
YA NO ESTOY AQUÍ (FERNANDO FRIAS DE LA PARRA)
Set in 2011, Ya no estoy aquí (I’m No Longer Here) is a sort of bildungsroman that taps into music as knowledge. The film chronicles the journey of Ulises, a seventeen-year-old kid from Monterrey, Mexico, who spends his days hanging out with his friends and fellow gang members, dancing and listening to cumbia rebajada (essentially, a slowed-down version of traditional cumbia), until he is forced to leave Monterrey for New York. We should cast a critical eye on representations of class and race in movies about the marginalized. However, this film did not feel pretentious or condescending to me, and that is important.
10
“DEFIANT MUSES: DELPHINE SEYRIG AND THE FEMINIST VIDEO COLLECTIVES IN FRANCE IN THE 1970S AND 1980S” (MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA, MADRID; CURATED BY NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ AND GIOVANNA ZAPPERI)
Delphine Seyrig (1932–1990) is best known as an actor and a cofounder (together with activist video maker Carole Roussopoulos and translator Ioana Wieder) of the feminist collective Les Insoumuses (Defiant Muses), which emerged in the 1970s. Replete with media, videos, artworks, photographs, and archival documents from that decade and the one that followed, the exhibition deepened our knowledge of a relevant body of work made by a woman, as well as our understanding of an important facet of feminist history, which has much to teach us about the ongoing problematics of art, politics, and struggle today.
Co-organized with Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut, Villeneuve-d'Ascq, France, and the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, Paris.