“No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place”.
Maya Angelou
“Antonio is constantly leaping through time and space, from continent to continent. Gravity should be conquered in order not to be in the same place during a whole lifetime, enabling him to start a new life elsewhere. His life accelerates, slows down, accelerates again, and slows down again”.
Rob Slooten
My gravitational Installations and Genographic projects addresses how immigration has become constitutive of the world today. These projects and installations explore mechanisms of power and violence inherent in the ongoing and open confrontation between different worlds. My installations also reveals how these abstract principles connect to the current political reality in the West on one hand, and on the other, to largely unresolved historical issues such as the colonial past.
As an artist the aim of my work is to create audiovisual storytelling, with installations and multimedia projects related to gravity, history, my African identity and the Diaspora, using interaction and reaction between different cultural groups internationally. My installations and videos address how immigration has become constitutive of the world today. These projects and installations explore mechanisms of power and violence inherent in the ongoing and open confrontation between different worlds.
I believe that Diaspora and gravity have a relation with each other. My projects give me the opportunity to explore with my body and all the gravitational elements that surround my life in new places and new environments. My work consists of multiple video screens with images and interviews, DNA maps, family photos, portraits, sounds, poems in different languages. Every image is linked to the place were my ancestors come from. They play as a whole with time and space. Reconnecting all this to the issue of my Diaspora. In some of my installations you see me jumping from my origins to different worlds, different dimensions in space and time.
This installations study my situation, study how I got here, and which elements were fundamental to bring me here. They also deal with transatlantic motivations, multimedia networks, as well as the urge to create an international collective memory. I see my installations and videos as the documentation of the contemporary black Atlantic, with the use of filmed portraits and photography. In the installations the photographs as well as the moving images build on imagery from poetic urban landscapes and ambient soundscapes of African origins in different parts of the world. My work poses questions concerning daily life, strategies of survival and presents thoughts on the new African identity as well as possibilities and ideas for cooperation with other artists and cultures.
My projects refer to exile identities and they bring together thoughts, ideas, experiences, dialogues of different people around the world. My new project Piertopolis is a rhizomatic network of piers, a pier never looks the same. The structure-like characteristics of the pier make one think of small meccano constructions, architectural fantasies and utopian landscapes in which the border between reality and illusion is blurred.
My project “The Day We Surrender to the Air” is based on sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of my DNA. The results of this DNA analysis help me form a genetic map that reveals the route my DNA covered through different continents over the past 200,000 years. “The Day We Surrender to the Air” also investigates the connection between migration, Diaspora and gravity.
The collective project State of L3 explores the installation as a medium for a documentary on transatlantic networks, the collective reflections on the Black Atlantic African world, the symbiosis that exists as people of African descent and their position in the contemporary society as well as the historic perspective and the colonial past of the countries of origin of the artists part of the collective. It is an artistic exploration of time and space in relation to society. The installation is a visualization of migration, gravity and Diaspora.
Antonio Jose Guzmanaka Akuaigar
S∅y Zero Gravity
MP3′s Interviews | Guzman | Radio Rietveld | Stedelijk Museum | Radio Netherlands Worldwide
Radio Rietveld One | Rietveld Two | Rietveld Three | L3 RNW (French) | L3 RNW (Portuguese)
