Bare-Faced

Bare-Faced was created in 2011 as a collaboration between Sammy Baloji and Lázara Rosell Albear for TRANCEMEDIAMIX, a project by Corban (now Videolepsia) where Walter Verdin brought together artists from different backgrounds and disciplines. The two searched for a common personal history and followed Congo’s central African culture to Cuba on the tracks of inherited religious practices, in which trance plays an important role. The work breaks open ossified cultural attributions made during the long history of racist constructions.

Bare-Faced is an installation, documentation, concert, and performance. The video work is based on a performance that similar to a boxing match is divided into six rounds and makes numerous references to other works by Baloji. In an interview, Maarten Couttenier, anthropologist and historian at the Royal Museum for Central Africa Tervuren, Belgium, first speaks about the absence of the history of King Lusinga in the permanent exhibition, a chief who was beheaded by the colonizers. His skull was brought to Belgium as a trophy on behalf of Leopold II and is today included in the collection of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. In an earlier work, Baloji had taken photographs of the skull in the style of 19th-century anthropological (race-theoretical) measurements. In further rounds, Rosell Albear’s body becomes the projection screen for colonial images, her mother talks about the Afro-Cuban religious practices of her grandparents, a male voice relates racist experiences in Brazil and the attempt of Afro-Brazilians to grasp their blackness with new terms.