Día de la Liberación Africana
Africa Liberation Day
2025
Program
Conciencia Afro + La Casa Encendida
Curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa y Julia Castelló
Part of ¿Adónde iré yo que no te lleve? + 25 Años de Generaciones
Conciencia Afro:
Yeison F. García López
Moha Gerehou
Rubén H. Bermúdez
Lucía Mbomío
Marisol Saelo
Esther Mayoko
Sara Bourehiyi
Ana Bibang
Zira Rivera Matos
Multidisciplinary artist Agnes Essonti Luque—winner of Generaciones 2024—explores themes connected to her Afro-Spanish identity. Her work makes visible the complexities of cultural and personal belonging through various forms, including text, textiles, installation, performance, food, and video.
For Where Will I Go That You Are Not There?, Essonti Luque joins forces with the Conciencia Afro space to rethink Africa Day: What does an Africa Day look like? What do we celebrate, and how? What should this celebration include? These are some of the questions the artist raises as she proposes a day of activations around this commemorative date.
Also known as African Liberation Day, the celebration was first promoted in 1958 in Accra, Ghana, at Kwame Nkrumah’s initiative, to address decolonization and the rights of African people. Thus, the series of actions curated by Essonti Luque will revisit the connection between a date that originated on the continent and the Pan-Africanist movements that developed across the diaspora, with the idea of returning home.
In the artist’s words: “Returning home, returning to Africa, returning to La Casa Encendida, returning to Espacio Afro… but also returning to oneself, bearing in mind that many of us do not have a single place we can call home.”
Ángel Calvo Ulloa and Julia Castelló
For the event, I curated 4 different activities through the day:
- A ritual welcome to introduce the day/journey back home in which I also opened up about my artistic practice and the idea of generosity.
- A community lunch cooked by Mayra (Mi Cocina Africana) that included a yam porridge and bissap (hibiscus flower drink).
- A talk on intergenerational practices with Rubén H. Bermúdez, author of “And you, why are you black?” and “A todos nos gusta el plátano”.
- A dj set by Oumoukala in which I asked them to work with different sounds of Africa and the diaspora that connect to ideas that bring us together apart from being black: gender, class and migration.