TERESA KUTALA FIRMINO: Owners of the Earth II: Beyond victims, villains and vixens

Deep in the forests of the fantasy of womanhood lives the lore of lineage. Inherited through the discoveries made possible by one’s disappearance into the older, and into the other, as the swells summoned by committing to remembering clear a path for those who dare.

Teresa Kutala Firmino re-revisits her origins, reviving and even challenging her initial learnings in volume two of Owners of the Earth: Beyond victims, villains & vixens. Grounded in her legacy as a descendant of former 32 Battalion soldiers and their families, since designated to Pomfret (in the North West province of South Africa), Kutala Firmino delves into the direct and interconnected consequences of the markers and makings of her identity: the physical, the historically fabricated and socially sustained – and their effects – with a vengeance. She digs deeper into themes of shared trauma; sexism; community-culture; womanhood; motherhood and what happens when, in the hopes of survival, Black assimilation to colonial religion and ideology creates a subset of belief systems encoded with the truths of an already complicated and shared history. A history stored and explored through the life of the artist’s body and, now, a history re-evaluated (as it will be again and again in both Owners of the Earth volumes to follow) by her revelations, and articulated as her mixed media creations and performances.

Prefixing the artist’s investigation and the title’s archetypes – and subsequent associations – with ‘beyond’ was intentional in emphasising the surging spirituality that drives her, while also removing the limitations hindering the ongoing process of the series’ purpose of relentless uncovering. Including the artist, every woman in Kutala Firmino’s family has been called a ‘witch’, the ever-evolving idea upon which any issue with an outspoken, independent, curious and questioning woman was cast.

The concept of time, as it engages here with meaning-making, identity formations and inherited beliefs, gave insight to the artist. This is especially through synonymous occurrences across the experiences of the women in her community, and the surfacing connections made to the modern ‘demonisation’ of women, using terms such as whore or bitch to equate to the same oppressive conditioning tactics still enacted on Black women in society today.

Kutala Firmino has also tasked herself with the duty of space-making for another world where the summation of her bloodline can be held, in order for the artist herself to behold. It is here where the painting begins. Where the transmissions are downloaded and decoded and drawn. Where the audience is ushered in, to connect, too, to the presence of the women before her.

Considering her own motherhood, and what she has realised that her body can endure, and the plane that exists as pain’s place, Kutala Firmino adds dimension(s) to notions of being in commune: with each other, with the beyond, and with oneself. Through this volume of Owners of the Earth the artist endeavours also to understand the body’s ability to capture, as an artist would, and as a haunted room can, the impressions of the past. Multiplicity, malleability and matrilineality meet to make the magic required for Kutala Firmino’s work to go forth, and for the artist’s desires of expression, liberation and healing to become more than a possibility.

Misha Krynauw

CLICK HERE TO REQUEST A PORTFOLIO

ARTIST WALKABOUT 11.00 SATURDAY 18^TH FEB

Installation images by Michael Hall