Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo describes her work across photography, video, and performance as a preoccupation with creating “symbolic solutions and personal responses” to the history of violence against women. She sees her body as an archive of the forced displacement of people from Africa and Asia to Cuba. In her works, she often deals with violence against women and its effects and she questions the power systems underlying this violence. Her critique takes a personal perspective as a starting point. Resistance, struggle, family archive, mothers, Black women, négritude—these are the themes along which the artist’s profound work unfolds. Her performative works, many of them created in situ, are charged with the history and the energy of the places where they are made—often in countries that maintains large numbers of unprotected migrants in a state of limbo, most of whom are African. The boat, for example, that she towed in her performance Dibujo intercontinental [Intercontinental Drawing] at the Venice Biennial in 2017 represented her history, her ancestors, and the journey they were forced to take.

Reinventing memory and critically addressing the topic of the archive are fundamental for her research and a strategy to reclaiming identity and history for people who were denied the right to record their own history.