Curator Helio Menezes discusses Lélia Gonzalez’s enduring influence, the politics of diaspora, and why the exhibition refuses fixed borders in favour of movement, relation, and reinvention.
18 June 2026
‘Améfrica: Diasporic Connections in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection brings together artists from across Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Australia to explore the enduring cultural, political, and spiritual ties forged through the African diaspora. Curated by Helio Menezes and inspired by Afro-Brazilian thinker Lélia Gonzalez’s concept of amefricanidade, the exhibition proposes a vision of the Atlantic not as a site of separation, but of connection, exchange, and reinvention. Menezes speaks on curating beyond national borders, the complexities of diaspora, and the transformative potential of Black self-representation.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: The exhibition draws on Lélia Gonzalez’s idea of amefricanidad. How did this concept guide your curatorial approach, especially in moving beyond traditional geographic narratives?
Helio Menezes: The concept of amefricanity is both the theme and a methodology of thought for this exhibition. Amefricanity, in Lélia Gonzalez’s work, is a direct critique of colonial ways of organising territory, culture, and knowledge – and, by extension, we might add here, of ways of seeing and exhibiting artistic works. When Gonzalez proposes the term “Améfrica,” she displaces the European centrality embedded in the idea of “Latin America” and insists that the cultural formation of the Americas cannot be understood without the structural presence of African and Indigenous peoples. This had direct consequences for the curatorial approach. The exhibition is not organised according to national categories or linear chronologies. Instead, the focus lies in highlighting – and at times suggesting – relationships between works and artists based on shared experiences: displacement, cultural transmission, spirituality, community reorganisation, colonial memory, and the reinvention of everyday life.
For Gonzalez, amefricanity emerges from a profound recognition of colonial violence, racism, and slavery, but also from the radical capacity for reinvention produced by Black and Indigenous populations in the Americas. The exhibition seeks to operate within this tension.
‘Améfrica’ is structured as a relational, political, and aesthetic map. How did you balance these different layers when organising the five chapters?
I would say that the chapters function as moments of focus, in which the exhibition frames a relevant theme or question and devotes greater conceptual density to it. But the central issue of amefricanity spreads throughout and traverses the entire exhibition.
The political dimension appears both in the themes of the works and in the exhibition choices themselves. There is a deliberate refusal to organise the narrative by countries, techniques, or through a linear and progressive notion of history. There is also constant attention to colonial continuities present in themes such as labour, migration, spirituality, and representation.
At the same time, the exhibition depends greatly on the formal relationships between works: affinities of scale, materiality, composition, use of the body, photography, fabric, orality, archive… these are intrinsic dimensions of the works that guide proximities and emphasise relationships between them. In many cases, artists from very different contexts and periods share similar visual solutions for dealing with related themes or investigations.
The chapters also do not function in a rigid way; a work may simultaneously dialogue with more than one section. This was important because the very idea of amefricanity, in Gonzalez’s thought, presupposes constant circulation and transformation.
The exhibition features artists from over 30 countries and across multiple generations. How did you maintain depth and specificity within such a broad scope?
The main concern was to avoid turning the diaspora into a homogeneous category. The solution was not to attempt to represent “everything,” but rather to construct precise relationships and highlight key issues that emerge within the research practices of different artists in the collection. The interest lay precisely in the internal differences within the diaspora and in the specific ways artists deal with colonialism, memory, spirituality, territory, or racialization in their own contexts.
The selection of works was also not guided by the criteria of national representation. Each work entered the exhibition because it helped clarify an important issue related to the idea of amefricanity, or because it established compelling relationships with a broader set of works in dialogue. The presence of different generations also helps complicate the narrative. Some historical works reveal structural problems that remain active; others show interesting shifts in modes of representation, political debates, and formal strategies employed by artists.
The Adaptation chapter looks at movement across the Atlantic. How do these works challenge dominant ideas of migration as only rupture or loss?
Many narratives about Atlantic displacement emphasise violence, loss, and uprootedness. These dimensions are unavoidable, especially in the context of slavery and the transatlantic trade. But the section also attempts to show how Black populations in the diaspora produced complex forms of cultural continuity despite – and against – violence.
In the “Calunga grande” that gives the Atlantic its name, the Bakongo cosmogram and other circular forms of territorial-spiritual organisation matter more than the lines that define countries on maps. This formulation was important because it shifts the modern notion of territory as something fixed and national, instead understanding the Atlantic as a space of human, material, and spiritual circulation. Some works address commodities, waste, raw materials, and objects that crossed colonial routes and continue to structure contemporary inequalities.
In the Resistance section, the figure of the “madre negra” is central. How did you approach this idea without reinforcing stereotypes about Black women?
The figure of the “Black mother” appears in Lélia Gonzalez’s work in a complex way, simultaneously appropriated by Brazilian national narratives and erased as a political and intellectual subject.
Gonzalez, as one of the artists included in this chapter, completely displaces the idealised image of the wet nurse or the docile nanny constructed by the colonial imagination. As the author wrote:
“It is interesting to observe how, through the figure of the ‘Black mother,’ truth emerges through misunderstanding. It is precisely this figure who performs the maternal function. It is she who Africanizes the Portuguese spoken in Brazil. And in doing so, she Africanizes the white Brazilian. Consequently, it is she who trips up the dominant race.”
It was therefore essential to avoid any romanticisation of Black motherhood in the exhibition. The section does not treat motherhood as a feminine essence or as a natural vocation for care. What appears in the works is motherhood as a territory marked by colonial violence (as in the works of Rosana Paulino), exploitation of reproductive labour, but also by the transmission of memory, community reorganisation, affection, and everyday resistance.
Reinterpretation focuses on spirituality and ritual. How do these works question Western ways of understanding knowledge in art?
Many works in this section express how artists reject separations typical of modern Western thought: art/ritual, body/knowledge, matter/spirituality. Several artists engage spiritual practices as effective ways of producing memory and knowledge, developing works grounded in relationships of proximity and lived experience within Afro-religious contexts.
This also transforms the relationship to the artistic object itself. At the same time, it was important to avoid an exoticising reading of these practices. Many works show precisely how these cosmologies continue to produce critical thought about ecology, the body, violence, and territory in the present. They are living schools of thought and of linguistic creation.
The exhibition places historical and contemporary artists in dialogue. What kinds of connections or tensions were you hoping to highlight through this?
The interest of this exhibition, in emphasising the idea of amefricanity, lies in perceiving continuities and transformations of certain historical and visual problems across the horizon of interests and practices of various African and Afro-diasporic artists.
Many issues present in contemporary artists (racial violence, historical erasure, spirituality, self-representation, colonialism) already appeared in artists of previous generations, although formulated differently. Placing these works in dialogue makes it possible to perceive continuities, and the CAAC exhibition space – divided into galleries of different sizes, all connected by a large central corridor – allowed me to deepen a particular issue more intimately in each gallery, like islands within a broader Afro-Atlantic archipelago. In this way, the specificities of each artist’s research and language gain prominence within the larger whole.
Amefricanas centres Black women’s self-representation. How does this section shift the way we think about the gaze and representation today?
This section begins from a very concrete historical issue: in the history of Western visual culture, Black people were systematically represented through external gazes, often shaped by colonial perspectives that reproduced a range of stereotypes, from sexualization to anonymity. The artists in this section create portraits (and some self-portraits) that, in proximity to one another, allow us to see other regimes of visual (self-)representation in art.
There is also an important relationship with Lélia Gonzalez’s thought regarding the historical production of racial and gender stereotypes in the Americas. Gonzalez demonstrates how Black women were frequently reduced to categories such as the “mulata” or the “domestic worker,” always defined through social functions imposed by racism. Many artists in this section respond precisely to this history of framing by producing images that refuse simplification or typification. In doing so, they provide a powerful visual redefinition of portraiture as a genre from a Black perspective.
This exhibition is on view at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain, until 10 January 2027.
