Artist Talk Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo

“ Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo is not an artist. She is a Cuban, black, not perfect, and mortal woman. Her art is only one disguise among many, she has managed to wear in order to be listened to and perceived in her human condition. It is just a pretext, a very well thought out strategy of seduction that allows her to disguise in order to move among the extremes, divide paradox, and then pass quickly from one side of antinomies to the other.

She is mainly a sagacious observer who carefully analyzes human behaviour as well as the basis that supports social relationships; a well prepared anthropologist in her science. Perhaps, this is why Susana´s works are always focused towards unsolved conflicts and take the form of investigations. In this research work she frequently positions herself as the subject in the experiment. I do not know if she is aware of it, but by doing this, Susana always walks upon a loose rope.

In her works Daughter of Yemén (2014), Confrontatión (2015) or El Tanque (2016) the artist investigates her race and gender conditions. She not only marks out herself as a socially conditioned being, susceptible to different forms of discrimination, maltreatments or sufferings but also actively integrates herself into a community whose members have experienced similar circumstances. In this sense she presents herself as a symbol of the collective consciousness of that group, an instrument of denunciation. She initiates forms of mediation, which can be symbolic in some cases, or become real as concrete collective actions, such as for example: the natural hair show organized for the 12th Havana Biennial called Lo llevamos rizo .”

Extract from the essay: ¨ Susana Pilar upon a loose rope, or, related the frightful consciousness from the distance among the extremes¨ by Blanca Victoria López, art critic and curator, Contemporary Art Center Wifredo Lam , Havana.