Settlement

CARLOS MARTIEL, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1989, uses performance as a language to highlight the legal, symbolic and everyday violence that operates on racialized people. His work is characterized by a profound reflection on blackness within the framework of the Western colonial project, confronting nudity, slavery and the public exhibition of the black body as references that take up the structures that guide racial subjugation. Settlement (2012) is a performance in which the artist addresses what historian Manning Marable has conceptualized as global apartheid, engaging in a cross-border solidarity that alludes to the permanent sense of non-place experienced by blacks within neoliberalism. As the title suggests, the work points to the racial implications in the establishment of current migration policies, which testify to the perpetuation of unequal guarantees of life, safety and housing for immigrants from the Global South.