In celebration of Black History Month 2025, There’s Always More, Dr. Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet will deliver a lecture about his current curatorial research and exhibition development project, Africana Kairibe Malungaje: Futurist Reversed Memorie, for the 2025–2027 season at Howard University Gallery of Art.

Africana Kairibe Malungaje: Futurist Reversed Memories is a response to recent racialized stereotypes about African Caribbean communities and territories in social media posts and speeches during the recent presidential election campaign that proclaimed them as “dog meat eaters and garbage lands in the middle of the sea.” Decolonizing from the North as a point of orientation and reclaiming the East as a sacred location for Indigenous and African Caribbean peoples, this talk examines how to approach the “white cube” from a decolonized geometry and how to connect West African collections to contemporary artistic production in diaspora territories such as US Afro Caribbean Latinx communities, the Greater Caribbean, Canada, and Europe.

The research aims to dismantle recent colonial stereotypes and highlight the deep forms, representations, and structures in which African Caribbean-born and descendant artists re-signify the lives and the cultural and sociopolitical expressions of Black Caribbeans. The presentation aspires to bring sufficient evidence to unmask the opaque colonial mechanisms creating the stereotypes and to display the solid cultural production of artists such as Juan Sanchez, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Coco Fusco, Alder Guerrer, Harmonia Rosales, Javier Carmona, David Antonio Cruz, Billy Gerard Frank, La Vaughn Belle, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and others whose artworks speak of their black bodies and their experiences—sociopolitical, historical, communal, cultural, spiritual, and environmental—as the sources of their visual, audiovisual, and performance representations.

The event is supported, in part, by Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, Washington DC, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, New York.

Biography

Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator, Fulbright scholar, and community activist born in Havana, Cuba. He received a PhD from Duke University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. A member of the Mariel Generation and Co-Executive Director of Howard University Gallery of Art, Ferrera-Balanquet has organized Where We Meet (2024), The Phillips Collection Washington DC; Sensorial Africana Superrealities: Five Contemporary Diaspora Artists, IA&A at Hillyer, Washington DC; and Arte Nuevo InteractivA (2001–2014). He is author of Aestesis Decolonial Transmoderna Latinx_MX (2019) and editor of Andar Erótico Decolonial (2015). He has published in Latino Book Review Magazine, 2022; Social Text Journal / Periscope, New York; and Bienal de La Habana Para leer, Universitat De Valencia, Spain. He has exhibited at Haceres Decoloniales, Galeria ASAB, Bogota, Colombia; BE.BOP 2013 Black Europe Body Politics, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin; and Cuba: La Isla Posible, CCCB, Barcelona, Spain. He has received grants from Critical Minded, FONCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Lyn Blumenthal Video Foundation.