Mariposa Ancestral Memory
Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet’s Mariposa Ancestral Memory (photograph by Amelia Farfan Gongora)
In celebration of Black History Month 2025, There’s Always More, the American Academy in Rome presents the Italian premiere of Mariposa Ancestral Memory by Dr. Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet.
Mariposa Ancestral Memory (2023–2025) is an interdisciplinary project composed of a multimedia installation (video/photography/drawings/objects) and a ceremonial performance. Mariposa Ancestral Memory is the result of an extensive investigation dealing with the presence of African Caribbean writing (Vévé, Anafourana, and Kongo Crosmograms), the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Mariel Exodus, the US Latinx migration, and Indigenous Kairibe and Afro Caribbean spirituality. These topics are relationally interwoven with the life experience of the artist born in Cuba and now living as a Transnational subject between Cuba, Mexico, and the United States.
Mariposa Ancestral Memory also examines undocumented migration, creating multi-temporal links to the Black Atlantic Slave Trade, to the Civil Rights Movement of 1960s, to the use of the Kongo crosmogram in Cuban Palo Kongo’s firmas, and to their historical relation to Haitian Vévé and West African Cultures.
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.
Credits
Scripted, Edited, Designed, and Performed by Raul Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet.
Producers: Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, Arlan Lodoño, Fabiola Farias.
Videography: Mauricio Andrade, Fabiola Farias.
Costumes: Frank Trujillo Ferrera.
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.
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