Aerolectics - Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński

With works by
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński

Curated by
Lucrezia Cippitelli, Simone Frangi

In her first solo exhibition in Italy, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński focuses on the significant role of missionary work in South Tyrol in the creation of colonial relations between Europe and Africa. At the same time, she sheds light on the history of the forced African diaspora, with a particular emphasis on the German-speaking region. Under the pretense of saving their souls, some of these missionaries bought African girls and boys on markets and deported them to Europe.

The exhibition is based on the artistic research conducted in the archives of the Ursuline Convent in Bruneck. The artist focuses particularly on the fate of the girl Asue*, placing her at the center of the narrative. Along with two other African girls – Gambra* and Schiama*, she was brought unwillingly to the convent on January 11, 1855, by Father Niccolò Olivieri. While the other girls seemingly adapted to convent life, Asue* was known for her impulsive temperament. In the convent’s records, she is compared to a storm, which could only be subdued by physical force.

In the exhibition, Asue* is represented as a storm, with references to African cosmologies, stories, and myths. Viewers are confronted with a long-suppressed history that was buried under layers of sediment. The question is raised as to why it was swallowed by the colonial archive and simultaneously erased from collective memory.

The artist also draws on the first chapter of the exhibition series The Invention of Europe and the metaphor of the Insubric Line, evoking geological and meteorological imagery. The symbols of the storm and tectonics represent the ongoing frictions arising from the encounters between politics, ideologies, and moral teachings shaped by Christianity with non-European cosmologies and world systems.

Through a multimedia and immersive practice, the artist reshapes the spaces of the Kunsthaus, imprinted with contradictions such as emptiness and fullness, voices and silence. Through objects, narratives, sounds, and images, she examines the white gaze by tracing experiences of Blackness in Europe. Additionally, she develops practices of reparative ancestral work to honor the existence of Asue* and the other girls, without reducing them to mere research subjects.

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s artistic practice draws from the thinking of Black feminist writers and thinkers and implements it in diverse ways. Through a variety of visual languages – from video and photography to performance and text – she layers and intertwines polyvocal narratives of the African diaspora. The focus of her blend of documentation and fiction is on the presence of Black individuals who have been invisibilized in European historiography, landscape, and public space.

Aerolectics is the second exhibition project of the three-year program The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024-2027), curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi, and reflects on the monolithic idea of Europe and its constructed narratives. LC/SF