Owners of the Earth

Description

Teresa Kutala Firmino’s first comprehensive monograph, Owners of the Earth catalogues the four-part exhibition of the same name, spanning two years (2022 – 2023). Each chapter correlates with one segment of the exhibition, displaying the artwork, installation and performance images from each body of work. Six essays interrogate Firmino’s practice and shed further light on the artist and her world.

In Owners of the Earth, Firmino unpacks personal and family histories and experiences to investigate the effects of collective trauma – past, present and future – on her community and on Black women. An ode to the matriarchal lineage of her family, Firmino constructs what bell hooks defines as a rebellious act: opening up a space to formulate new transgressive possibilities for forming an identity that reclaims its power, besides and beyond trauma.

Contributors: Charles Shields, Zoë Hopkins, Misha Krynauw, Zaza Hlalethwa, Paula Nascimento and Lena Sulik.

Teresa Kutala Firmino is a multimedia artist now based in Johannesburg. She was born in 1993 to a Congolese father and an Angolan mother in Pomfret, a former asbestos mine camp-turned military base in the North West province where a group of former Angolan soldiers who fought for the South African National Defence Force’s infamous 32 Battalion were relocated at the end of the Border War (1989). Firmino’s work negotiates the collective trauma of the Pomfret community.