FREE THE LAND!

FREE THE LAND! is a cultural survey that contemplates African diasporic indigeneity and the literal and symbolic impact of history on our contemporary environmental landscape – from the embodied relationship with Mother Earth, to colonialism, climate change, and climate injustice.

On view through December 14 at MoCADA Culture Lab II at the L10 Arts and Cultural Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, this multidisciplinary exhibition is curated by MoCADA’s Executive Director + Chief Curator Amy Andrieux and features works by 20 artists, including the celebrated Chakaia Booker, Tabita Rezaire, Lizania Cruz, Deborah Jack, Illiana Emilia Garcia, and Yussef Agbo-Ola among rising notables including Hana Ward, Jaime Lauriano, and Mario Marcilau to name a few.

“Here is the magnificent climate; here is the fruitful earth under the beauty of the southern sun; and here, if anywhere on earth, is the need of the thinker, the worker and the dreamer. This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.” – W.E.B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land” speech; October 20, 1946.

Inspired by the writings of African-American sociologist, writer, and historian W.E.B. Dubois for the show’s curatorial point of view, and those of Black Brazilian feminist scholar Beatriz Nascimento for its spatial design, FREE THE LAND! is rooted in an intersectional, multigenerational, and international conversation about geographies of liberation. Grounded by Nascimento’s theory of the quilombo – free territories dedicated to African cultural practices, or as she puts it, “African villages where the Black population took refuge to pine after their motherland…”, where “armed resistance to the slavocratic regime” was enacted and exalted – the show works to detangle the vines of apartheid, exploitation, and imperialism from the African diaspora’s traditional and concentrated connection to land as stewards, laborers, farmers, foragers, root workers, and healers. To reconcile this shared history before any pruning can begin, Free The Land! poses an existential question about how one survives this critical moment, where land sovereignty lays at the root of multiple political conflicts (Palestine, Haiti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, etc): Will you build or will you destroy?

The show’s name comes from the Black Liberation Movement’s long-held call to action for land reparations and justice, which is inextricably connected to LandBack!, the Indigenous-led intercommunal movement calling for “a return to communal land ownership of traditional and unceded Indigenous lands and rejects colonial concepts of real estate and private land ownership. Return of land is not only economic, but also implies the return of relationships and self-governance.” Let the weeds of exploitative labor be pulled out while the restorative waters of ancestral memory nourish our legacy… By reclaiming our relationship with nature, we address climate injustice and confront colonialism at the root: Free the land, free the people.