Kalabongó returns home: the exhibition takes over the Palenque de Benkos
This Wednesday, May 14, the exhibition Kalabongó opened in San Basilio de Palenque—a show that returns to the place where it was born after having been on display at the MAMM between April 26 and September 1, 2024.
The exhibition, conceived by artists, musicians, and knowledge keepers of the territory, now unfolds across all of Palenque in a gesture that is at once celebration, memory, and cultural reaffirmation. Kalabongó takes over houses, streets, corners, and community spaces, transforming the territory into a living, resonant museum.
This expanded and deeply rooted version of Kalabongó is much more than an art show: it is a collective experience that celebrates the vitality of Palenquero thought and orality, and that recognizes in its musical, ritual, graphic, and audiovisual expressions a unique form of resistance, creation, and continuity.
Kalabongó asks about the meaning of images for a society, and of art as a tool for political action, historical vindication, and the recovery and reconstruction of local and ancestral knowledge. These photographs exist between the documentary and the mystical; all of them are the result of collaborative, community-based, and long-term processes in which the figure of the artist as a solitary creator and the artwork as an individual expression dissolve into the construction of collective imaginaries.
The exhibition in Palenque is also the culmination of an affective and collaborative process documented in the downloadable document, which narrates the details of this round-trip journey between the MAMM and the Palenque de Benkos. You can read it here:
About the exhibition
In some areas, people remember that the cimarrones (the colonial term for fugitive enslaved people) flew over the lands, fought troops, and defended the first palenques. The title of this exhibition derives from an allegorical universe in which fireflies (kalabongó in the Palenquero language) are the fugitive Africans who fight bats (colonizers) in a battle where darkness is an accomplice of freedom. Kalabongó asks about the meaning of images for a society, and of artistic practices as tools for political action, historical vindication, and the recovery and reconstruction of local knowledge linked to ancestral cosmogonies.