Grada Kilomba’s arresting 32-meter installation, O Barco / The Boat, currently sits across the courtyard at London’s Somerset House, displayed in the UK for the first time as part of 1-54 London and supported by Goodman Gallery. It is composed of 140 charred pieces of wood resting in such a way as to resemble the hold of a ship and remind us of the colonial crusades that carried countless souls from the African continent. This manifested expression of slavery requires the viewers to invert the Western notion of glory, freedom and victory that is so often associated with Europe’s naval conquest, and rather to focus on the underbelly of repression, trauma and loss. The boat is used as a metaphor for and to commemorate the many silenced stories and lives erased from the official histories. The inner rows of wood, which lie like graves, are inscribed in gold with a poem written by the artist and translated into Yoruba, English, Portuguese, Kimbundu, Arabic and Creole. The inscription reads:

one boat, one cargo hold
one cargo hold, one load
one load, one story
one story, one piece
one piece, one life
one life, one body
one body, one person
one person, one being
one being one soul,
one soul, one memory
one memory, one oblivion
one oblivion, one wound
one wound, one death
one death, one sorrow
one sorrow, one revolution
one revolution, one equality
one equality, one affection
one affection, Humanity

Kilomba was born in the periphery of Lisbon amongst many African diasporic communities where issues around belonging and not belonging, speaking and being silenced, were at the forefront of the collective mind. “I use my work to understand who I am, but also to understand my own history,” the transdisciplinary artist explains. “I try to reinvent a language which is able to give voice to the stories that I want to tell. The colonial language is fundamental to me. The feminist language is fundamental to me. My work is located in my biography and as a Black, female artist my task is to raise urgent questions. It’s a long process, but a very beautiful and powerful one.”

Kilomba studied psychoanalysis and clinical psychology at the Instituto de Psicologia Aplicada ISPA in Lisbon, where she was influenced by Frantz Fanon, and then attained a doctorate in philosophy from the Freie Universität in Berlin, where she is currently based. She is highly regarded as an academic, artist and writer with a practice spanning performance, staged reading, video, photography, publications and installation. She puts all of these endeavours toward decolonising the discourse. “We see things separately and fragmented and they are not like this in reality,” she says. “The colonial and patriarchal way of looking at things wants us to amass knowledge and achievements one after the other, growing like a phallic object. I find, to a much greater extent, that knowledge is constructed in circles and in movement. To gain understanding and develop answers to certain questions you have to go beyond several disciplines,” she explains. “Psychoanalysis is the language of the unconscious, which is also the language of art; working with associations, metaphors, images and with the imaginary, are all ways we develop a representation of reality - not reality itself.”

It was through working with war survivors from Angola and Mozambique during her studies that Kilomba developed diverse artistic and therapeutic projects to deal with human tragedy and cyclical violence. This has grown in her a profound obligation to understand why we exclude certain humans from humanity. Now many of Kilomba’s works, including O Barco / The Boat, address these concerns. It’s important for her that this installation is seen outside of a ‘white cube’ and experienced in the public domain. It is especially resonant at Somerset House which is stepped in the UK’s colonial past and was once home of the Navy Office. “We are surrounded in our public sphere by scenarios that celebrate one of the most brutal and horrendous times in human history. It is very urgent to consider how public spaces tell stories, and to whom and where these stories are told,” says Kilomba. “My work is a poetic necessity.”

O Barco / The Boat was originally created for last year’s BoCA - The Biennial of Contemporary Arts in Lisbon. “I decided to create something that mimics the size and scale of the monuments around, but rather than building up I wanted to look down under and make the invisible visible, by showing the belly of the boat. I wanted to work with natural, feminine materials, which is why I chose wood. I didn’t want anything hard, or high, elevated or phallic. I wanted the piece to be unnoticed until you entered inside it, like a labyrinth,” she explains of how the piece came together in its first location alongside the River Tagus in MAAT’s Praça do Carvão.

These sculptural pieces then formed part of a live performance combining music, song and dance with music production by Kalaf Epalanga. Influenced by the making of the work and the poem, Kilomba devised the performance based around the ritualistic burning of wood. “When I burnt the wood, I had to cry. Each wooden block has a skin that is unique and they each show their scars as you burn away the layers. I am making connections between the materials and the immaterial, the physical and the spiritual, the present and the future,” she says.

O Barco / The Boat then travelled to Barcelona’s Plaza Margarida Xirgu, in front of Teatro Lliure before arriving at Somerset House. For the performances during 1-54 London, it took on a new persona in relation to the setting. As before, Kilomba put together an ensemble of afro-descendant talents to join her and as the drums echoed around the courtyard, their heavy breathing drew life into the grave-like sculptures that they moved through. The rocking motion of their bodies mimicked the ocean swell and the navy clock sitting atop a Somerset House column chimed into their guttural song.

In this way, the piece is no longer only a monument to the past. It becomes a site of ritual, a ceremony and a tribute; a way of merging the travesty of the past, with a spiritual look towards the future. This garden of memories becomes a place to retell history properly in the contemporary moment. “You cannot be in the present without the past. As an artist I work with a sense of timelessness; where the past, present and future become one,” Kimoba asserts. “This is a choreography of contemplation, and a place of healing to take care of the wounds; these global wounds.”

O Barco/The Boat by Grada Kilomba is on view at London’s Somerset House until 19 October, 2022. Read more about it here .