PILAR DELAHANTE MATIENZO, Susana
Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo: Achievement

I think we should create archives for artificial intelligence images in the future. These archives would be compiling photos based on real moments or situations that we know did exist but for whatever reasons no images could be captured. These images recreate something real, a bit like paintings. For instance, you have many historical paintings, from many historical situations and moments, but no photos could be taken. So, I would say that AI generated images are a way of painting with photography, you know?
—Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo

This companion book to the Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo’s exhibition’s at Secession, Vienna, comprises two conversations between the artist and the journalist Adiaratou Diarrassouba and Thomas Lax, curator at MoMA in New York, in which she discusses the new photo series Achievement, her work with AI image programs, and the role she ascribes to them in the creation of new archives.

Pilar Delahante Matienzo’s artistic intervention for the book is an action: wrapped in black gift paper, the book must first be unwrapped. There is something rebellious about the gesture of tearing open the paper, a nod back to the performance the artist conceived for the opening of her exhibition. On the inward-facing side of the paper, excerpts from her collage of different source texts for the spoken-word performance offer reflections on her identity as a Black woman and artist, on racism and resistance, and on visionary ways of living together.

The reinvention of memory and the critical engagement with archives are central to Delahante Matienzo’s research and a strategy that lets her recover the identities and legacies of people who were denied the right to record their own histories. As a Cuban-born artist with African and Chinese roots, she knows from her own family’s experience that, for the longest time, oral traditions were the only available sources on which to draw for one’s lineage and heritage. In Achievement, she presents a fictional and speculative archive that features Black women as prominent, affluent, and esteemed members of society and as hardworking and self-determined businesswomen. In so doing, she not only undertakes a critique of history, she also takes a vital step toward a more nuanced consideration—ultimately, a reprogramming—of beliefs that have seemed impossible to dislodge. Defying the colonial gaze, the artist charts assertive alternative representations. Her use of AI, currently a subject of heated debates, is refreshingly unconstrained by ideological commitments: AI is a tool, an expedient that uncovers potentials. [publishers’ note]

Published by Secession, 2024
Design by Sabo Day
Artists' Books