What did it mean then to speak of lineage, of ancestry, of descent? Was it a burden, a continuity, a scar, a myth? Descendencias offered no definitive answers, but instead opened a fertile space for visual inquiry. At a time when identities were rapidly reshaped and familial narratives fractured or faded, the works brought together in Descendencias suggested a return to the intimate—not as nostalgia, but as a gesture of critical re‑engagement with what still defined us, often beyond our will.
Here, inheritance was not accepted passively. It was questioned, altered, even resisted. The artists summoned memory inscribed in the body, gestures repeated as ritual, forms that persisted beyond erasure. Descent emerged as a spectral presence—at times a shelter, at others, a demand for rupture.
Spanning from the documentary to the staged, from hyperreal portraiture to poetic mise‑en‑scène, the images in this exhibition offered a heterogeneous yet symbolically charged visual repertoire. What bound these works was not a stylistic unity, but a shared urgency: to reveal what often remained hidden—the subtle threads connecting us to what we once were, and to what we had been told we must become.
In these visual meditations, the body became a living archive. The creased face of an elder spoke in centuries. A figure draped in red cloth, seated and veiled, evoked mourning, resistance, or devotion. A woman stitching her white dress beside a rusted fan summoned a still, liminal space between domestic labor and performance. The use of masks, disguises, and performative personas unsettled the fixed self, invoking community, displacement, and inherited roles.
Sometimes it was gesture, sometimes absence; sometimes a scream, sometimes silence. Yet in each case, the image opened a fissure through which both memory and invention might slip.
Descendencias did not seek to affirm identity, but to multiply it. Through bodies in flux, dispersed memories, and sensibilities that resisted reduction, the exhibition imagined a lineage not as a fixed line, but as a constellation—unfolding outward, unpredictable in its shape and scope.
Perhaps its most radical proposition was the conversion of intimacy into a political space. What at first glance appeared personal was revealed as a node in larger histories, a fragment of collective memory under constant negotiation.
Descendencias thus invited us to look anew at what we thought we knew. To revisit our inheritances. To ask: what gestures do we keep? What stories do we repeat? Whose faces live within us?
Descendencias did not seek to affirm identity, but to multiply it. Through bodies in flux, dispersed memories, and sensibilities that resisted reduction, the exhibition imagined a lineage not as a fixed line, but as a constellation—unfolding outward, unpredictable in its shape and scope.
Perhaps its most radical proposition was the conversion of intimacy into a political space. What at first glance appeared personal was revealed as a node in larger histories, a fragment of collective memory under constant negotiation.
Descendencias thus invited us to look anew at what we thought we knew. To revisit our inheritances. To ask: what gestures do we keep? What stories do we repeat? Whose faces live within us?
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners and Rodriguez Collection
The Kendall Art Cultural Center (KACC), dedicated the past six years to the preservation and promotion of contemporary art and artists, and to the exchange of art and ideas throughout Miami and South Florida, as well as abroad. Through an energetic calendar of exhibitions, programs, and its collections, KACC provides an international platform for the work of established and emerging artists, advancing public appreciation and understanding of contemporary art.
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The Rodríguez collection is a blueprint of Cuban art and its diaspora. Within the context of the new MoCA-Americas the collection becomes an invaluable visual source for Diaspora identity. It represents a different approach to art history to try to better understand where we come from to better know where we are heading.
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