What does it mean today to speak of lineage, of ancestry, of descent? Is it a burden, a continuity, a scar, a myth? This exhibition offers no definitive answers, but instead opens a fertile space for visual inquiry. In a time when identities are rapidly reshaped and familial narratives fracture or fade, the works brought together in Descendencias suggest a return to the intimate—not as nostalgia, but as a gesture of critical re-engagement with what still defines us, often beyond our will.
Here, inheritance is not accepted passively. It is questioned, altered, even resisted. The artists summon memory inscribed in the body, gestures repeated as ritual, forms that persist beyond erasure. Descent emerges 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 offer a heterogeneous yet symbolically charged visual repertoire. What binds these works is not a stylistic unity, but a shared urgency: to reveal what often remains hidden—the subtle threads connecting us to what we once were, and to what we were told we must become.
In these visual meditations, the body becomes a living archive. The creased face of an elder speaks in centuries. A figure draped in red cloth, seated and veiled, evokes mourning, resistance, or devotion. A woman stitching her white dress beside a rusted fan summons a still, liminal space between domestic labor and performance. The use of masks, disguises, and performative personas unsettles the fixed self, invoking community, displacement, and inherited roles.
Sometimes it is gesture, sometimes absence; sometimes it is a scream, sometimes silence. Yet in each case, the image opens a fissure through which both memory and invention may slip.
Descendencias does not seek to affirm identity, but to multiply it. Through bodies in flux, dispersed memories, and sensibilities that resist reduction, the exhibition imagines a lineage not as a fixed line, but as a constellation—unfolding outward, unpredictable in its shape and scope.
Perhaps its most radical proposition is the conversion of intimacy into a political space. What at first glance appears personal is revealed as a node in larger histories, a fragment of collective memory under constant negotiation.
Descendencias thus invites us to look anew at what we think we know. To revisit our inheritances. To ask: what gestures do we keep? What stories do we repeat? Whose faces live within us?
Descendencias does not seek to affirm identity, but to multiply it. Through bodies in flux, dispersed memories, and sensibilities that resist reduction, the exhibition imagines a lineage not as a fixed line, but as a constellation—unfolding outward, unpredictable in its shape and scope.
Perhaps its most radical proposition is the conversion of intimacy into a political space. What at first glance appears personal is revealed as a node in larger histories, a fragment of collective memory under constant negotiation.
Descendencias thus invites us to look anew at what we think we know. 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, and the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners.
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.
READ MORE
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.
READ MORE
