Artist Talk and Screening with Las Nietas de Nonó

Join us at the Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church for a screening and artist talk with Mapenzi Chibale Nonó from the duo Las Nietas de Nonó in conversation with curator Jonathan D. Katz!

Before the talk, Centurión (2025), a short film by the duo commissioned for the exhibition Dispossessions in the Americas, will screen. The film follows a family in San Juan, Puerto Rico, during the 1990s as they navigate the Mano Dura contra el Crimen policy, a mandate that consequently subjected neighborhoods to heavy police and military presence in the name of crime control. The children want to run, laugh, and play, but stepping outside is impossible—patrols, raids, and sudden violence have made the streets dangerous. Inside their small home, every sound—from boots on the pavement to distant shouts—casts a shadow over daily life. Juni moves through this tension with quiet determination, finding ways to protect the kids and carve out fleeting moments of normalcy. In the cramped, anxious space they share, the world outside feels both omnipresent and threatening, shaping their days with fear, care, and fragile gestures of tenderness.

Afro-diasporic siblings Mulowayi and Mapenzi form Las Nietas de Nonó, whose practice evokes ancestral memory through personal archives, performance, found objects, organic materials, ecology, fiction, video, and installation. Their 2022 solo show Posibles Escenarios, Vol. 1 LNN at Artists Space, New York, explored expropriation, colonial violence, and microhistories in geopolitics. They created Ilustraciones de la Mecánica (2016), later shown at the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and 79th Whitney Biennial (2019). Recipients of awards including the Rome Prize, United States Artist Award, and Latinx Artist Fellowship, their work has been exhibited internationally. In 2019, they co-founded Parceleras Afrocaribeñas, advancing environmental and racial justice in San Antón, Puerto Rico.