In this project Adriana Bustos examines the slave trade that took place across the Atlantic Ocean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This trade was greatest forced migratory movement in history and affected three continents, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The growth and development of capitalism in Europe was based on the economic model of the slave plantation in much of America. This work considers issues of exploitation, censorship, submission, prohibition and the obliteration of the black population in the American continent.

Ever since she began to work on Anthropology of the Mule in 2007, the artist has focused on the breeding of mules as a highly prosperous activity in seventeenth- century Cordoba practiced by slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa. At that time, the black race was sixty per cent of the entire population of the city of Cordoba, as opposed to its virtual non-existence today in Argentina. Adriana Bustos spotlights the exclusion of blacks from the story of the nation and of its ideology of identity through mechanisms of invisibility, favoured by historiographical racism, the constitutional preference for the European and the manipulation of censuses and stories that lead to its non- recognition.

Susana González