Antonio Jose Guzman

Antonio Jose Guzman (born August 2, 1971) aka Akuaigar, is a Dutch-Panamanian artist. He lives and works in Amsterdam, Panama City and Dakar. Guzman’s work includes films, documentaries, photography, installations and publications. Besides his individual art practice, Guzman is the founder and director of the Pan African art collective The State of L3, a collective that has been operating since 2006. In his work, Guzman focuses on topics like DNA, migration and gravity. He is currently working on the ongoing multidisciplinary audiovisual art project Piertopolis / PSY Amsterdam Mappings and the documentary trilogy "The day we surrender to the air". His company, GF Workstation, makes documentaries internationally.



Born in Panama City, Panama, Guzman began studying photography and video, and became interested in polaroids at early age. In the early 90's he worked in Panama for the advertising giant Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB) Draftfcb as a staff photographer. In the same years he did a series of photo projects for Greenpeace Latin America and was freelance photographer for France Press International. In 1994 he graduated from the Ithmus University. He wrote a thesis on the psychological effect of advertising photography.

In 1997 he moved to Europe and started working as an artist, editorial photographer and as an editorial staff of different magazines in Barcelona, London and Amsterdam. Between 1997 and 2002 he served as editorial board of different scientific journals at Elsevier Science. In 2003 he produced and directed his first documentary, "Representando".


In 2004 he started studies on audio visual arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie of Amsterdam. While studying at the Rietveld, Guzman got inspired to work with electronic art and began to work with gravitational issues, migration and the life of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader. His examination project "Gravitational Experiences", was a series of multiple channel installations and the documentary "The Miracle". In 2007 he took part in the exhibition "Multiple M", in which he participated with "Chain Diary", an installation with 8 multiple projections, and 12 oversized photos. In January 2008, Guzman began working with Samsung's newest mini portable video projector to combine video, sound and performance. In his project State of L3 he asks participants to upload their work onto a database so that their partners and later on other visitors can access, watch and react with their own ideas to what they see. In this way the database will create and ever-growing and expanding online community based on either personal histories or just interest in Africa and all its cultural and social expansions over the entire globe.

The State of L3 refers to exile identity and the creative process of three artists working together with eighteen young artists and university students. The project brings together their thoughts, ideas, experiences, dialogues and virtual exchange in the L3 virtual database. The State of L3 explores with multimedia installations as a medium for a documentary on transatlantic networks and the artists reflections on the Black Atlantic African world, the symbiosis that exist between people of African descent and their position in the contemporary society as well as the historic perspective and the colonial past of the countries of origin of the artists. It is an artistic exploration of time and space in relation to society. The installation is a visualization of migration and Diaspora. Each suitcase represents migration; each balloon represents the transatlantic unity. The project is supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, the VSB Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB) and Erfgoed Nederland.

The documentary trilogy The Day We Surrender to the Air, is based on the results of Guzman’s DNA test. This DNA test, executed by the National Geographic Genographic Project and African Ancestry, shows Guzman’s mixed background. In the documentary, Guzman travels to the places of his ancestry and brings to the front various questions considering ethnic identity, migration and Diaspora. The trilogy was supported by the The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB). The documentary had its premiere at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the biggest documentary festival in the world, before going on international tour in 2010. The Day We Surrender to the Air, Episode Two was firstly shown at the The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2010 in Greece and the Africa in the Picture film festival, Amsterdam.

Project Piertopolis is inspired by New Babylon of COBRA artist Constant, Piertopolis features an architectural design for an installation of a life-size landscape made out of piers and walking bridges. A pier accommodates the act of leaving, of traveling and embarking – it is a place where the gone and lost are contemplated. At the same time, a pier is a place easily associated with arrival and return, with reconnection, and with the fulfillment of hopes and wishes. Besides, a pier is also a continuously changing structure. Its features are affected by wind and sea, by the people, boats and animals that use it. A pier never looks the same. The structure-like characteristics of the pier make one think of small meccano constructions, architectural fantasies and utopian landscapes in which the border between reality and illusion is blurred.

The project is supported by the Amsterdam Foundation for the Arts. AFK and by the Mondriaan Fonds.

Guzman's new project PSY Amsterdam Mappings 2013 is a Research of the population demographics and transit of Amsterdam. After half a century of situationist maps in the districts of Paris, it’s time for a new generation to explore the cities. Psychogeographic Amsterdam will first attempt to explore the Psychogeography idea of the city and it’s inhabitants, using new networks. Guy Debord formulated the "unitary urbanism": the theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as a means of contributing to the construction of a unified environment in dynamic relation with experiments in the behavior.

For the project Guzman will be collecting photos and data of the inhabitants and their day city trips, their ideas and conceptions of the future of urbanization of the city and the effect of the real state in last the last years and future generations.

The information from the research will be transform into a data visualization maps, that will generate an idea on how the city of Amsterdam is forming itself towards the future, the maps will demonstrate areas of Transculturalism or homogenous cultures, incomes and preferences.

Press Articles:

Films against extreme right

It is already seventeen years ago when British sociologist Paul Gilroy’s influential book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness has been published. But the effect, at least in the visual arts, it still going on. This spring Tate Gallery in London organized a great overview of black art under the title Modern Afro Journey Through the Black Atlantic with a clear reference to Gilroy. In upcoming October the debate Black Atlantic (Revisited) will take place in Rotterdam Union.

Gilroy introduced the term ‘Black Atlantic’ to create a recognizable and unify name for several black cultures around the Atlantic Ocean. According to Gilroy there are no cultures that are typically African, Caribbean, American or European though exists a hybrid of “Transatlantic” Black culture.

The artists collective The State of L3, which now exhibits in Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, relegate to Gilroy’s ideas by calling their exhibition Modernity & Aesthetics of the New Black Atlantic.

By far the most impressive subject of this exhibition is L3 founder Guzman himself with his video work. The film The Day We Surrender To The Air is a gripping report about the search for his own genetic roots.

For the project The Day We Surrender To The Air, Guzman went to the United States to analyze his DNA. The results brought to light that his early family assembled European Sephardic Jew and Muslim peoples of the Sahel, but also Indians and people from Panamanian indigenous tribes belonged to his family tree.

The film became a road movie, which followed the tracks that his ancestors thousands of years ago previously have taken. Guzman walks through the snow in Siberia from where his ancestors once crossed the Bering Strait. He stands on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which his family traversed on their way to Mexico twenty thousand years. And he looked straight through the gate in Senegal, where the slaves were driven towards the ships, taking off to an unknown destination.

Who are we and where do we come from? These are the questions that Guzman’s movie again and again emerges. And what does nationality mean if your genetic material can be attributed to almost all parts of the world? Guzman actually say in this movie that the world is one big family. And this is an important statement, in a time where right wing ideas more and more prevail in a growing number of parts of our world.

By Art Critic, Sandra Smallenburg | Excerpt from Article | NRC Next / Translation of manuscript in Dutch.


In search of the African gene

‘L3′ is a gene that occurs in all Bantu people.

Antonio Jose Guzman would prefer to go flying on a boat and sail across the sky. Over Africa, across the Atlantic; He created the Dogon Voyager for Interstellar Planetary Travelling, the spacecraft is the beating heart of his art project The State of L3, which is a growing web of artist and friends from Africa, Europe and Latin America. It’s a fantasy that Guzman gained by Jules Verne, the jazz of Sun Ra and the TV series Star Trek. Parts of the expanding work was on display in Amsterdam’s Gallery 23 and Smart Project Space, Sanaa Gallery, Utrecht and in the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp MHKA, Lonely at the Top MHKA.

By Wim Bossema | Excerpt from Article | De Volkskrant / Translation of manuscript in Dutch


Famous quotes containing the word antonio:

    Socialism can only arrive by bicycle.
    —José Antonio Viera Gallo (b. 1943)