A place of affection. Of healing. Expression of emotions. A place to elaborate connections that depart from Western rationalism. Does this fit in an academic space? Does it fit in an art museum? If the research webinar Curatorial Processes: Critical Curatorship and Decolonial Studies in Visual Arts – African Diasporas in the Americas did not determine an answer, it pointed out paths and possibilities. With the aim of bringing up academic and curatorial research related to the proposed theme, the week of meetings was able to create a fertile environment, much more powerful than the institutional model could handle.
The academic environment is the place where knowledge is legitimized and, through various challenges imposed, it is decided who can speak. This is the space where the canons are decided. With each narrative attributed to power, many others were silenced. According to Grada Kilomba, the academic space, as well as “concepts of knowledge, scholarship and science are intrinsically linked to racial power and authority” (2019, p. 19). That racial authority is, of course, white. Such a hierarchization systematically serves to deny the privilege of speech to racialized people.
Sarting from these questions, I feel the need to point out that, throughout my institutional trajectory, as an undergraduate student in History of Art at the Escola de Belas Artes and a master’s student at the Graduate Program in Visual Arts, both at UFRJ, I have never had a teacher who were not white. Finding alternatives has always been an independent effort, in complementary training. The importance of this webinar resides on this fact, as it brought, for the first time in the trajectory of many of the participating postgraduate students, the experience of participating in a training course composed mainly of black teachers, researchers, artists and curators in a university institution.
In recent years, with the increasing implementation of affirmative actions in postgraduate courses, research has been modified not only in the themes addressed, but in epistemological principles and forms of knowledge transmission that no longer have Europe as the center. The expansion of knowledge about (or from) African and Afro-Diasporic or Native American peoples, with seriousness and commitment to the anti-racist struggle, is a process that can no longer be interrupted or reversed. It is no longer about paternalistic policies of a white elite, but a true political articulation of committed researchers. This is a realization that each and every one of us was able to reach through the action of MAC USP.
It was mentioned, more than once, the fact that this space had become a kind of quilombo. A safe space of resistance, conducted mostly by black people, but also counting on the presence of allied white researchers, who start from Afro-diasporic knowledge to conduct their research. In this sense, exchanges that escape the austerity required by academic protocols were possible. In several moments, emotion transpired between the speeches, whether the fear of meeting the expectations that such a special moment seemed to demand, the happiness of being among their own and realizing how the connections between the researches went beyond the theoretical references, reaching much deeper layers of diasporic experiences, gratitude present in many speeches, in which all the professionals involved for these actions to be possible were remembered, or the relief of envisioning possible futures, even in the midst of so many attacks, veiled or not, that we live in different society spaces. We understand that in our quilombo there is, indeed, space for us to express all our emotions, because they are also part of the intellectuality that we claim, which goes through all layers of our existence, and not for a rationality that intends to be objective, as required by knowledge centers driven by whiteness.
As a researcher who deals with the frontiers of art as tools of coloniality, through the hierarchization of artistic productions from institutions, I was very interested in research that proposed a resumption of the agency capacity of individuals who were always placed as an object of study, of fetish or representation, never as subjects with their own narratives and worldviews. Denaturalizing the lens that the colonialities of power, being, knowledge and cosmogonic, as pointed out by researcher Mônica Lima, based on Aníbal Quijano, makes us realize how we were affected in the most subjective layers of our existence. It is from actions of shock, when we come across everything that was veiled, and resumption, in a process of rescuing the memories that belong to us, that we can turn to the development of possible futures.
These frontiers are also tensioned by the productions presented by the artist and researcher Renata Felinto, who, based on the investigation of the work of black women, some made invisible by the art system by being limited to the circuits of popular or naïf art circuits, such as Ana Leopoldina dos Santos and Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt, bringing in the link between life and art, in informal education, in the connection with their ancestry, the possibilities of building dreams and destroying nightmares. Raquel Trindade, also composing the group presented, circulating through other dimensions of the art system, starts from the multiple artistic abilities to incorporate a way of thinking about Brazil that questioned the hegemonic vision, questioning, for example, the myth of racial democracy. One of the biggest critics of this issue is an anthropologist, a black woman. Lélia Gonzales understands that this discourse, incorporated into national identity, is not intended to make visible the “effective contribution of the popular classes, women, Blacks and Indians in our historical and cultural formation. In fact, what is done is folklorizing all of them” (2020, p. 204).
Through the production of these women and the biographical analysis of their trajectories, Renata Felinto addressed how issues of race, class, gender and territoriality impact the access to art and the production of art. These are works that, until then, were not used to be present in shows designed to provide an overview of female artistic production. A crucial point touched upon by the artist, which connects with the entire proposal of this research webinar and with the dimension that I address in this report, is the fact that the empowerment process is not individual, and it is therefore necessary for us, black women, to be part of a network of artists, so that we can glimpse the possibilities of living from art, something that, historically, has been denied to us.
Finally, among the valuable contributions of all the researchers present, another issue that connects with my investigations was the possibilities for the museum to look at itself and see the possibilities of ceasing to be a tool in the service of coloniality, an issue raised by Renata Bittencourt at the final meeting, in which the postgraduate students present, divided into groups, were able to dialogue and do the important exercise of connecting ideas, thinking collectively.
When we think about power relations, especially in the field of visual arts, we have museums as great legitimizers of discourses that are presented from their collections. Although, historically, they have served to present pacifying visions of memory preservation, suggesting a neutral and apolitical aura, it is necessary to pay attention to the potential of these spaces as an arena, as a space of conflict, as a field of tradition and contradiction (CHAGAS, 1999, p. 19).
In contemporaneity, as Igor Simões rightly pointed out in his presentation, the possibility of mobility of the past and the ways of narrating it, the sophisticated strategies of power associated with the visibility of some narratives to the detriment of others, and the current dispute between these narratives are recognized. The researcher pointed out the role of education in the museum environment, in the sense of provoking thoughts and generating suspicions, bringing the public as an agent in the establishment of relationships between works. This articulation between education and curatorship as a possibility for the plurality of narratives was a common point in this collective thought developed from the meetings.
Regretting not being able to delve deeper into the relevance of each word, each expression, each image that each of the participating researchers brought to this meeting, which certainly continues to reverberate in each of the students present, I conclude with the understanding that this meeting brought an ethical and relational principle that departs from Africa. This one, which points out possibilities for us to continue living with all our potential in the diaspora. “Ubuntu is the essence of being human. It speaks of how my humanity is achieved and indissolubly associated with you.” (TUTU, 2012, p. 42). Grateful to the organizers and all the participants for making me understand that, in an academic space, I can “be what I am for what we are” and that “I exist, because I belong”.
References
CHAGAS, Mário de Souza. Há uma gota de sangue em cada museu: a ótica museológica de Mário de Andrade. In: Cadernos de Sociomuseologia, v. 13 n. 13. 1999.
GONZALEZ, Lélia. Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2020.
KILOMBA, Grada. Memórias da plantação: episódios de racismo cotidiano. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2019.
TUTU, Desmond. Deus não é cristão e outras provocações. Rio de Janeiro: Thomas Nelson Brasil, 2012.