The MAC USP webinar Curatorial Processes: Critical Curatorship and Decolonial Studies in Visual Arts – African Diasporas in the Americas was held between October 4th and 7th, 2021. The meetings proposed to present topics relevant to contemporary discussions in the curatorial field, through the various thoughts. Among the guests, on the first day, we had the presence of Thomas Cummins, Angelica Sanchez and Mônica Cardim; on the second day, Renata Felinto, Thiago de Paula Souza and Luzia Gomes; on the third day, Kleber Amancio, Renata Bittencourt and Kimberly Cleveland; on the fourth and final day, curators Claudinei Roberto da Silva, Diane Lima and Igor Simões exposed their speeches and exhibited their work. The webinar ended with a cross-group debate, with participants and panelists discussing about the approaches.
On the first day of work, October 5, Thomas Cummins, a researcher and professor at Harvard University, talked on the portrait of Andrés Sánchez Galque, entitled Portrait of Don Francisco de Arobe and Sons Pedro and Domingo and dated 1599, in which the political leader from the Esmeraldas coast, in Ecuador, lands next to his children, a descendant of an enslaved man and a Nicaraguan mother. This painting was on display in the exhibition Tornaviaje. Arte iberoamericano en España, on display until February 2022 at the Prado Museum in Madrid, according to the institution’s website.
Cummins also shared information about the country’s political opposition to the exhibition of Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra, Buen Gobierno. The Spanish government censored the use of terms such as “racism” and “restitution” in the exhibition’s texts. According to the professor, the government’s intention was to combat this “black wave” that occurs in the country’s institutions, instead highlighting the work of paintings by Spaniards in America. Such an expressive and magnanimous example of this production, according to Cummins, comes up against the promotion of terms such as fascism and Nazism: some of them even associated with the creation of museums and Spanish institutions at the time of the oppressive regimes. “What is happening in Spain is a cleansing”, emphasized the researcher in one of his speeches.
Continuing the program on the same day, Angelica Sanchez, a researcher who carries out studies in which she analyzes the representation of the black population, addressed visual culture, focusing on the issue of gender and structural racism. Under the theme Deconstructed Mirrors: Natural History, Intersectionality and Contemporary Art in Brazil and Colombia, Sanchez focused her talk on the theory of Scientific Racism, which has exponents such as Louis Agassiz, presenting the artistic work and research of some artists who seek a critique of the writings mentioned here.
Agassiz had a scientific and creationist commitment, producing, among others, images of enslaved people in the United States that became known throughout the world for their racist content. One of the artists mentioned by the researcher, Rosana Paulino, builds a strong work of criticism of these images. According to Sanchez, the artist speaks, through her works, of how black women were portrayed at the time in series such as Assentamento (Settlement). These dehumanizing images are remade, rethought and reconstructed with tools used by the artist, who is also a researcher and was one of the organizers of this MAC USP webinar. Faced with these discussions, Angelica Sanchez asks us: How can we respond to this racist construction? Do the works presented try to answer this?
On the same scale, closing the first day of meetings, Mônica Cardim, a researcher and a photographer, brought her research on the representation of black people in photographic portraits by the German Alberto Henschel. For Cardim, men and women would have their images related to a process of inferiority, as in the records produced by Henschel, which would be “improved” by the processes of slavery. In her readings, Cardim looks at the materiality and the context in which Henschel’s photographs were presented, relating it to the coloniality studies defended by Aníbal Quijano.
For the second day of the webinar, on October 6, Renata Felinto, a researcher, artist, curator and professor at the Universidade Regional do Cariri, brought the theme Visual arts as an intimate place for building dreams and destroying nightmares. From the aspect of artists who articulate legacies for an experience and an “anti-holocaust” of diasporic families in Brazil, in which the issues of daily survival collide in artistic practice, the researcher addressed this dynamic in examples of some black women artists. Ana das Carrancas, from Pernambuco, produced autonomous objects, in which anthropozoomorphic figures appear in exaggerated features, in dialogue, even if geographically and temporally distant, with a production that takes place in West Africa. Displayed and placed on top of furniture, his works often appear in everyday objects, such as crockery and pans. Even though mentioned as a popular artist, in an attempt to reduce her work, Ana das Carrancas’s productions were published in newspapers that aroused the interest of specialized critics.
Felinto continued his speech anchored in the artist Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt, who has a rich production in tapestry that recently caught the eye of institutions such as the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand – MASP, which acquired one of her works. The researcher concluded with the works of Raquel Trindade, raising discussions about black women in this place of polymer artists, that is, black women who incorporated a series of talents and skills. This repertoire learned by different areas personifies, in turn, concepts such as empowerment and belonging. For Felinto, the three artists authorized themselves to try to make a living from art, even due to the limited inclusion of these works in shows in the major circuits.
Continuing on the same day, Thiago de Paula Souza, a curator and researcher, presented us with the exhibition of Frestas Trienal de Artes do Sesc Sorocaba, an exhibition signed by the curator alongside Beatriz Lemos and Diane Lima. Based on an inquiry that proposes to discuss the relationships, among others, of works and life stories of artists whose bodies are linked to colonial violence, the curator showed some paths brought in Frestas from the artistic works that make up the exhibition.
At the end of the same day, Luzia Gomes, a researcher and professor, addressed the decolonial practice from the perspective of museology. Having the word as the axis of her speech, Gomes brought literary creations in dialogue with museological theory and practice, with the museum itself being a colonial space at the heart of its formation.
On the third day of the webinar, on October 7, Kléber Amâncio, a researcher, proposed a new reading of the work A Negra (The black woman, 1923), by Tarsila do Amaral. Amâncio introduced us to the concept of “White-Brazilian Art”, carrying out this case study from the reading of an image from a visual document, in this case, modernist painting. In his essay, the researcher showed other productions in which the black was represented under the gaze of the white artist.
With the question Was Rubem Valentim an Afro-futurist?, the researcher Kimberly Cleveland asked us about the production of the title artist of the panel, approaching a new vision of Valentim’s production. Timely questions regarding the concretist aspect of the artist’s production, aesthetics and the themes raised by her were among the discussions.
On the same path taken on this day of the event, Renata Bittencourt, a researcher and cultural manager, performed a reading of the work by Jacob Lawrence, A Aula (The class, 1946), which is part of the MAC USP collection. The work proposes an experimentation of themes emphasizing in African-American culture, such as jazz, for example, from the representation of spaces for education and reading, libraries, where American blacks were present. Bittencourt continued her speech for other works by the artist, moved by the aesthetic and semantic expressions of this production.
As a way of closing the seminar, on October 8, 2021, we were awarded by the presentations by the curators Diane Lima, Claudinei Roberto da Silva and Igor Simões, who were immersed in the MAC USP collection during the previous weeks, and also in the days when the event occurred. The curators listed some works that were examined, so that we could know more about their research and curatorship work carried out.
Subsequently, debates were proposed between the groups. After the discussions, the author of this report recorded some perceptions. Among the speeches, a point of confluence of the themes brought up by the panelists was the perspective of a presence of black bodies in different transits. From the works of the MAC collection by black artists, passing through the sieve of an art of white authorship responsible for the formulation of the “image” of the Black for centuries, to the spaces in which these same bodies occupy, in proposals such as that of this seminar, in institutional places of speech, decision and power, with curatorship being a linking key between these consonants, is it possible to think about these visualities in other ways?
From the subjectivities of each artist, curator, researcher, in the face of the plurality of narratives, how can curatorship be a space to communicate an idea, an instrument, and question what is traditionally discussed in a constant call to shake the structure, as mentioned by Angelica Sanchez? And more, how to do this without necessarily hierarchizing these speeches? In this sense, thinking about forming quilombola centers was one of the paths to be followed. However, it is necessary to form quilombola centers beyond the Rio-São Paulo axis. Ideally, proposing new places for the production and circulation of thoughts are topics that are dear to all of us. May these discussions also blur the boundaries of these still so limiting spaces.