A decolonial approach to art history highlights the constructive processes of the canon of this discipline, as well as its contribution to the establishment of cultural and geopolitical centers and peripheries – hegemonies and subalternities – in line with colonial and neo-colonial dynamics. This approach is permeated by issues of gender and race, in an effort to destabilize or disrupt biased and discriminatory epistemological, cultural, social and political practices. In the presentations and debates of the MAC USP research webinar CURATORIAL PROCESSES: Critical Curatorship and Decolonial Studies in Visual Arts – African Diasporas in the Americas, we saw the use of methodologies aimed at deconstructing old-fashioned conventions and biases on which the field of art history was built – Eurocentric in its original conception, being re-centered in the United States from the mid-twentieth century onwards – and the articulation of new historiographic and curatorial possibilities that take into account the specific conditions for artistic practice in America (i.e., American continent) and in Brazil. The biographical procedure was often employed, in the presentations, to rescue narratives neglected by the timeline of mainstream art history. Alternative ways of considering time and history were exposed, starting from cosmovisions with indigenous and African roots, as practiced by modern and contemporary artists, with a particular focus on the concept of Afrofuturism.

Both the biography and a Eurocentric perception of time and history are at the heart of the discipline of art history. Elizabeth Freeman, in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, formulates the concept of “chrononormativity,” that is, “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity”. The author claims that time is manipulated, “[converting] historically specific regimes of asymmetrical power into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines” to construct and legitimize particular bodies, communities, lives and historical narratives. Chrononormativity is identified by Freeman in several instances coherent between each other: the re-temporization of the body resulting from the transition from agricultural work to salaried work; the state-sponsored time line, which is determined by milestones such as birth, marriage, property acquisition, and death; a person’s ability to narrate their life in a novelistic framework, defined by Freeman as “event-centered, goal-oriented, intentional, and culminating in epiphanies or major transformations”; and the definition of activities and feelings cultivated in the domestic space as timeless and primordial in opposition to the cruel rhythms of industrialized work, creating two time zones and erasing women’s domestic work. The cultures, histories and lives impacted by such chronobiopolitical procedures are “variously and simultaneously black, female and queer”.

In opposition to chrononormativity, Freeman proposes an “erotohistoriography”: a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures that counters the logic of development”. The colonial state and market implement large-scale temporal mechanisms to contain populations, in addition to the spatial containment exemplified by borders and the division between public and private spaces. Through such mechanisms, cultural practices, historical events and lives can thrive or are forcibly interrupted. One such instance is the accelerated march of Western “modernity”, which supplants “pre-modernity.” Freeman introduces a temporal intervention representative of the colonial state: the imposition of the calendar to skew “indigenous rhythms of sacred and profane and representing these rhythms as backward and superstitious”. Erotohistoriography, therefore, resists official timelines persisting in post-imperial nation-states, incorporating post-colonial notions of temporal heterogeneity and centering bodily delight as conducive to historical thinking. Several presentations of this webinar used non-linear narrative mechanisms, exposed how artists questioned the Euro-centered colonial time or grounded their arguments in a corporeal historiography, as in Freeman’s erotohistoriography.

Thomas Cummins, professor of pre-Columbian and colonial art at the Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Harvard University, started the webinar presentations with a talk about the concept of “hispanidad”, through the work Retrato de Dom Francisco de Arobe e seus filhos Pedro e Domingo (1599), by Andrés Sánchez Galque, the exhibition Buen Gobierno (2021), by the Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra, and the volume El primer nueva chronica y buen Gobierno (1615), by the Peruvian indigenous author Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. Cummins traced a transtemporal narrative, considering the violent process of Spanish colonization, the construction of a Spanish identity during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the echoes of this fascist identity, which are currently manifested in Spain and beyond, under the auspices of the concept of “hispanidad”, to emphasize the supposed benefits of the civilizing process rather than the brutality of the methods used in the invasion of territories.

Renata Felinto, visual artist and professor of Art Theory at the Regional University of Cariri, starting the second day of presentations, proposed a reflection on the potential of a “micro-history”, with the focus returned to the individual. The narratives traced by her focused on three female and black artists active from the 1950s and 1960s: Ana das Carrancas, Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt and Raquel Trindade. The title of her presentation, “Visual arts as an intimate place for building dreams and destroying nightmares”, reflects the trajectory of these women, who, in intense dialogue with everyday cultural and artistic practices and from diasporic communities, built works that combined the actions of being, living and knowing. With no formal artistic education, they interacted with artistic canons that Felinto describes as Afro-brothers, demanding that their work be observed through criteria that escape the white-centric historiography of art.

Kleber Antonio de Oliveira Amancio, a professor at the Universidade do Recôncavo Baiano, similarly to Felinto, points out the white bias of art history through the term “white-Brazilian art,” a valid counterpoint to the expression “Afro-Brazilian art.” If Cummins dealt with the concept of “hispanidad” and its colonial and fascist roots in his presentation, Amancio comments on how the concept of “Brazilianness” served to construct histories that suppressed and dehumanized black artists. The work A Negra (The Black woman, 1923), by Tarsila do Amaral – a painting depicting an anonymous figure, which can be interpreted as a racial type, imprisoned and without action, the model being possibly a woman enslaved by Tarsila’s family, is the starting point for an investigation into the portrait of non-white people and cultures in Brazilian art from the early to mid-20th century. O Lavrador de Café (The coffee worker, 1934), by Cândido Portinari, the figure of the mestizo and his hoe positioned between past and future. Samba (1925), by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, which reiterates the black woman’s body as available to the white man. Amancio derives, from these and other examples, that the black body appears in white-Brazilian art as: (a) a type; (b) a working body; and (c) as part of the landscape, but never as an individual. Exceptions to these categories can be observed in the work of José Correia de Lima, Lucílio de Albuquerque, Armando Viana and Antonio Ferrigno. Heitor dos Prazeres and Arthus Timotheo da Costa are black artists who have proposed different directions for black representation in Brazilian art. Amancio concluded his presentation with a provocation for us to provincialize Europe and Eurocentric art, stressing that it is not enough for black people to be represented, they must be understood as human. In the group discussion, Amancio pointed out that the definition of what black art is in Brazil is closely connected to the art criticism in the country, which is produced mostly by white people

. Black artists who did not conform to this understanding were silenced or neglected.

The art historian, researcher and curator Igor Simões interrupts the chrononormativity in his curatorship of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo with the objective of offering protagonism to the black artists in the collection. His constellation method implies a shuffling of chronologies and artistic languages and is based on the notion of film editing. The work Assentamento (Settlement, 2012-2013), by Rosana Paulino, serves, for Simões, as a visual representation of an art history that problematizes itself. The works selected from the collection are transtemporal, anachronistic to each other, creating unexpected dialogues, conceptual and visual reverberations, occupying the wall, the spectator’s space and the gallery’s exterior. Simões outlines a new repertoire of Brazilian art built by black men and women in dialogue with both the canon that centers Europe and the United States, or white art in the country, as well as other possible canons – that of popular art or that of Afrobrotherhood, as stated by Felinto. Like Amancio, he favors a definition of black Brazilian art based on the work of black artists and thinkers. Simões is a staunch supporter of education as the foundation of the museum’s mission in Brazil, as well as a formulation of accessible art history that can be discussed by many.

The day the webinar concluded, we were divided into several groups to talk. In my group, mediated by Ana Magalhães, professor at the University of São Paulo and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the same institution, we discussed anachronism and displacement as productive strategies for curatorship and the historiography of contemporary art, interrupting hegemonic narratives that cohere with the production of colonial and neocolonial knowledge. Freeman’s erotohistoriography – anti-colonial, focused on the individual and his bodily rhythms, escaping the teleological timelines of global historical processes and chrononormativity – may be an adequate methodology for this.