I begin this text with Exu so that he opens and guides the paths and, also, for understanding him as the force, axé, responsible for dismantling the binarisms that order coloniality. Laroyê!
Killing the bird yesterday with the stone only thrown today is the task undertaken by black researchers in the arts who, when facing the images produced by coloniality, or enclosed in colonial definitions, promote curatorships powerful enough to displace them from the state of Maafa (NJERI, 2019, p. 7). And, in doing so, they create from the narrative repression, the vacuum and the silence about the dignified black presence in the construction of the nation and its images. They transit in what is hegemonically not known, and fable. They start from the invention of what it means to be black and the very denomination marked by coloniality, to conjure the place of the black, owner and knower of their trajectory. They are black bodies that reinscribe themselves in the art system.
“We must make an inventory of the archives of silence, and make history from the documents and the absence of documents” – by quoting Le Goff (1996, p. 109), Professor Claudinei Roberto da Silva reminded us of some words that are key to triggering insurgent actions. One of them is archive. Going through the archive that forms the history of white-Brazilian art is to come across choices made over time. For Achille Mbembe, in the text The Power of the Archive and its Limits (2002), the archive, more than the preservation and recording of data, can be understood through the choice and status that this choice represents. The archive would be the result of a judgment and the exercise of specific authority and power in defining which documents are archived and which are discarded. When thinking about the archive that we understand, as a society, as the history of white-Brazilian art, we can see the presence of certain forms of representation, authorship and discourses. Such an archive builds a racist and white supremacist imagination and collaborates, according to Edimilson de Almeida Pereira (2018), for the maintenance of an order designed by hegemonic groups, not based on exclusion, but rather a partial inclusion of minority groups in society through image.
At the same time, it is possible to find the concept of white-Brazilian art developed by Professor Kleber Amâncio, according to which, in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there is the formation of the Brazilian formal artistic dynamics. At that moment, there is a definition of what black art would be, a concept that would also delimit black humanity. Along with this, a canon was created in which white artists would have been elevated to the great artists of the Nation, in a process that is closely related to racial dynamics in Brazil.
When thinking about racial relations and social order in Brazil, an image does not escape our collective memory and what we normalize as a society. The painting A Negra, by Tarsila do Amaral (1923, MAC-USP collection), can awaken reflections on settlements and the dispute over the body of black women in the arts, as Professor Igor Simões tells us.
By portraying her vision of the Brazilian character embodied in the representation of the naked black female body, Tarsila evokes compositional elements that do not differ from the colonial logic that shapes representations of negritude (blackness) in the history of white-Brazilian art.
Certainly, referring to the story that the images tell, it is noted that the incidence of the female slave body sitting on the floor marks the visuality of the Luso-Brazilian patriarchal culture. By choosing the body of a black woman in this position, Tarsila activated, perhaps without realizing it, the latency of questions that currently raise numerous problematizations, in both the sociological and the anthropological fields, explaining modes of domination imposed by European peoples on other cultures (HILL, 2017, p. 157).
Marcos Hill writes about Tarsila’s activation of questions around black existence in Brazil and a racialized iconographic field that maintains reminiscences of slavery. A Negra works, therefore, as a place of memory of slavery. When reflecting on how the white hand portrays us, it becomes remarkable to catch that white existence is also crossed by the way in which black men and women are represented, since the difference is marked by the relationship between opposites. This crossing occurs precisely because of the differentiation that constantly confirms whiteness. in the comfortable place of universality, rationality and civilization. Nameless, sitting on the floor, next to the banana leaf that diagonally crosses the canvas, naked, with a prominent breast, a small head, without hair, devoid of past or future, A Negra is an inert witness of a representation that makes it continuously present in the colonial time from the perverse white language game. A game that, on the eve of the centenary of the painting, continues to reveal the active coloniality in the white-Brazilian art system.
But we have eyes to see. On the occasion of the Tarsila Popular exhibition, held in 2019 at Masp, the canvas was displayed between two self-portraits by Tarsila do Amaral. It is important to point out that the painter portrays herself in such a way as to become extremely recognizable in her expression, traits, hair, clothes and accessories, details carefully inserted in the construction of her individuality on the canvas that emphasize the mark of differentiation between the self-subject and the other objectified, in a condition of renewable subalternity.
The way out of this condition occurs through black hands. Professor Renata Felinto presented the research on Ana das Carrancas, Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt and Raquel Trindade. An effort collectively undertaken to rescue and preserve black women’ memories and poetic actions. The dispute over the body of the black woman, mentioned by Simões, also comprises our memories and the organization of the entire Brazilian society.
The curatorial processes that consider decoloniality and African diasporas in the Americas promote shake-ups of racialized models of representation and of society as a whole. It is in the enunciation of the unspeakable and in the critical return to the signs that delimit a subaltern existence that it becomes possible to reinscribe the cartography of intolerance through the bias of aesthetics. In Axexê da negra ou o descanso das mulheres que mereciam serem amadas (2017), Renata Felinto undertakes a performance of self-inscription and self-definition, since, by conjuring a Nagô concept/action and the existences of black women who were wet nurses, based on their representations in white-Brazilian art, the artist, researcher and teacher also conjures up grounds for projecting possible futures for contemporary black women.
The curator artist relives these lives by bringing the memory of a humanity that has always been present, but which was buried in the rubble of Eurocentric representation. It also indicates the path to disassemble an entire system. A path that starts from a remembrance that listens and shapes the voices silenced by the historical process. It is about killing the bird yesterday with the stone that was only thrown today.
References
HILL, M. “Mulatas” e negras pintadas por brancas: questões de etnia e gênero presentes na pintura modernista brasileira. Belo Horizonte: C/Arte, 2017.
LE GOFF, Jacques. História e Memória. Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 1996.
MBEMBE, Achille. The Power of the Archive and its Limits. Refiguring the Archive. Cidade do Cabo: Clyson Printers, 2002.
NJERI, A. Educação afrocêntrica como via de luta antirracista e sobrevivência na Maafa. Revista Sul-Americana de Filosofia e Educação, Brasília, DF, n. 31, p. 4-17, 2019.
PEREIRA, Edimilson de Almeida. Ardis da imagem: exclusão étnica e violência nos discursos da cultura brasileira. 2ed. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2018.
PINHEIRO MENDES, Lorraine. Minha história é suada igual dança no ilê, ninguém vai me dizer o meu lugar. Políticas Culturais Em Revista, 14(2), 122–141, 2021.