Por isso decidimos não morrer jamais
como também não morreram aquelas outras
que aqui estiveram antes de nós
-Roberta Tavares

This text is an incomplete account, a fragmented chronicle at best. I write knowing fully well that I can only give partial insight into the week-long research webinar organized by MAC USP the week of October 4 – 8, 2021. Titled Curatorial Processes: Critical Curating and Decolonial Studies in Visual Arts – African Diasporas in the Americas, the event gathered forty researchers and curators who are committed to thinking beyond the gaps and erasures in the archives to focus on afro-descendant art in the diasporas across the American continent. Every talk presented in the webinar would deserve an essay, but this short text will zoom in on select aspects of a few presentations that left a deep impression on me and which I can already see influencing my research and writing.

I have chosen to include myself in this account, narrating it in the first person, not due to a lack of rigor or familiarity with academic expectations but precisely because I want to trouble those standards to ask who do they benefit, and who do they serve? Who do they help keep silent? In doing so, I seek to echo what one of our colleagues, Carolina Gracindo, expressed towards the end of the third day of the webinar when she shared how deeply moved and touched she felt by the talks given by Renata Felinto, Thiago de Paula Souza and Luzia Gomes. She conveyed her admiration with tear-filled excitement, to which Felinto immediately replied. Careful to acknowledge Gracindo’s emotive response, she pointed out that her intervention constituted a decolonial act in and of itself, a counter-response in the face of academic environments that prohibit such human(e) displays of affect. This exchange offered us a reminder, a beacon to look for a form of art history and art criticism that genuinely excites us, that touches others. Perhaps, a way of curing academia is to make sure there is enough room for doubt, for parallel histories and alternative stories, born out of different expressions and forms of knowledge that can include emotions in the first person.

This account begins out of linear time, with a quote that I stumbled upon a couple of days after the webinar was over but which, looking back, could very well have been part of the event’s introduction. “Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end,” wrote bell hooks in her book Teaching to Transgress. hooks was referenced in passing throughout the week, quoted by others, and I became attached to the effect that her words had on our discussions. For me, what stood out in all the talks of our guest lecturers was the pulsating urgency that they impressed on their varied topics, the way they, following hooks, asked their investigations to serve in that process of healing, of revolutionary liberation. From looking closely at Tarsila do Amaral’s 1923 painting A negra, to reconsidering Rubem Valentim’s practice as a form of afro-futurism, all the talks presented during the webinar took very seriously the task of putting theory to work in promoting a decolonial approach to art history. Whether it was Diane Lima performing a critical analysis of the photographic documentation of black workers cleaning the galleries in the first Bienal do Museo de Arte Moderno de São Paulo, or Thomas Cummins exposing Spain’s refusal to question the dominant narrative of hispanidad, the speakers made sure to establish and make evident the political implications of their research.

Monica Cardim spoke about the possibility of finding a decolonial cure in the transatlantic portraits of black subjects created by photographer Alberto Henschel in Brazil and which he brought with him to Europe. By looking at these nineteenth-century portraits as an expression of the African diaspora, Cardim reflected on the lacunae in the archives, particularly the gaps around the lives of black women. She brought to her analysis the discussion on coloniality by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, who described the coloniality of power as one that extended to control ways of being in the world, trying to silence any form of knowledge that did not align to a Eurocentric one. This point resonated with the talk by Angélica María Sánchez, who reminded us to be wary of science’s drive to categorize and measure everything, organizing natural history and hierarchizing forms of knowledge in a process that established white colonizers and settlers as superior to all others.

In particular, what struck me about Cardim’s talk was how she evidenced the lasting effect of these gaps in historical archives, of these omissions in the past. What happens to the construction of identity when one does not see yourself reflected in history? What gets dislocated when she asks, “And where am I?” What are the enduring effects of having such few images that record the lives of black people in Brazil during the 19th century, and that most of the photographs that survive are framed within a construction of the other posed by anthropology and eurocentrism that hinders our possibility of engaging more fully with the subjects? Cardim’s presentation was both a question and an answer, performing her decolonial cure by helping to write a counter-narrative to these voids in the archive. By looking to the past for answers, she contributes to the formation of other kinds of much-needed histories of what the future of afro-Brazilian people will look like. There’s no doubt that more work needs to be done on this front and that the losses in the archive might never find reparation, but what Cardim shared with us was her way of trying to suture that wound in the past and, in doing so, find some form of redress.

Renata Felinto presented the work of black, afro-descendant women artists who developed their practices mainly outside of mainstream art circuits. She brought to our attention the work of Ana das Carrancas and Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt. Taking them as examples, she encouraged us to ground our research in very concrete questions related to the context in and from which an artist is working. For example, where are artists producing their pieces, geographically, and where were they born and raised? She stressed the importance of understanding what their everyday looks like, in terms of tasks but also with regards to their materials and visual languages. However, Felinto also warned us, “the experience of color is not uniform, it is not monolithic” and should not be written about as such. These considerations are essential when researching an artist, but in writing about minoritarian subjects, they become particularly relevant, Felinto argued.

These reflections make it evident that art history and academia are riddled with problems sustained by colonial values and expectations that render certain people and their practices almost invisible. To counteract these silences, Felinto called on us to shake and rattle the archives for clues, for sediments on which to imagine the stories of those who have been left out. Confront the spaces of exclusion and privilege would be to find a way of counterbalancing hegemonic narratives with radical, empowering retellings of that history. I felt deeply moved by Felinto’s talk but also troubled by questions and doubts. How might we study these practices without contributing to their capture, fetishization, or tokenization as stories of exception that obscure the ongoing structural racism?

From Thiago de Paula Souza, I keep his brief discussion of Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira’s Repertorio no. 2 presented at the FRESTAS triennial, and the idea that the temporary, the provisional, can be in itself a path to find a way to keep going. In their almost hypnotic repetition of steps, Pontes and Ferreira a choreography of self-defense, where the objective is to create space for other processes to emerge. Their naked bodies revel in all their fleshiness while still retaining their right to opacity. Following Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant, this opacity is at the base of the ethical relations and defense strategies that the artists seek to deploy, ushering in the possibility of existing with difference, insisting on illegibility rather than mandatory transparency.

I am grateful to Luzia Gomes for the assigned readings: three short excerpts by Jeferson Tenório, Edimilson de Almeida Pereira and Miriam Alves, and a poem by Roberta Tavares that I quote at the beginning of this essay. Her “Poema para não morrer” found echoes in many of the talks and questions that emerged throughout the webinar: an insistence on life, on the power of love as a radical decolonial act, on the refusal to be erased or categorized, measured and catalogued.

Porque vida e amor tudo eles
querem apartar de nós e sabemos
bem: estarmos vivas e insistir no amor
é contrariar as estatísticas em que eles
querem nos jogar

Igor Simões proposed conceiving exhibitions as places of learning, as spaces where fragments can be constellated in different ways. By thinking of the moment of display as opening a space for dialogue and criticism, artworks also become mediators to understand one another in relation, in constellation. In this sense, exhibitions can be seen as tools through which to ask what does it mean to be in Brazil or to be Brazilian. Moreover, in questioning what remains out of sight, hidden in the museum’s storage, or simply outside museum collections, Simões asks us to consider what alternative interpretations or conceptions of the idea of “Brazil” would arise if the narratives of afro-Brazilian and Indigenous artists were involved in this retelling? This question implied others in my mind, such as: Are we rethinking and reflecting on how cultural institutions work? And how does the museum enact or refuse the logics of oppression, violence and dispossession?

In developing his argument, it was important for Simões to recenter doubt as the primary source of material for discussions and public programming, to focus on uncertainty as the base from which to consider the works on view. His conception of the museum space resembled more that of a laboratory, where one ought not to trust blindly what is exhibited on those white walls. Suspicion and critical thinking came to the fore in his conception of the museum, calling for an urgent redistribution of what is on view and the cultivation of other forms of seeing through educational proposals and projects. Throughout his presentation, he stressed the need to go beyond those limiting imaginaries that would seem to pre-establish what work created by afro-Brazilian artists can look like. The answer to this problem lies in recognizing that there is no one answer, no single narrative that could destroy and rebuild afro-Brazilian art, but rather a plurality of stories that trouble that very category.

I conclude this relatório with a quote from black feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman, whose influence traversed many of the talks throughout the week. She writes: “the necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair, must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future”. It is in that same spirit that I end this short essay, embracing the hope that came with meeting other researchers and still reflecting on the knowledge that was shared over that week-long webinar.