This report aims to summarize some of the topics presented during the webinar. Although limited to an overview of some of the presentations, I aim to provide an account to future inquiries on decolonial practices, and a brief discussion sparked by the presentation of Thomas B. Cummins. Cummins’ talk explored colonial practices still very much active in the present day in Spain. According to Cummins, an ethnic cleansing in paintings made in Spanish America at the Prado Museum are made to erase blackness from its collections to reinforce the idea that Hispanidad is white and a civilizing force. In this context, criticism is received with bitter comments by, for example, Madrid governor Isabel Dias to whom restitution, and decolonial practices from an indigenous standpoint would be historic revisionism. In an interview to The Wall Street Journal given at the occasion of her official visit to The Hispanic Society (New York) Dias asks: “Why are we revising the history of Spain in America and questioning Hispanicity 500 years later…when all it did from its origins was bring universities, civilization, and the West to the American continent, values sustaining prosperous democracies to this day?” . Dias’ question is valid as evidence of how colonial, imperial and institutional racism still fuels art, education, and politics. The subsequent presentations addressed not only this question but how artists and scholars are challenging institutional racism within a decolonial framework in curatorial practices.

Angelica Maria Sanchez intersected the works of artists Rosana Paulino (Brazil) and Liliana Angulo (Colombia) and their decolonial practices. Paulino, in the work Assentamento (Settlement) (2012-2013), says Sanchez, visually identifies the African Brazilian women as the ones who forged modern and contemporary Brazil from their own wombs through forced labor, forced adaptation, and forced Assentamento. Sanchez then posits that Assentamento articulates the visuality of survival of black communities and of Rosana Paulino communities as well, making the artist’s positionality one of the foundations for their decolonial aesthetic strategies to disrupt a natural history that has traditionally typified, and erased blackness. In Liliana Angulo, Portrait of Lucy Rengifo, 2007, Sanchez identifies strategies that intersect the works of Angulo, Paulino, and Carrie Mae Weems. Through such intersection, the struggle and the survival of black communities across the Americas are stitched together. Such analysis, Sanchez suggests, may revoke white male elite practices (if we remember Días’ question from Cummins’s talk we can expand these practices to white females as well) that insist on adjusting their theories to their own convenience, to authorize and subdue black and indigenous identities. In the end, Sanchez asks: “What happens when we don’t allow the continuation of racist constructions, how can we respond to that?” As a segue to this question, the reader will see that many practices both by curators and scholars are focusing their work to provide space and time to experiment in the direction of disruption. The presentation of Monica Cardim offered disruption to the colonial gaze, and, more importantly, liberation from the notion that such a gaze was the only one existing within the eighteen hundred photographic archives.

Monica Cardim spoke about the transatlantic circulation of portraits of African and African Brazilian people photographed by Alberto Henschel in the nineteenth century. As a strategy to articulate decolonial cure, Cardim equates the circulation of these portraits to a kind of African Diaspora people trafficking second wave from the Americas to Europe through the materiality of the photographs in which the subjects were racialized and objectified based on racist scientific theories of the 19th century. These portraits served at the time to turn African and African descendants invisible as human beings, nameless, unidentifiable, dehistoricized. However, Cardim points out that African and African descendants were very aware of such colonial practice and made use of photographs to counter such erasure attempts and disrupt the colonial archive. Such counter portraits, according to Cardim, may be read then within the concept of Ubuntu that intersects individuality and collectivity to create a potential colonial cure. However, such colonial healing must also be performed outside of colonial archives and academic art production, and that is what Renata Felinto brings next to the table.

Renata Felinto approached the aesthetic strategies of women of color artists in Brazil who infused their practices with their own historical, geographical and cultural contextual influences. Felinto points that because of the specificity of their locations and their life experiences, those artists go beyond academic aesthetic solutions. By looking at artists such as Ana das Carrancas, Felinto proposes to read their practices through critical lenses that articulate non-monolithic collectivity and individual histories. Doing so the scholar aims to disrupt the narrative of art in Brazil, seen as a continuation of European art history, to meet the reality of the production of these artists. “They are not “modern artists”, and they are opposed to this, they could not benefit from urbanization projects of the 20th century because they were either on the periphery or in the rural area. Art is part of their daily survival, they re-establish the link between life and art,” says Felinto. Furthermore, the scholar pointed out that not only those artists can’t be located within the canonical European art history, but that black women, in general, have also been erased from places of curatorship. By revealing these artists’ strategies and how their surroundings pushed their practices beyond academic aesthetic solutions, Felinto reveals their resilience, subjectivity, and unique artistic strategies from an analysis of who they are and where they come from, their positionality, and the intersection of their practices. Intersectionality will also permeate the collaborative aspects of curatorship that Thiago de Paula Souza presented next.

Thiago de Paula Souza’s presentation was guided by an initial question: how to create curatorial experiments with the participation of artists who have been impacted by colonial violence, and at the same time how to escape being co-opted by neoliberal colonial gaze? According to Souza, from this question emerges a strategy of refusal put in practice by both curators and artists. A strategy that aims to unlearn colonial categories that leaked into modernity as racist institutional choreographies, as put by Souza. That is, within the colonial institutional spaces, knowledge production and learning are performed to allow some groups to participate as full citizens and others to not. Through the disruption of a categorization schema, for instance, Juliana dos Santos’s abstract painting is a form of refusal performed within institutional spaces, disrupting their racist choreographies. This “strategy of refusal” as put by Tina Campt, Souza says, aims to avoid the making of art by black and indigenous artists to be simply used to please neoliberal needs. Within such a framework Souza spoke of how important it is to emphasize collaboration among artists and curators and to honor everyday creative and disruptive processes. An even broader articulation of collectivity will be offered next by Luiza Gomes, to whom black women literary production provides the grounds to create a decolonial framework to poke at museum theory.

Luzia Gomes proposed to frame creativity and innovation beyond denouncing institutional racism as a path to answer the question of how we – African descendants – look at museum exhibitions. Gomes highlighted the works of Fernanda Felizberto, Janaina Damasceno, Roseanna Borges, among others, whose academic production approaches black women’s displacement in literature to affirm a (black) right to look. From such a framework – one that takes African Brazilian insurgency and black women protagonism – affirms Gomes, images can be seen as categories of transformation and an African visuality emerges to pave the way to such a right to look, and subsequently a right to articulate exhibitions on the making and on the looking to create new curatorial projects.

At the end of Gomes’ presentation other participants added productive points such as how bell hooks updated Paulo Freire’s pedagogical praxis by adding love and cure as decolonial pedagogical practices. In addition to Gomes’ inference that we – African descendants – have a specific positional right to look, Thiago de Paula Souza offered that “the museum can be seen as a tool for the redistribution of powers and affections through temporary exhibitions with special collections taking advantage of the provisional for solutions for the now, not forever.” An interesting future discussion was seeded by Gomes. While Souza talked about the use of museum’s special collections, Gomes asked how to use sources beyond museum collections and at the same time dialogue with museum theory. Such a question, Gomes says, will take us to the realm of public policies and the fact that museums don’t do anything, the people who work at the museums do. Both Souza and Gomes strategies are valuable to the common goal of freedom and liberation. It is productive to think about Gomes’s question in conjunction with the next presentation addressing whiteness and the erasure of black subjectivity, for both involve the people in and out the museums, exhibitions, and Brazilian Art history narratives. Perhaps we can ask: If the museums are made of people who take or not action to revoke institutional racism, who are those people? Does it matter if they are black or white?

Kleber Amâncio spoke of Brazilian whiteness and how such whiteness has erased or silenced blackness, and specifically, Brazilian black art production. For Amâncio, as for Mario Pedrosa, “art is an exercise of freedom”, and thus, to achieve the freedom we need to disrupt and challenge Brazilian Art History narratives to bring black art production to the foreground. One strategy proposed by Amâncio’s scholarship is to unveil whiteness to reveal how the erasure of blackness had been visually articulated in works made by Brazilian white artists, and how the readings of such artworks had supported such erasure. Specifically, Amâncio uses the work of Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra/The Black Woman, from 1923, in conjunction with new approaches to the previous formal analysis of the work to support his decolonial exercise. Amâncio points to the works of artists Tarsila do Amaral, Heitor dos Prazeres and Portinari whose visual strategies render the control of the black bodies diminish their intellectual capacity, erasing their subjectivities, and ultimately portraying a pacified body. In contrast, Amâncio talked about the work of Brazilian black artist Arthur Timóteo da Costa paraphrasing Chinua Achebe: “it is not enough any longer that black people be represented, but that they can represent and thus be human beings.” It may not look like a disruptive proposition, but to say that African descendants and African people are human beings still carries the weight of oppression, but more important the means to liberation. A liberation that may be made not through images of pacification but, as we will see next, by a sequential juxtaposition of the visuality of whiteness, of blackness, and document display to disrupt colonial narratives.

Igor Simões thinks of the exhibition as an editing room in which fragments of stories, experiences, and practices are juxtaposed as a curatorial strategy to create visual frictions. In a conflictive relationship, says Simões, the artworks put in sequence disagree with each other at times and agree at others to disrupt a whitewashed Brazilian Art History. Simões asked what happens when Assentamento by Rosana Paulino and A Negra by Tarsila do Amaral are exhibited side by side? In other words, what happens when an artwork that articulates blackness as a whole subjective collective force, as done by Paulino, and an artwork that articulates blackness through typification as in A Negra, are seen together? Or, what happens when the work of Rubem Valetim is juxtaposed to the figure of a pretend bestial Exu in Mario Cravo Jr.’s work? According to Simões, what happens is that we are invited to a discussion rather than a stabilized (whitewashed) curatorial narrative.

Going back to the beginning and to Isabel Dias’s question of “Why are we revising the history of Spain in America,” I would like to expand this question to why we are revising the history of the Americas with African descendants and Indigenous people at its foreground. I believe this webinar not only provided answers to that question but went beyond and offered practical strategies not to merely revise but to disrupt and, hopefully, revoke colonial practices. Tiago de Paula called for an urgent redistribution of museum resources, Igor Simões proposed the insertion of documents juxtaposed to images in an art exhibition to cause friction. Renata Bittencourt called for the museum to change location, and to empower audiences to determine what the new museum must be, must do, must accomplish. If traditional museum practices, Bittencourt posits, are consensual, it is important to know and discuss what such consensus is. In this report, the traditional paradigm of museums has whitewashed, and erased blackness, has erased the art production of black and indigenous people, and has rendered black people pacified, bestialized, and subjugated. Perhaps, that was what Isabel Dias meant by “all that [Spanish colonization] was to “bring universities, civilization, and the West to the American continent.” In a certain sense, she is right, for the neoliberal democracy ideal was founded upon such racist institutions. In contrast, Renata Bittencourt affirmed that the contemporary museum is the museum of the debate, of the friction, where institutional racism can be put on display, where experimentation replaces canonization. A political museum that may be a space for resurrection rather than pacification. A resurrection armed by bold decolonial scholarship and curatorial practices as presented by the guest speakers at this webinar. My hope as a black woman visual artist and scholar is that the reports of this webinar, in their brilliant diversity of approaches and intersectionality, can work as non-linear guerrilla manuals to be used by me, by many, anywhere, translated into multiple languages. This way we can dream, create, innovate, and more importantly disrupt capitalist/racist institutions by exercising our collective right to make and look at art beyond institutional boundaries.