35th bienal de são paulo choreographies of the impossible

(eds.)
diane lima
grada kilomba
hélio menezes
catalogue manuel borja-villel
 35th bienal de são paulo
choreographies of the impossible
The Ministry of Culture, São Paulo State Government, through
the Secretary of Culture, Creative Economy and Industry, the Municipal
Secretary of Culture, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and Itaú present
35th bienal de são paulo
choreographies of the impossible
 ahlam shibli → 52
aida harika yanomami, edmar tokorino yanomami and roseane yariana yanomami → 54
aline motta → 56
amador e jr. segurança patrimonial ltda. → 58
amos gitaï → 60
ana pi and taata kwa nkisi mutá imê → 62
anna boghiguian → 64
anne-marie schneider → 66
archivo de la memoria trans (amt) → 68
arthur bispo do rosário → 70
aurora cursino dos santos → 72
ayrson heráclito and tiganá santana → 74
benvenuto chavajay → 76
bouchra ouizguen → 78
cabello/carceller → 80
carlos bunga → 82
carmézia emiliano → 84
castiel vitorino brasileiro → 86
ceija stojka → 88
charles white → 286
citra sasmita → 90
colectivo ayllu → 92
cozinha ocupação 9 de julho – mstc → 94
daniel lie → 100
daniel lind-ramos → 102
davi pontes and wallace ferreira → 104
dayanita singh → 106
deborah anzinger → 108
denilson baniwa → 110
denise ferreira da silva → 112
diego araúja and laís machado → 114
duane linklater → 116
edgar calel → 118
elda cerrato → 120
elena asins → 122
elizabeth catlett → 285
ellen gallagher and edgar cleijne → 124
emanoel araujo → 126
eustáquio neves → 128
flo6x8 → 130
francisco toledo → 132
frente 3 de fevereiro → 134
gabriel gentil tukano → 136
george herriman → 138
geraldine javier → 140
gloria anzaldúa → 142
grupo de investigación en arte y política (giap) → 144
guadalupe maravilla → 146
ibrahim mahama → 154
igshaan adams → 156
ilze wolff → 158
inaicyra falcão → 160
januário jano → 162
jesús ruiz durand → 164
john woodrow wilson → 287
jorge ribalta → 166
josé guadalupe posada → 168
juan van der hamen y león → 170
judith scott → 172
julien creuzet → 174
 kamal aljafari → 176
kapwani kiwanga → 178
katherine dunham → 180
kidlat tahimik → 182
leilah weinraub → 184
leopoldo méndez → 289
luana vitra → 186
luiz de abreu → 188
m'barek bouhchichi → 190
mahku → 192
malinche → 194
manuel chavajay → 196
margaret taylor goss burroughs → 288
marilyn boror bor → 198
marlon riggs → 200
maya deren → 202
melchor maría mercado → 204
min tanaka and françois pain → 206
morzaniel ɨramari → 208
mounira al solh → 210
nadal walcot → 220
nadir bouhmouch and soumeya ait ahmed → 222
nikau hindin → 224
niño de elche → 226
nontsikelelo mutiti → 228
patricia gómez and maría jesús gonzález → 230
pauline boudry / renate lorenz → 232
philip rizk → 234
quilombo cafundó → 236
raquel lima → 238
ricardo aleixo → 240
rolando castellón → 242
rommulo vieira conceição → 244
rosa gauditano → 246
rosana paulino → 248
rubem valentim → 250
rubiane maia → 252
sammy baloji → 260
santu mofokeng → 262
sarah maldoror → 264
sauna lésbica by malu avelar with ana paula mathias, anna turra, bárbara esmenia and marta supernova → 266
senga nengudi → 268
sidney amaral → 270
simone leigh and madeleine hunt‑ehrlich → 272
sonia gomes → 274
stanley brouwn → 276
stella do patrocínio → 278
tadáskía → 280
taller 4 rojo → 282
taller de gráfica popular → 284
taller nn → 290
tejal shah → 292
the living and the dead ensemble → 294
torkwase dyson → 296
trinh t. minh-ha → 298
ubirajara ferreira braga → 300
ventura profana → 302
wifredo lam → 304
will rawls → 306
xica manicongo → 308
yto barrada → 310
zumví arquivo afro fotográfico → 312
essays artist's residency networks

grada kilomba → 12 auá mendes ëntun fey azkin (mapuche territory)

hélio menezes → 14 juliana dos santos nls / new local space (jamaica)
manuel borja-villel → 20 mario lopes sertão negro (brazil)
diane lima → 28 natali mamani
hagar kotef → 42 queen gloria "mama g" simms
gladys tzul tzul → 96 xadalu tupã jekupé
rizvana bradley and
denise ferreira da silva → 148
tiganá santana → 212
ilenia caleo → 254
leda maria martins → 314
collaborations institutional letters +

abigail campos leal josé olympio da veiga pereira → 336 biographies → 330
ana longoni margareth menezes → 337 credits → 340
barbara copque itaú cultural → 338 acknowledgements → 344
beatriz martínez hijazo instituto cultural vale → 338 partners → 346
carles guerra bloomberg → 339 image credits → 348
cíntia guedes sesc são paulo → 339 publication credits → 352
claudinei roberto
david pérez
déba tacana
emanuel monteiro
fernanda carvajal
getsemaní guevara
heitor augusto
horrana de kássia santos
igor de albuquerque
isabel tejeda
josé antonio sánchez
juliana de arruda sampaio
kaira cabañas
kênia freitas
kike españa
luciana brito
luciane ramos silva
marco baravalle
maria luiza meneses
mario gooden
miro spinelli
natalia arcos salvo
nicole smythe-johnson
oluremi onabanjo
omar berrada
pérola mathias
phillipe cyroulnik
rafael garcía
renato menezes
rocío robles tardío
rossina cazali
sara ramos
sol henaro
sylvia monasterios
tarcisio almeida
tatiana nascimento
thiago de paula souza
choreographies of diane lima grada kilomba
the impossible

choreographies of the impossible takes shape from a conceptual exercise

that is reflected in our own curatorial training and practice. We came
together to create a horizontal group, without the hierarchy of a chief
curator or the homogeneity of a collective. It is a way of choreographing
that considers our different backgrounds, education, areas of activity and,
above all, seeks to create strategies that allow us to face the institutional
and curatorial challenges inherent to a project of this magnitude.
Broadening collaborative processes and our perspectives was what
motivated us to conceive a set of dialogues, ranging from the list of partic-
ipants and groups and spaces – which offered us examples of alternative
management to current approaches – to researchers and learning prac-
tices not necessarily linked to conventional fields of knowledge. There was
also a lot of dialogue with the pair of curatorial assistants, composed of
Sylvia Monasterios and Tarcisio Almeida, and with the curatorial council,
formed by Omar Berrada, Sandra Benites, Sol Henaro and Thomas Lax.
As we will see in the various texts that make up this catalog, this spiral
principle radiates through the selection of works and all the other struc-
tures that organize a biennial, such as the architectural and exhibition
design, the education and mediation program, as well as the invitation to
read this material.
Conceived as a weave of voices, or a “braid” of worlds – as the artist and
educator Nontsikelelo Mutiti, who created the visual identity of the 35th
Bienal de São Paulo, urges us to think – this editorial project brings together
a large group of authors who have accepted the challenge of updating,
rereading, translating or developing original thoughts and dialogues, and
who expand the ways of conceiving choreographies of the impossible. This
web, which takes place as a flux, consists of four essays written individually
by the curatorial team, reference texts and a chorus of commissioned critical
essays, which reflect the profile of the 121 participants.
In the exhibition space, a choreography of paths was created, as defined
by Vão, the firm responsible for the architectural and exhibition design of
choreographies of the impossible, which has no themes or chronological
organization. It is a proposal capable of making us feel in our bodies what the
shifts in flows and the interventions in the building produce, such as the inver-
sion of the floors, an illusion created by the envelopment of the central span
– one of the most emblematic architectural structures of Oscar Niemeyer’s
original project – and a design that arranges a sequence of movements that
accelerate, slow down, pause, and suggest different speeds, linking different
rhythms and contrasts beyond the monumental scale of the Pavilion.
These choreographies of narratives place great importance on the for-
mative work carried out by Fundação Bienal’s Education team, especially

8
9
hélio menezes manuel borja-villel

given the challenge of creating facilitation tools that help elucidate to

visitors how such paths challenge, in practice, the relationships with time
and space.
The way the team narrates its path in the three movements – the name
given to the educational publications that complement each other and
reveal themselves throughout the construction of choreographies of the
impossible – is also a good example of the way the concept radiates.
Through the creation of a broad educational program and invitations to
different artists and researchers, the team understands that different edu-
cational procedures are devices of liberation and freedom, if not a calling
in which artistic, intellectual, and political practices become fundamen-
tal in the construction of knowledge based on exchange, collaboration,
and experimentation.
We have also developed a network of artist's residency programs,
formed by New Local Space (Kingston, Jamaica), Sertão Negro (Goiânia,
Brazil), and Ëntun Fey Azkin (Wallmapu, Ancestral Mapuche Territory).
These independent spaces and initiatives are circuits that foster art,
education, and new modes of organization, also providing training and
redistributing access to the local scene, in view of the crises and social
and economic impacts that these territories face. We believe in the role of
platforms such as biennials in creating formative processes and research
and in strengthening collective movements. We also believe that, together
with the discussions that our project proposes, we can contribute to the
maintenance and consolidation of solidarity networks such as Cozinha
Ocupação 9 de Julho – MSTC, which is present at the 35th Bienal both as
a participant and in charge of food service.
The choreographies of the impossible also have an extensive public
program, composed of activations, performances, roundtables, talks, film
screenings, workshops, and laboratories throughout the exhibition.
What can these practices, which choreograph the impossible in their
original locations, generate when put in dialog here? What ruptures and
encounters, consensuses and dissensuses, can this reunion create? For
us, these questions play a central role. They make it possible to invent and
discover new and unknown choreographies.
3rd floor plan closed space open space

2nd floor plan closed space open space

image: Vão Arquitetura
 c-h-o-r-e-o-g-r-a-p-h-i-e-s
grada kilomba

what is choreography? time?

what is a choreography?
what are choreographies?
and what are the choreographies of the impossible?
what is impossible?
what is the impossible?
and what about the impossibility?
can a choreography circumscribe the impossible?
how does one define choreography?
is it an art?
a drawing?
an inscription?
a movement?
is it a dance?
is choreography the art of dancing?
or the art of drawing a movement that is danced?
can we, thus, abstract the idea of choreography?
slow time?
fast time?
unhurried time?
fragmented time?
still time?
can the same choreography vary according
to the time it is danced?
allowing for many interpretations?
creating multiple dances?
dances that were unimaginable before?
dances beyond the power of imagination?
or beyond what was imagined?
or beyond what was imagined for us?

is it the art of inscribing a movement? can a choreography interrupt the impossible?

of drawing a set of movements? and can a choreography occupy the impossible?
their sequence?
in all their parts and fractions? space?

the spelling of a movement? empty space?

full space?
the spelling of a movement that will compose a dance? horizontal space?
the spelling describing how a dance will take place? vertical space?
foreseeing it? diagonal space?

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 how does one occupy the space what is impossible?
for a choreography? the body?

mindfully? the impossible body?

absently?
around? the denial of a body?
about? or its desire?
the violence against a body?
can the choreography get across notions of space? or the repressed desire?
the same way it gets across notions of time? the refusal of a body?
creating infinite dances? or the obsession over it?

crossing the impossible? can the choreography

beyond impossibility? dismantle the impossible?

and the body? creating multiple dances?

who dances the choreography? in multiple variations?
in multiple forms?
is choreography, then, the writing of the body? and in multiple bodies?
and is the body the center of the choreography?
crossing manifold notions of time, space,
the body? presence, and body?
the physical body?
the body, not the object? what are the choreographies of the impossible?
and what is the 35th Bienal de São Paulo?
the possible body?
the revealing of impossibles?
who is possible? the affirming of possibilities before the impossible?
who is impossible? or the revelation of what was always possible?
and who becomes an impossibility? revealing multiple possibilities?

Berlin, June 20, 2023

translated from Portuguese by bruna barros

and jess oliveira
 choreographies of the impossible,
crossroads of time
hélio menezes
I learned from an early age that Time is another name of
the Kitembo nkisi, god of infinity, being that inhabits and
crosses all beings and times. An entity that inhabits and
takes on the body of a sacred tree. A Time that is fed. Its
twinning with the indeterminable times of natural and
more-than-human cycles, and the consequent collapse of
sequentiality as an ontological dimension of time, embody,
it seems to me, an interesting and radical possibility of
altering the rigid time-space binomial. An inherent ability
to de-narrate stories by the movement itself in/of time.
In a similar cadence, the thinker Leda Maria
Martins has suggested that time can be experienced
through the principle of movement: a curve that turns,
goes back and forth, shuffles the chronology, conjugates
remembering and becoming as Siamese verbs. The author
reminds us that one can experience times outside linear
mechanics, irreducible to the modern idea (i.e. the colo-
nial idea) of a sequential or progressive chain. A time
lived ontologically with and as a body. And which finds its
translation in linguistic and thought systems for which the
separation between ethics, aesthetics, body, time, and life
lacks explanatory power.
As Leda teaches:
in Kicongo, one of the Bantu languages of the
Congo, the same verb, tanga, designates the acts
of writing and dancing, from whose root the noun
ntangu is also derived, one of the designations
of time, a plurisignificant correlation. Here, in a
choreography of returns, to dance is to inscribe
curvilinear temporalities in time and as time.1
Ntangu. — Tanga — Matanga — Tango — Matanza.
To write, to dance (in) time.
These choreographies of returns, movements of
the impossible, are understood in the context of the 35th
Bienal de São Paulo as temporalities that are realized
in episteme at each movement that seeks to escape the
1/ Leda Maria Martins, Performances do tempo espiralar: poéticas do cor-
po-tela. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2021, p. 81.
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rigidity of this world torn apart by the daily life of the rites
and practices of total violence. And which make the idea
of a full and just life an impossible occurrence. An unat-
tainable horizon for at least five centuries, for the same
and increasingly numerous wretched of the earth.2 A world
against which, in the end, attempts are made, as unavoid-
able as they are improbable, to wriggle and escape, refuse,
confront, reverse, and repair the consequences of those
very contexts that make the lives of some more impossible
than the lives of others.
These spiral understandings of time, which
perceive it and conceive it as localized and embodied
knowledge, the matrix of all motricity and therefore of all
possibility, support and find an echo in the choreographies
of the impossible. The desire to gather and propose rela-
tionships between a set of artistic and social practices that
claim other cosmoperceptions of time, that try to choreo-
graph other configurations of the world — despite dealing
with impossibility as a condition — was the basis for the
research that resulted in this 35th Bienal, as well as in the
essays and images that make up this publication now avail-
able for your reading.
There are several, even infinite, times at play here:
there is oneiric time, and its capacity for transmutation
to access other planes and worlds, as told in Mãri Hi [The
Dream Tree], directed by Morzaniel Ɨramari; the ancestral
time of mulheres mangue [mangrove women] by Rosana
Paulino, powerful figures in form of roots and anthropo-
morphic trees, in which life, mud and renovation are indis-
tiguishable; the telluric time of ceramics, unearthing sto-
ries of exploration but also of healing, as Marilyn Boror Bor
and Simone Leigh teach us, or even M’barek Bouhchichi, in
suppressing the distance between Dave the Potter’s verses,
M’barek Ben Zida’s lyrics and Conceição Evaristo’s writ-
ings. There is the time-without-time of those who live “in
the time of capture,” as Stella do Patrocínio tells us in her
2/ Frantz Fanon (1961), The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox.
New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Falatórios;3 the time that dwells in the hinge of re/memory
with delirium, as Aurora Cursino and Ubirajara Ferreira
tell us; the time of horror and its incarnate effects, about
which narrative is impossible (but is still spoken of), as
Ceija Stojka did.
There is the time of a time that ends, as in the
Silent March, organized by the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation on December 21st, 2012 — the day the world
ended, according to the Mayan calendar. The slow time
of sowing and the uncertain time of harvesting, set by the
criollo corn garden, and unsubjectable to monoculture,
which Denilson Baniwa explores in this Bienal; the time
of re/de/composition of fungi, plants, and other beings
beyond humans, in long-lasting cycles where life and death
are indistinguishable markers, as Daniel Lie suggests.
There is the cumulative time of “found and unim-
portant objects,” collected throughout Rolando Castellón’s
life in Nicaragua and Costa Rica; machinic time and dance,
in its umbilical links with industrial colonialism-capitalism,
which Warp Trance, by Senga Nengudi, Tales of the Copper
Cross Garden: Episode I, by Sammy Baloji, and Sumidouro
nº2 — diáspora fantasma [Sinkhole No. 2 — Ghost Diaspora],
by Laís Machado and Diego Araúja, seize and decode. There
is the time of mourning and the (impossible, though inevita-
ble) reconstruction of inter/rupted kinship ties, as in A água
é uma máquina do tempo [Water is a Time Machine], by Aline
Motta, which shuffles Afro-Atlantic colonial histories and
family stories of death and self-writing; or as in Palestine
under the gaze of Ahlam Shibli, populated by images of mar-
tyrs and murdered youth, on the street as well as in domestic
spaces, portrayed in Death series.
There is the time of walking feet, of body shapes
that go back and forth between Senegal, France, and Brazil,
as choreographer Ana Pi points out, in partnership with
Taata Kwa Nkisi Mutá Imê, chief priest of the Casa dos
Olhos do Tempo que Fala [House of the Eyes of the Time
that Speaks] — a candomblé terreiro whose name is already
a proclamation of a time that is anything but static.
3/ Stella do Patrocínio, Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome, ed. and
introd. Viviane Mosé. Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2001.
Other artist-choreographers, such as Bouchra Ouizguen,
Luiz de Abreu, Will Rawls, Inaicyra Falcão, and the duo of
Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, are taking part in the
exhibition with propositions that also use the body as the
primary vehicle of time, and vice versa, expanding the
dialogues (which are ancient and always current) between
the fields of dance, music, and visual arts. Whether in
Maya Deren’s camera, who, when filming Chao-Li Chi in
a dance-trance of rigor and accuracy, ends up dancing
herself; or in Katherine Dunham’s rhythmic movements,
between Africas, Caribbeans, and Americas, developing a
choreographic vocabulary that is still influential today on
several generations of artists, here, time and body are fully
interchangeable instances.
●●●
From a curatorial perspective, thinking about these folds
of time of/in artistic expressions also implies relocating
the meaning of choreography — taking it in an expanded
and poetic sense, beyond its disciplinary historicity. Thus,
it consequently required contradicting the assumption of
authenticity of its etymological meaning, freeing the gaze
towards movements, performed in a world that seems
irresolvable, through which improvisation and creativity
develop new and unsuspected motions.
Choreography was an art, a practice of moving
even when there was nowhere to go, no place
left to run. It was an arrangement of the body to
ellude capture, an effort to make the uninhabit-
able livable,4
says Saidiya Hartman about Mabel Hampton, a young
black choir singer from Harlem in the 1920s, in a meaning
that is coextensive with what this Bienal entails. “In its
4/ Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histo-
ries of Social Upheaval. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
broadest sense, choreography — this practice of bodies in
motion — was a call for freedom.”5
In this sense, choreographing the impossible
connotes the social technologies and artistic practices that
seek to circumvent the grammar of violence, referring to
poetic exercises of resilience, social, aesthetic, and cura-
torial strategies of evasion from the norm; a permanent
invitation to the fabulation of a yet unknown future —
despite all infeasibility. A half-moon tempo, as they say in
capoeiragem: the dexterity of combining an elusive maneu-
ver, at the very moment of its realization, with a reverse
circular kick, in a game that is also a dance, a dance that is
also a fight.6 “Alongside defeat and terror, there would also
be this: the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility,”7
Saidiya reinforces.
What does it take to make these instants emerge?
What impacts can defeat and terror have on language?
How have artists been reading or circumventing the
effects of these impossible contexts? What aesthetic
propositions emerge from unsubmissive subjectivities
and collective strategies of emancipation from, against,
and in spite of ruin? Beyond combative reaction, figu-
rative description, and the politics of representativity,
what other expressive forms can the radical imagina-
tion awaken, beyond expectations of resistance through
responsive frontality?
“What do we want, after all, from language?
Everything, everything that allows us to be in the world
without bending our backs,”8 in the words of Edimilson de
Almeida Pereira.
From other perspectives, the term choreography
also invites us to reflect on the risk, which always lurks,
of the seizure of this same dancing freedom by devices
5/ Ibid., p. 322.
6/ Reference to the lyrics of the song “Capoeira de benguela”, by Paulo
César Pinheiro, from the album Capoeira de besouro. Quitanda, 2010.
7/ Saidiya Hartman, “Vênus em dois atos”, trans. Fernanda Silva e Sousa and
Marcelo Ribeiro. ECO-Pós, Rio de Janeiro, v. 23, n. 3, pp. 12-33, 2020, p. 24.
8/ Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, Um corpo à deriva. Juiz de Fora: Macondo,
2020, p. 147.
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of body conduction (not any bodies, we all know) and the
codification of disruptive movements, often converted into
merchandise. Whether through interpersonal relation-
ships hierarchized by social markers of difference (race,
class, gender, sexuality, et al.), by the State, or by Capital
and its derived institutions of surveillance and control
(those of art, especially).
The illusion and irreality of the freedom to wander/
dance, to move in a truly free way, is a funereal character-
istic of these times of extreme clarity in which we live. Of
this modernity-coloniality engendered by the transatlantic
trafficking of people and destinations, by forced displace-
ments and containment barriers, regulatory ideas of bor-
ders and racialized divisions of space, concentration and
refugee camps, policies of incarceration and asylumiza-
tion of sexual and gender dissent, land grabbing and land
disputes, the irreversible consequences of environmental
racism — the aftermath, in short, of a world in agony.
Or rather, of certain impossible worlds that cohabit
(in) the world. Physical and symbolic places that have been
seized as spaces of expropriation and destruction for much
longer and more rapidly than others, and which are nev-
ertheless places of resistance and fabulation. I am refer-
ring to Lake Atitlán, surrounded by three volcanoes and
countless layers of time — Mayan time, colonial time (still
so alive), the repressive time of the Guatemalan state and
society, the time of extractivist neoliberalism — and which
serves as setting and protagonist for Manuel Chavajay’s Oq
Ximtali — a choreography of fishermen’s boats in synchro-
nized movement, generating an unstable quasi-perfect cir-
cle. These impossible worlds are also found in the Raposa
Serra do Sol Indigenous Land, whose Mount Roraima
shines in multicolor on Carmézia Emiliano’s canvases,
despite the illegal invasion and mining that threaten life in
the region with pollution and lead poisoning; in the places
of permanent exile, of which Mounira Al Solh tells us; in
the bars of and for lesbian women running in downtown
São Paulo, photographed by Rosa Gauditano in the 1970s,
in the midst of the military dictatorship; it also refers to the
architectural and abstract spaces of black compositional
thought, as defined by Torkwase Dyson; to the spaces of
surveillance and incarceration, metaphorized by Kapwani
Kiwanga in pink-blue; to the somatizations arising from the
trauma of patrolling and death that lurk along migratory
crossing routes, which Guadalupe Maravilla reminds us
of. Or Deborah Azinger’s abstract landscapes, composed
of curly hair and the blues of a non-idyllic Caribbean; the
sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic, reimagined
by Nadal Walcot in drawings where train tracks meet
workers, dances, and fantastic beings; to the cotton fields
and their role in British colonial control over Egypt, to
which Anna Boghiguian’s Woven Winds — The Making of an
Economy — Costly Commodities refers.
This impossible cartography, where a good part of
the artistic proposals that embody the 35th Bienal de São
Paulo are located, is not the result of an expansive cura-
torial movement, nor of an encyclopedic search through
the world’s eviction rooms.9 Nor is it a residence, although
many of the participants in this Bienal come from this
southern region of the world, the so-called Global South
— a concept that, devoid of an analysis of raciality10 as the
ordering principle of the inequities that underlie moder-
nity, ends up concealing irreconcilable “internal” inequali-
ties, making it too broad.
These impossible spaces to which we refer are
located, rather, in the native, existential, spiritual, and
ancestral territories that find ways to choreograph the
impossible in which they live, conceiving their own instru-
ments, movements, and languages. Territories that are
located in street protests, on their corners and crossroads
— and which take place at the encounter between written
language and visual language in the most diverse ways and
geographies: in the more than 30,000 images of the Zumví
— Arquivo Afro Fotográfico, a collection that holds the
work of Lázaro Roberto, Rogério Santos, Aldemar Marques,
9/ Carolina Maria de Jesus (1960), Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favela-
da. 10. ed. São Paulo: Ática, 2019.
10/ Sueli Carneiro, Dispositivo de racialidade: a construção do outro como
não ser como fundamento do ser. São Paulo: Zahar, 2023; Denise Ferreira da
Silva, Homo Modernus: Para uma ideia global de raça, trans. Jess Oliveira
and Pedro Daher. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2022.
Jônatas Conceição, Geremias Mendes, Lúcio Guerreira,
and Raimundo Monteiro, black photographers active in
Bahia since 1980; in the posters of the Taller NN in Peru in
the 1980s; in Taller 4 Rojo, in the midst of the Colombian
armed conflict of the 1970s; in the visual activism of Taller
de Gráfica Popular and its collective creative processes,
in Mexico in the 1940s; in the fabrics and street actions
of Colectivo Ayllu; in the banners and lambe-lambes of
Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho — MSTC.
Impossible territories extend to the villages and
their enunciations of florestania (or “forest citizenship”), a
possibility of citizen life within the forest, as proposed by
Ailton Krenak,11 and can be inferred from the fantastic and
“erotic” drawings by Gabriel Gentil Tukano; the filmogra-
phy of everyday practices made by Aida Harika Yanomami,
Edmar Tokorino Yanomami, and Roseane Yariana
Yanomami; as well as the Floresta de infinitos [Forest of
Infinities], populated by Nkisi, orixás, caboclos, animals,
and enchanted humans, as proposed by Ayrson Heráclito
and Tiganá Santana. Territories that are consistent with
the quilombo, simultaneously, ethical space and oper-
ation, “the continuity of life, the act of creating a happy
moment, even when the enemy is powerful. A possibility
in the days of destruction,”12 in Beatriz Nascimento’s apt
definition — and one that resonates in the living archive of
Quilombo Cafundó.
These choreographies of the impossible take place,
themselves, in an impossible territory called Brazil. And in
an equally impossible context — in the four years preced-
ing the 35th Bienal, 570 Yanomami children were killed
by mercury poisoning, malnutrition, and hunger in this
country, according to data from the Ministry of Indigenous
11/ Ailton Krenak, Futuro ancestral, ed. Rita Carelli. São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 2022.
12/ Maria Beatriz Nascimento, Beatriz Nascimento, quilombola e intelectu-
al: possibilidade nos dias de destruição, ed. União dos Colectivos Pan-Afri-
canistas (UCPA). São Paulo: Filhos da África, 2018, p. 190.
Peoples.13 This, among the many and innumerable impos-
sibilities that occur on a daily basis in this place, is espe-
cially shocking due to the re-enactment of the 17th century
European invasion — a loop of time that never passed. As
Gilberto Gil sings: “here is the end of the world”.14
The urgency and persistence of these issues have
led these choreographies of the impossible to highlight a
series of artists, collectives, historical figures, collections,
poets, and social organizations, driven by the radical possi-
bility, as Denise Ferreira da Silva proposes, of “thinking the
world Otherwise.”15 All of them are involved in movements
of creation of between-spaces and between-times that,
though ephemeral, are fertile to the practice of generation
and transmutation of life. They meet “the ethical mandate
to challenge our thinking, to free our imagination and to
welcome the end of the world as we know it, that is, decol-
onization, which is the only adequate name for justice,”16
also in Denise’s terms.
●●●
As if in a choreography of returns, the works presented at
this 35th Bienal were conceived between the 17th century
and 2023 — although the propositions and provocations
they allow, in dialogue and relationship, exceed and inval-
idate such dates. And they are expressed in multiple lan-
guages, moving between cinema, visual arts, music, ritual
art, dance, and poetry, among others that barely fit into the
more or less habitual categories.
13/ Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, “Presidente Lula convoca ação
emergencial interministerial na TI Yanomami," Jan. 20, 2023. Available
at: www.gov.br/povosindigenas/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/2023/01/presi-
dente-lula-convoca-acao-emergencial-interministerial-na-ti-yanomami.
Accessed: July 7, 2023.
14/ “Marginália II”, song by Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto, from the
album Gilberto Gil, 1968, São Paulo, Philips Records.
15/ Denise Ferreira da Silva, op. cit.
16/ Pensamento negro radical: antologia de ensaios. São Paulo:
Crocodilo, 2021.
18
19
This ensemble makes it possible to highlight, I believe, the
intense circulation between languages, emphasizing formal
experimentations that mix up the boundaries, for example,
between visual arts, archives, and practices of resistance.
How can we fail to recall Marlon Riggs’s stage-cinema, which
dared to recite love poems between queer black people and
people living with hiv, in the 1980s? Or Kamal Aljafari’s
“camera of the dispossessed,” expanding the possibility
of filmmaking by using unlikely footage shot by security
cameras, recorded by the Israeli army or commissioned by
state advertising agencies? The expanded ways of dialogu-
ing between different languages can also be found in Kidlat
Tahimik’s “cinematographic” installations, where the stories
of Igpupiara and Syokoy, beings from indigenous-Brazilian
and Filipino mythologies, are told through assemblages
that are very similar to a film script. Filmmakers such as
Sarah Maldoror, Amos Gitaï, Leilah Weinraub, and Trinh
T. Minh-ha; poets such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ricardo Aleixo,
and Raquel Lima — for whom the fields of the visual arts, the
body, and writing go hand in hand — are other examples of
practices that develop in circulation.
Such diversity guided the curatorial proposal to
arrange the works in expographic neighborhoods that
privilege sensitive affinities, connections of a more prop-
erly poetic order, rather than guided by approximations in
thematic nuclei, by language types, or formal or material
properties. Nor by chronological orientation. They are
arrangements that allow us to highlight other genealogies
of the contemporary, braids that have not been incorpo-
rated or subsumed into the constitutive teleology of art
history and that allow the encounter, for instance, of the
bindings, twists and body-canvasses of Sonia Gomes’s
sculptural vocabulary, the inextricable weaves of ropes and
fabrics of Judith Scott’s dense compositions, with the lines,
rods, poetry and dance amalgamated in Julien Creuzet’s
installations. For this reason, they decline in the config-
uration of an exhibition space that is averse to linearity,
composed in refrains, unforeseen reappearances; without
a predetermined path or an ideal sense of direction.
“Time, in its spiral dynamics,” says Leda, “can only
be conceived by space or in the spatiality of the gap that
the spinning body occupies. Time and space thus become
mutually mirrored images”.17
The architectural design for the 35th Bienal,
developed in partnership with Vão, therefore favored the
construction of a dynamic between wide and delimited
spaces, alternating movements of contraction and opening,
systoles and diastoles. The architectural design is funda-
mentally inspired by the curvilinear forms of the building
— the mezzanine and central void. The contours of these
spaces, when summed, result in an architectural body
that seeks to disobey the structuring orthogonality of the
Pavilion, functioning in a reversed manner on each floor.
On one floor, the periphery external to the hollow space is
filled with closed rooms; on the other, the central space is
occupied by closed galleries, while its surroundings open
up into a wide, non-sectioned space.
We also seek to extend this concept to the places
of coexistence and encounter that permeate the space of
the choreographies of the impossible. Projects of a gregar-
ious nature, which operate equally as an installation, an
exhibition place, and a space that is open to encounters
— such as Assay, proposed by the duo Nadir and Soumeya;
the re/dis/assemblable tetrahedrons that make up
Metaphysics of the Elements — The Studio, by Denise Ferreira
da Silva; Parliament of Ghosts, by Ibrahim Mahama; and
the Sauna lésbica [Lesbian Sauna], by Malu Avelar with Ana
Paula Mathias, Anna Turra, Bárbara Esmenia, and Marta
Supernova — are examples of these diastoles that spread
between the exhibition floors.
The same can be said of the presence of the Cozinha
Ocupação 9 de Julho — mstc [the Kitchen of the 9 de Julho
Occupation — mstc], from its spiral forms and collective
technologies of governance, gestated in the homonymous
building occupied by the Movimento dos Sem Teto do Centro
(mstc) housing movement, in São Paulo — which creates an
in-between space in which food, street visual culture, the
debate-in-practice of the right to the city and to quality food,
resulting from a responsible production chain, are merged.
17/ Leda Maria Martins, op. cit., p. 134.
Such curatorial proposals stem from an understanding
of our group — composed of my colleagues Diane Lima,
Grada Kilomba, Manuel Borja-Villel, and myself — in
dialogue with the curatorial assistants Sylvia Monasterios
and Tarcisio Almeida, as an attempt to disarrange the
vertical structures of power and their imperative modes
of operation.
From this encounter is derived a conception of the
choreographies of the impossible as a Bienal — in the form
of exhibitions, publications, artistic residencies, public
debate programs, performative actions, mediation and
educational actions, collaborative networks with autono-
mous spaces for art and thought — that is also a platform
for practices of redistribution, a laboratory open to exper-
imentation, to collective governance exercises. A cross-
roads, in Leda Maria Martins’ terms, again:
the possibility of interpreting the systemic and
epistemic circulation that emerges from inter-
and transcultural processes, in which performa-
tive practices, conceptions and cosmovisions,
philosophical and metaphysical principles,
diverse types of knowledge, are confronted and
intertwined — not always amicably.18
Not always amicably, the choreographies of the impossible
can, I want to believe, shake the ground on which this
collapsing world rests. By changing its rhythm, by revers-
ing its cadence, these crossroads of time accomplish the
impossible: they bring back to the dance the all-that-can-be
of times not yet lived.
translated from Portuguese by philip somervell
18/ Id., ibid., p. 51.
 six moments for another time
manuel borja-villel
1. Cairo. 14 March 1932. At the request of King Fuad I of
Egypt, an important international congress is organized
with the aim of discussing and documenting the sound
traditions of the Arab world. After gaining independence
from the United Kingdom in 1922, the Egyptian govern-
ment yearns to assert its identity by showing a history
that differs from the English and serves as a modernizing
example for its citizens. The convention was attended by
scholars and musicians from the Maghreb and the Middle
East, such as Muhammad Fathi, Ali Al-Darwish, Rauf
Yekta Bey and Mohammed Cherif, as well as European
composers such as Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith.
One of the most important milestones of the meeting was
the request to restrict improvisation and standardize the
tuning system, which was not tempered. The government
representative to the congress, Muhammad Fathi, rec-
ommended that musical groups in the area use Western
instruments, which he believed possessed superior expres-
sive qualities. If Egyptian vernacular music had produced
what a British commentator described as “terrible sounds,”
harmony was now guaranteed. The constant reinvention of
rules was also limited, favoring standardization and state
control. The narrative was changed, what was national was
reclaimed, but the framework of Western thinking was
maintained. This allowed participation on the condition
that it was carried out within pre-established and suppos-
edly scientific parameters of ordering and classification —
and also of possession and destruction.1
We know that decolonial processes have not always
been successful and can even lead to counter-revolutionary
periods. Knowing why they failed, analyzing their causes
and consequences, is essential. Hence the relevance of what
the Moroccan thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938-2009) called
“double critique,” that is to say, the continuous questioning
of colonial reason and our position in relation to it.
The overturning of mastership, subversion
1/ I thank Philip Rizk for sharing his research on this conference with
me.
20
21
itself, depends on this decisive act of turning
infinitely against one's own foundations, one's
origins, those origins undermined by the whole
history of theology, charisma, and patriarchy,
if one can characterize thus the structural and
permanent givens of this Arab world. It is this
abyss, this nonknowledge of our decadence and
dependence that should be brought to light,
named in its destruction and transformation
beyond its possibilities somehow.2
In an article entitled “What it Means to Curate for My
Native American Community”, Kiowa-Muscogee-Seminole
curator and activist Tahnee Ahtone wonders about the
way in which indigenous cultures have been introduced
into American museums.3 She does not doubt the good
intentions of her colleagues. However, she questions
whether there was any real will to change the structures.
Ahtone laments that indigenous curators are often forced
to develop their careers in a system that is alien to the cus-
toms and ways of doing things in their communities.
When the alternative or independent is used only
as a style, it does not designate anything outside main-
stream culture. A visit to a few art fairs, exhibitions, and
museums confirms this. Racism is denounced, raciality is
vindicated, but this critique tends to refer to established
patterns, which do not merely question what makes racism
possible, but revalidate it. However, this does not imply a
paradigm shift, because domination remains intact. When
certain approaches become fashionable, when a work of
art becomes a product apart from the context in which it
was created, when we fail to understand that we are all part
of a shared ecosystem in which nothing is ours, and when
the subject-object separation is ratified, the master-slave
2/ Abdelkebir Khatibi, Plural Maghreb: Writings on Postcolonialism
(1974). London: Bloomsbury Academy, 2019, pp. 26-27.
3/ Tahnee Ahtone, “What it Means to Curate for My Native Ameri-
can Community,” Hyperallergic, Dec. 2021. Available at: hyperallergic.
com/702775/what-it-means-to-curate-for-my-native-american-communi-
ty/. Accessed: Jul. 2, 2023.
relationship remains active, regardless of whether the
images depicted are African-American or indigenous.
This entails transforming history, not just remem-
bering it, and requires the reformulation of institutional
governance, and also understanding the role of the art-
ist in each society while recognizing that we cannot talk
about art from a modern perspective, that is, as if it were a
universal and infinitely interchangeable object. We must
not forget that in some indigenous languages, such as
the Mayan, the word “art” does not even exist. To refer to
artistic practice, they use other terms that have to do with
healing, the biosphere, tradition, or with something that is
done with the hands, and which apply to things that belong
to everyone and are therefore inseparable from their
community and territory. Likewise, for Yoruba cultures,
aesthetic delight is not separated from the functionality
of their songs or dances, their crafts, sculptures, symbolic
representations, sciences, or music. As noted by Leda
Maria Martins, while the triumph of the economic over the
imaginative spirit made the terrible rupture between life
and art possible in the West, for the Yoruba, aesthetic plea-
sure is added to and not disassociated from a fundamental
ethical understanding, constitutive of all the qualities of
doing/making.4 This involves a radical change with respect
to Eurocentric ways of collecting, ordering, exhibiting,
and explaining.
4/ Leda Maria Martins, Performances do tempo espiralar: poéticas do cor-
po-tela. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2021, pp. 70-71.
2. London. 1 May 1851. The Crystal Palace, the fantastic
architecture of Joseph Paxton (1803-1865), is inaugu-
rated in Hyde Park. One can argue that the phenom-
enon of the great exhibitions began with it, replacing
local fairs and overcoming the chaos and the social
disturbances they caused. Under the hypnotic gaze of
the spectacle, these exhibitions served to regenerate
cities and strengthen national pride, building a sense of
deceptive unity between unequal classes and groups.
The great exhibitions arose shortly after what was appar-
ently its opposite: the panopticon, which was imposed in the
Western prison system from the 18th century onward. The
Crystal Palace was an open space, based neither on con-
finement nor on a unidirectional vision. From the outside
one could see what was going on inside; from the inside
one could distinguish what was occurring outside. The gaze
became omnipresent and external surveillance was no
longer essential, since everything was available to every-
one. As in prison, control was exercised by the individual
over themself.
The spectator observed from a location that was
intended to be neutral. Traversed by the single perspective,
the bodies did not exist as such, they were transparent.
However, this transparency concealed conflict and made it
impossible to distinguish the mechanisms through which
the propositions were produced, interpreted, and distrib-
uted. With modernity, experience ceased to be an irruption
of the unknown and became captive to a totalizing general
design that caused the loss of relational and performa-
tive spheres.
In the cognitive system of many peoples, words are
invested with effectiveness and power. They express them-
selves through circumlocutions, the different sonorities of
the voice and the movement of the body. Not only do they
represent a thing, but they are also the thing itself. They
contain what they evoke. Contrary to modern thought,
knowledge is not only kept in libraries, museums, archives
or official monuments; instead it is constantly revived and
recreated through oral and bodily repertoires, gestures,
and habits.5 This performative aspect runs through the
works exhibited in choreographies of the impossible.
In its etymological sense, the noun “choreography”
means inscription in space. The Greeks, whose culture was
not so much the origin of Western civilization as it was the
continuity of a set of knowledges that already existed in
Asia and Africa, used two different terms to refer to place:
topos and chora. The former responds to an Aristotelian
notion that is static and entails the dissociation between
agent and space. One can move freely through space, but
not leave it, since space is always identical. Chora, on the
other hand, is a Platonic concept that entails a dynamic
relationship between being and place; there is no sepa-
ration between one and the other. Both form a dance of
encounters and displacements, which teaches us how to
relate to what we know and to what we ignore about our-
selves and others.
The hegemony of writing over other modes of com-
munication was absolute from the 16th century onwards.
Let us mention a remarkable historical coincidence: the
publication of Nebrija’s Grammar in Spain in 1492 — the
same year the Spaniards arrived in America — was key
to transforming language into an instrument of control
and conquest. At that time, the newly introduced regula-
tion avoided constant variations and was essential in the
attempt to suppress knowledge considered heretical and
undesirable by the Europeans.6
Spelling or graphing knowledge is synonymous
with an experience that finds its place in the body in
performance and not necessarily in an alphabetically-writ-
ten language. Many of the participants in the 35th Bienal,
such as Tejal Shah, El Niño de Elche, Pauline Baudry and
Renate Lorenz, or Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne, have
designed installations that go beyond the binomial white
cube/black box. They are constantly transforming, they
encourage the conscious mobility of the public and call for
a break from the straitjacket of all modern devices, fleeing
5/ Ibid., p. 40.
6/ Ibid., p. 34.
22
23
from the transparency and optocentrism characteristic of
the “Crystal Palaces.” There is no separation between sub-
ject and object. Thus, Gallagher and Cleijne’s “landscapes”
in Highway Gothic (2017) are part of a common memory,
not experiences external to the human being. Similarly,
El Niño de Elche’s Auto Sacramental Invisible (2020),
inspired by a 1949 composition by Spanish artist and
inventor José Val del Omar (1904-1982), is both material
and mystical. Such is the case with Tejal Shah’s Between
the Waves (2021), a desiring machine, in which times and
genres flow and the ancestral is current. It introduces
poems and images that question the viewer, returning their
gaze to themself, asking the audience to reflect on their
capacity to perceive.
The voices, images, and objects in these and other
pieces are fragments of a whole, always incomplete, which
must be updated each time. They are not exhibited for
the visitor to recognize themself in them, nor to explain a
higher order, but to introduce elements of rupture in their
way of being and acting, generating alternative political
and epistemological reconfigurations, bringing together
very different kinds of knowledge. Hence the Bienal is not
organized according to thematic, formal or chronological
affinities. A conceptual artist such as stanley brouwn, who
worked in Europe in the second half of the last century, can
make sense, for example, alongside an American comic
book artist from the beginning of the century, like George
Herriman (1880-1944). Or a space like Cozinha Ocupação
9 de Julho can approach the butoh dance of the film
Meditation on Violence that Maya Deren (1917-1961) made
in 1948. This choreography, which brings together schol-
arly and local artistic practices, proposes an insurrection
of learning.
3. Bienal Pavilion, Ibirapuera. 6 September 2023.
A woman dressed in traditional Mayan costume from
San Juan Sacatepéquez stands on a cement base whose
surface is still fresh. As the material dries, her ankles
are also covered and she stands like a monument.
Before the cement sets, the woman steps down from the
pedestal. There is now no memorial figure. A plaque
on its base seems to take her place. It reads: “Freedom
for the rivers, the hills, the mountains, the flowers,
and the lakes!” The action is a recreation of a piece
entitled Monumento vivo [Live monument], that Mayan-
Kaqchiquel artist Marilyn Boror Bor represented in
Guatemala City’s Central Plaza in 2021.
Memorials are fashionable, both in terms of their construc-
tion and their demolition. A natural and logical tendency
of any repressed society is to try to take down the sym-
bols of those who subjugate it. However, it is one thing to
remove the monuments of repressors from public space,
but quite another to amputate history. Such erasure is
often the way in which an order of power is camouflaged
and survives. After 1989 most of the countries that had
constituted the Soviet bloc destroyed or hid almost all the
memorial statues referring to the former regime. This does
not mean that the oligarchy has ceased to exist in Russia
and other countries. Large monopolies have replaced the
Party apparatus.
Boror’s monument is not intended for a superior
being who rises above all others. It is erected for those who
apparently have no history and for non-humans. It pro-
poses the idea of a society in which there is no separation
between community and territory and in which our links
with other species are reconfigured. The sustainability of
our lives is rooted in a politics of care and affection, and
opposes the notion of indefinite growth that has distin-
guished Western society for centuries.
The testimony offered by this Monument is neither
at the center nor outside the conflicts. Its truth is based on
the fact that it is a participant in the problem. The historical
account is also history, not just a chronicle or description. On
the pedestal remains the footprint of the feet, of the action,
the podium remains, but not the figure that oppresses
because of the power it holds; it is not something that is
transmitted or exercised, and it only exists in action.7 In this
way, the Guatemalan artist questions both the language of
oppression and the oppression of language. She proposes
a kind of counter-history, which exposes the way in which
power relations activate certain devices of knowledge and
politics of truth. These devices consist in the ability to tell
the story of other people and simultaneously make it the
definitive one.8 To telling the history of the continent we
know as America with the arrival of Christopher Columbus
is not the same as using as a start point the communities that
originally populated it, nor is it the same to begin telling the
history of Africa with the failure of the African state as with
its colonial creation.
Boror exposes the danger of a single history,
because not being recognized by it or not accepting its
recognition condemns one to non-existence. All the
exclusions, oppressions, scorns, and despoilments derive
from this eviction, but also all the heresies and dissidence,
criticism and the creation of unsubmissive worlds. Those
“without history” are both those who are expelled by it
and those who resist its capture. So it happened with the
civilizations that did not pass into what was considered the
legitimate genealogy of Western culture. “How to endure
nothingness? How to resist not being?” asks Marina Garcés
in the epilogue of the Spanish edition of Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie’s book, The Danger of a Single History.9
7/ Michel Foucault, Genealogía del racismo. Madrid: Las Ediciones de la
Piqueta, 1992, p. 28.
8/ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, El peligro de la historia única. Barcelona:
Penguin Random House, 2019, p.19.
9/ Ibid., p. 43-44.
4. Chiapas. 21 December 2012. March of Silence. retrospection, of remembrance and becoming.12 Time and
Forty-five thousand Zapatistas peacefully and by surprise memory are images that reflect each other. They consti-
occupy some of the municipalities they took by force in tute an enigmatic knowledge, which traps us even though
1994. The demonstration takes place without proclama- their meaning escapes us, because trying to apprehend
tions or chants. For a few hours, a crowd of hooded men an enigma means grasping the ways in which that which
and women march through the squares, their steps form- cannot be seen manifests itself. Every memory can evoke
ing ephemeral spiral shapes. The date is revealing, as it an unexpected event that supposes an opening to unimag-
marks the end of the world in the Mayan calendar and ined futures. Past and future are not part of a continuum,
heralds the beginning of a new era for oppressed peoples. but interruptions of it. This is cardinal for communities
and races that have lived in bondage and have had to move
Modernity confused reality with vision and, in so doing, between impossibilities, between what was expected of
turned all epistemology into aesthetics. The modern world them and what they actually did.
was not the result of the scrutiny or analysis of certain traces
or vestiges, but a self-evident truth, because perception Their epistemes and a whole complex body
and representation were the same thing.10 This produced a of knowledge and values were re-territorialized,
false idea of space and time. The latter responded to a linear, re-implanted, re-founded, recycled, re-invented,
progressive, and teleological conception of the universe. re-interpreted, in the countless historical cross-
Space was imagined as an empty terrain to be conquered. An roads resulting from these journeys.13
abstract and colonial non-place, incapable of admitting that,
in the territories occupied by modern man, other human
beings and forms of life already existed.11 All the ecologi-
cal catastrophes, personal tragedies, and social fractures
caused by the plundering of resources were erased at a
stroke. In contrast, after a few years of little public activ-
ity, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (ezln)
reappeared, announcing a time and a space of its own, that
of the “Caracoles” (“snails”), which is the name given to the
districts governed by the Zapatistas in Chiapas. There were
no speeches because there is a language that is neither dis-
cursive nor narrative; it is the language of the living body.
The time claimed by the Zapatistas is opposed to
the idea of chronos of the Western calendar, in which time
is just a succession of events. The time of the March of
Silence is, as Leda Maria Martins says in another context,
a spiral, a temporality that bends forwards and backwards
simultaneously, always in the process of prospection and

10/ Rolando Vázquez, Vistas of Modernity. Decolonial Aesthesis and the End
of the Contemporary. Amsterdam: Mondrian Fund, 2020, p. 26. 12/ Leda Maria Martins, op. cit., p. 23.
11/ Ibid. p 34. 13/ Ibid. p. 45.

24
25
5. United States. Late 19th century. “If I can’t dance, Dance is the place where ghosts repressed by history can
I’m not interested in your revolution.” This is the phrase appear. Bojana Kunst explains that, by not being attached
attributed to feminist activist Emma Goldman when a to anything, always dwelling on the edge of the fixation
male colleague reproached her for dancing. of its own image, ready to disappear at any moment, the
performing body interferes with the instituted modes of
An admirer of a “rebellious and innovative” Nietzsche, figuration. Excluded beings can emerge through this danc-
Goldman proclaimed that “revolution is but thought car- ing body, discovering forgotten or repressed movements
ried into action.”14 She thus revealed the nature of a history and gestures. The past revives in us through dance. That
which, despite all the revolutionary ruptures it might is why its movements and rhythms constitute a political
contain, was still conceived as a continuous evolutionary praxis. The choreographies that Katherine Dunham (1909-
process. She reclaimed a history told through the move- 2006) designed in the 1940s on the basis of her anthropo-
ment of dance. That is to say, a different history, with its logical research in the Caribbean would be a clear example
paradoxical laws, irreducible singularities, unheard-of and of this. They were guided by an impulse to denounce that
incalculable sexual differences.15 hid in the seams and cracks of an established knowledge
Capitalism originated, among other causes, in the system. In her dances, the body shone without form, and
expropriation of communal lands. Once this was accom- the joyful tension between presence and disappearance
plished, at least partially, there was another object and form acted freely.18
of expropriation, that of bodies, which began in the course
of the s17th century. As Silvia Federici points out, this was
facilitated by the reorganization of the State and the Church,
by the philosophical criteria of René Descartes and Thomas
Hobbes, as well as by the new sciences of anatomy and
statistics,16 leading to a disciplining of the body that aimed to
transform it into a mere working tool, an object that could be
used, exchanged or even destroyed according to the will of
its owner or master. In short, it was a matter of making bod-
ies submissive and obedient to the capitalist work schedule,
of turning the body into a machine, especially necessary at a
stage of technological development that was still in its infan-
cy.17 This subjection has only increased since then and is the
very basis of today’s necropolitics on a planetary scale.

14/ Jacques Derrida and Christie McDonald,“Coreografías.” Lectora: revis-

ta de dones i textualitat, Barcelona, n. 14, 2008, p. 157.
15/ Ibid., p. 160.
16/ Silvia Federici, Caliban y la bruja: Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación origi-
naria. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2018, pp. 183-221.
17/ Victoria Pérez Royo, “Corporalidades disidentes en la celebración.
Fiesta y política en la escena contemporánea", in Bárbara Hang; Agustina
Muñoz (eds), El tiempo es lo único que tenemos. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 18/ Bojana Kunst, “Los cuerpos autónomos de la danza.", in Bárbara
2019, pp. 138-140. Hang and Agustina Muñoz, op. cit., pp. 58-59.
6. San Francisco, 1987. Aunt Lute Books publishes
Gloria Anzaldúa’s book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The
New Mestiza. This book is essayistic, autobiographical,
combines poetry with prose, is written in several lan-
guages (Spanish, English, Nahuatl, Tex-Mex, Chicano,
and Pachuco) and delves into the idea of the border, of
boundaries and divisions. One of the poems in the book
begins and ends with the following lines:
To live in the Borderlands means you
are neither hispana india negra española
ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed
caught in the crossfire between camps
while carrying all five races on your back
not knowing which side to turn to, run from
[…]
To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads.19
Anzaldúa argues that it is necessary to draw a map that
does justice to the territorial reality of the border, that
trans-geographical and trans-historical place where the
reconstruction of collective identities of the diaspora or of
those located beyond coloniality takes place. To this end,
it is essential to reduce the scale in order to assimilate the
fact that the territory in conflict, by the simple fact of being
shared, harbours more stories than those that make up the
national narrative. These stories are nourished by what
each denies of the other, and between the mutual denial a
space is created, one in which the rumor of the narrative
of the expelled population, which has been suppressed
and which is established against the grain of the others,
takes shape.
Can I belong by not belonging? To be a citizen,
yes, but a second-class citizen. Is this belonging
by not belonging, or rather belonging by pre-
19/ Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Fran-
cisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987, pp. 261-262.
26
27
tending to belong? These are still two positions
in tension that should be mutually exclusive,
and yet they are two positions whose overlap-
ping shapes a social identity.20
Accustomed as we are to the fact that only those who inhabit
a territory have a narrative of their own, we have not been
able to construct a history in which narratives have more to
do with relationships than with identities. Unlike the latter,
relationships are not fixed. Beyond reductive categories such
as “American art,” “Latin American, art” or even more recent
concepts such as “Afro-American art,” we should talk about
the flows and encounters that took place on both sides of the
Atlantic. On the other hand, while Foucault understood the
confinement of prisoners as a form of control, control today
is exercised on the basis of mobility. Diaspora has become
a state of permanent deportation, which is the condition of
many people without a voice in history.
Forced migrations, planned relocations, and exiles
are part of our condition. The silences of history are
marked by it. The movement of authors who have worked
on the border, who have constructed a hybrid language,
which is nourished by the past while subverting it, which
maintains roots that have disappeared in their regions
of origin, is unstoppable. This language finds its space at
the crossroads, which is “a sacred place of intermediation
between diverse knowledge systems and instances.”21
In Yoruba cosmogony this crossroads is represented
by Èsù, who is constitutive of everything, of the material and
the superhuman, of the feminine and the masculine. Not in
a binary sense, but in flux, because it cannot be classified
into any category. Èsù represents the ontology of time in the
Yoruba cosmogony, since it is the ontology itself, the time
that curves forward and backward.The reinvention of new
subjectivities, gazes that hinder the colonial domination that
occurs against those who are rejected because of their race
or sexual orientation, is inescapable. Resisting the discourse
20/ Martha Palacio Avendaño, Gloria Anzaldúa: poscolonialidad y feminis-
mo. Barcelona: Gedisa Editorial, 2020, pp. 67-68.
21/ Leda Maria Martins, op. cit., p. 51.
of shame and seeking strategies to rewrite history are radical
political acts, that break with many of the established episte-
mological divisions and unite with authors from different
continents, generating unexpected cartographies.
In his introduction to Stefano Harney and Fred
Moten’s book, Jack Halberstam mention Maurice Sendak’s
famous short story Where the Wild Things Are (1963).22 For
Halberstam, the protagonist of Sendak’s narrative is on
a journey to a world that is no longer the one he left, but
also not the one he originally intended to return to. This
is, according to Halberstam, the most important element
of Harney and Moten’s text. We cannot really imagine a
future when we set off from a reality that is intrinsically
unjust, whose form of knowledge is imposed on us and
does not allow us to see beyond its limits. It is impossi-
ble to put an end to colonialism if we fight it with its same
tools, with its same truths. It is inescapable that we situate
ourselves in a space that has been abandoned by the reg-
ulated and the normative. It is an indomitable, borderline
space that exists beyond colonial reason, it is not an idyllic
utopia, it already exists in many situations: in jazz, in the
improvisation of performance, in noise, in the enigma
of the poetic. This “other place” is already present in our
desire. As Moten says, according to Halberstam:

The disordered sounds that we refer to as cacoph-

ony will always be cast as “extra-musical” […]
precisely because we hear something in them
that reminds us that our desire for harmony is
arbitrary and, in another world, harmony would
sound incomprehensible. Listening to cacophony
and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to
the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.23

Translated from Spanish by Ana Laura Borro

22/ Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercom-
mons", in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive
Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013, p. 6.
23/ Ibid., p. 7.
 the impossible
diane lima
“Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of
creating possibility in the space of enclosure,
a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our
terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is
a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and
the love of too much.”1
— saidiya hartman
When, the other day, you asked me why I said yes to the
impossible, I remember answering almost without think-
ing that it was to survive: a way to find freedom or, simply,
to make things more possible in life.
The questions “what is the impossible” or “what
is impossible” soon popped up, because if we consider
the impossible to be the ontology of black women, we will
always tend to face these questions with a certain intimacy
and, above all, with an absolute sense of refusal, given that
the revolt against the compulsory condition that makes
the impossible more possible for some than for others is
implicit in our daily lives.
Today, looking back on my days as curator of the
35th Bienal de São Paulo from the few that remain as such,
I am left with the same feeling I had during a research trip
to Jamaica, when I understood that, always journeying with
the task of survival, it is to search for beauty that we defy
the impossible.
“A beauty of life” were the words I began to repeat
over and over until the moment I could no longer discern
between what was sea water, tears, or raindrops. “A beauty
of life” seemed to be the revelation of a commitment or a
promise that, at some point, had been made, and which,
until then, I didn’t even know about.
By this time, I was totally immersed by Christina
Sharpe’s thought that beauty is a practice and a method.
“What is beauty made of?”2 she asks. “Attentiveness when-
1/ Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories
of Social Upheaval. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, p. 60.
2/ Christina Sharpe, “Beauty is a Method.” e-flux, n. 105, Dec. 2019.
Available at: www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-isa-method/.
Accessed: Jul. 12, 2023.
28
29
ever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence
whenever possible — even if it is only the perfect arrange-
ment of pins.”3
If the only way to find beauty is to refuse all impos-
sibilities and escape violence whenever possible, perhaps
that is a first free definition of what the choreographies of
the impossible might be. A beautiful experiment, to also
quote my rapture at the way Hartman sees beauty in the
everydayness of rebellious lives, a gesture that refuses
what has been given as destiny and the always scarce
possible options. A life that refuses impossibility, but
“demands the impossible — reparation.”4
I believe that being in Jamaica touched me deeply
because it was a kind of encounter with some notions of
what I consider beauty that I have long wanted to experi-
ence. In one of the conversations I had with the researcher
and opera singer Inaicyra Falcão, who gifted me with
thoughts like “dance is everyday life transformed” and
“grandma was my new world,” she made me relive how
the transits of the Black Atlantic are remade in Bahia,
when telling me how, since she was a child, she nurtured a
cosmopolitan impetus by having access to a whole Atlantic
cultural repertoire that passed through Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá,
in Salvador.
Afonjá is the terreiro where she learned from Mãe
Senhora, Maria Bibiana do Espírito Santo, her paternal grand-
mother and a recognized Ialorixá, how to be an articulator of
worlds. It made an impression on figures such as the French
philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as
they learned through Mãe Senhora’s famous phrase “from
the gate inwards, from the gate outwards” how the dynamics
of knowledge production and transmission take place in the
circular spaces of African heritage in Brazil. A knowledge
that is learned in performance, that is made and remade in
everyday life, in a participatory dynamic in which one learns
with the whole body and not only through an ocularcentric,
3/ Ibid.
4/ Saidiya Hartman, “Extended Notes on the Riot.” e-flux, n. 105, Dec.
2019. Available at: www.e-flux.com/journal/105/302565/extended-notes-
on-the-riot/. Accessed: Jul. 12, 2023.
categorical, and binary dimension between body and mind.
Which is dedicated to all those who inhabit the doorways5 and
which gains from the image of the gatekeeper the determina-
tion of what liturgical knowledge is, which must be preserved
with its secrets in the community of initiates, and what can be
transmitted and recreated as intellectual and artistic expres-
sion for society in general.
Teachings that Falcão incorporated when musi-
calizing the orikis, a memorial poetry that narrates the
heritage of the knowledge of the Nagô-Yoruba tradition and
that, even before becoming the Autos coreográficos: Mestre
Didi, 90 anos,6 or any other of the many books dedicated
to Deoscoredes Maximiliano dos Santos, Alapini, supreme
priest in the worship of the ancestral Egunguns, artist,
playwright, writer, and her father, had already manifested
the desire for a choreography of displacements.
With a sonorous timbre that is felt in one’s skin,
the frequencies of this dramatic soprano’s voice reached
its most plural modes of expression at the borders. From
her long academic career retracing the flows of Brazil-
Nigeria, we ended the day talking about how this trajectory
had informed her “pluricultural proposal of dance-art-­
education,”7 in which ancestral exercises and technologies,
from the deepening of collective listening to the exercises
of collectivization of choreographic processes through
everyday movements, build an archeology of spinning that
finds, in the voice, its own dance.
By the end of the day the only thing we hadn’t
talked about was the title for the project we had commis-
sioned, which concerned the recording of an album, the
publication of a book, and a presentation of her lyrical per-
formance. But as “every wheel of movement turns into a
radiating center of force and vibratory energy that expands
5/ Dionne Brand, Um mapa para a porta do não retorno: notas sobre per-
tencimento, trans. Jess Oliveira and Floresta. Rio de Janeiro: Bolha, 2022.
6/ Deoscoredes Maximiliano dos Santos, Autos coreográficos: Mestre Didi,
90 anos. Salvador: Corrupio, 2007.
7/ Inaicyra Falcão dos Santos, Corpo e ancestralidade: uma proposta pluri-
cultural de dança-arte-educação, 2. ed. São Paulo: Terceira Margem, 2006.
its borders,”8 two days later Falcão wrote to me saying that
the project had been baptized. When I read it, I was sur-
prised, for it was the same expression by which I had been
called that night by a researcher passing through town,
who explained to me the meaning of the word in Yoruba. I
breathlessly replied to Falcão, who told me the reason for
her choice: when she went to Nigeria, she was soon called
TOKUNBÓ. And when she began to attend Ilê Axipá, the
ancestors also gave her the title of TOKUNBÓ. “I am always
hovering. I go to Nigeria and I come from abroad, then I’m
here and I come from there.”
TOKUNBÓ: sounds between the seas. We have a title.
the Mona Lisa
I grew up in a town called Mundo Novo, in the state of
Bahia,9 in a house with a beautiful view over two moun-
tains, where the window was the stage for my imagination
and my thirst for discovering what lay beyond the valley,
or what I might see behind the mountain range. In that
house, I grew up with abundance and prosperity, and by
the late 1980s, my mother had been the first to realize
and conquer much of what was not widely available in the
city as a field of possibilities. And that was a lot for me.
I don’t know if anyone else in my family saw it the same
way, so I don’t speak of it as a fact, but as an impetus, a
fire, a feeling. As I suppose the impossible makes its home
in believing, the walls, as unbelievable as this story may
sound, were taken over by reproductions of classical works
of Western art history. In birthday photos, balloons on the
walls contrast with duly framed characters, among them
the Mona Lisa (1503), by Leonardo da Vinci; the work Bust
of a Man (the Athlete) (1909), by Pablo Picasso; A Walk at
Twilight (1889-90), by Vincent van Gogh; as well as two
still lifes, a Virgin Mary with a child in her arms, a clown,
8/ Id., “Tramas criativas de corpo e ancestralidade,” in Fundação Bienal
de São Paulo (ed.), aqui, numa coreografia de retornos, dançar é inscrever
no tempo: publicação educativa da 35ª Bienal de São Paulo — coreografias do
impossível. Movimento 1. São Paulo: Bienal, 2023.
9/ Mundo Novo literally translates as “new world”.
and a woman with a horse — for the last two, I always held
less appreciation.
I grew up with them, talking to them, naming them,
and literally creating my own stories for them. The Mona
Lisa, of course, was the one that impressed us the most.
At nightfall or when fear of being alone crept in, so did the
fear of that eye that stalked us. And, in case of any disobe-
dience or restlessness, it was enough to remember that
the ghost was hanging and that, if I was not brave, at some
point those eyes would catch me.
I don’t know what seems more impossible to me: to
have met the Mona Lisa in that condition or to have man-
aged to escape from her.
As I grew up in a house with a communist and trade
unionist mother, and a great-grandmother who, having
passed away at the age of almost 104, left us as a legacy,
among many teachings, the proverb “tomorrow is dark,”10
I decided to tell this story, because I came back from Falcão’s
house wondering if it was not from this episode that beauty
became a synonym of escape for me. Also, to highlight how
multiple are the ways in which the impossible constitutes
us throughout life. What Hartman, when discussing the
work of the artist Simone Leigh, calls the “monumentality of
the everyday”:
Her work, like my own, is preoccupied with the
question of scale: how to undo assumptions about
the provincialism and narrowness of black wom-
en’s life and work, so that the dimensions of their
existence in the world, their contribution, their
way of making and doing might be recalibrated.11
This means that one can see the lives of black women not
only as an “inventory of violence”12 but as an “architecture
10/ In Portuguese the sentence “o amanhã é escuro" concentrates a
poetic and prophetic charge with two meanings: dark is also Black which
means the future.
11/ Saidiya Hartman, “Extended Notes on the Riot", op. cit.
12/ Ibid.
30
31
of possibilities,”13 so that we can find a “critical language
capable of conveying the epic scope of the black ordinary
and the monumentality of the everyday.”14
It was as much this ordinary life of cosmopolitan
Salvador that Falcão’s lyric singing transcended, as it was
this ordinary re/cognition of Black women’s creative and
intellectual output that materializes in the many images,
sculptures, and encounters created by Simone Leigh, that
readied me to respond, in the lecture we gave in collabora-
tion with New Local Space (nls) in Kingston, Jamaica, to
what had brought me there.
We were greeted by Deborah Anzinger, who, in
addition to her work with painting, sculpture, video,
and installation, is the founder of nls, an independent
art space that originated in the garage of a music studio
where big names of reggae music that Jamaica exported to
the many bays of the Atlantic passed through. I had been
familiar with Anzinger’s work for some years, but it was
at Loophole of Retreat, a large seminar hosted by Leigh
and organized by Rashida Bumbray as part of the artist’s
exhibition at the US Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, that
we met for the first time.
I think then, that two other events had brought
me there: An Unlikely Birth (2018), a series by Anzinger
selected for the choreographies of the impossible, in which
the artist, combining synthetic and natural materials,
through abstraction tensions geographical, ecological, and
spatial paradigms “to develop a syntax that centers and
shifts the ways that Black female embodiment is paralleled
with the land.”15 And also an unlikely birth through music,
which is what I actually managed to say in the opening
lecture referring to the arrival of reggae music in Bahia
and the reinvention, in recent decades, of its sonic cells
through the creation of samba-reggae and soundsystem
culture. Movements that I incorporated as knowledge from
a very young age, even before I read A cena em sombras
13/ Ibid.
14/ Ibid.
15/ See the artist’s talk at Loophole of Retreat. Available at: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=mH9oGYiBGNE. Accessed: Jul 19, 2023.
[The Scene in Shadows], Os dias anônimos [Anonymous
Days], Afrografias da memória [Afrographies of Memory]
and Performances do tempo espiralar [Performances of
Spiral Time], all classics by the poet, essayist, playwright,
and queen of Nossa Senhora das Mercês of the Irmandade
de Nossa Senhora do Rosário do Jatobá, Leda Maria
Martins, from whom I learned what I consider a proverb
and continue to repeat with conviction: “that which in the
voice and body is repeated is an episteme.”16
In the 1970s and 1980s, music became the primary
form of expression of the politics of being Black in Salvador
and, although there is no consensus on the origin of
samba-reggae,17 what we do know is that, having been born
in the context of carnival entities called blocos-afro, it is a
rhythm that, together with ijexá, a beat from candomblé
ceremonies, emerges as a precursor of the various con-
ceptions of the organized Black movement. And it was the
generative and performative force that underlies the idea
of movement that contaminated me.
During the same program we developed with nls,
which also included readings of young artists’ portfolios
and an in-depth discussion with key players in Kingston’s
art scene, we also met Queen Gloria “MaMa G” Simms, a
multidisciplinary artist, cultural and spiritual Jamaican qui-
lombola leader who created the Maroon Indigenous Women
Circle. With a deep knowledge of the various Jamaican
ritual and cultural traditions, such as kumina, rastafari,
and revival, MaMa G also shares practices and knowledge
developed in the Maroon towns, quilombola towns that have
emerged in the mountains of Jamaica since the 17th century,
in view of the intensification of Atlantic trafficking under
British rule and forced labor on plantations. For her, impro-
visation is the root of choreography and, when she dances,
she is choreographed by the spirits.
16/ Leda Maria Martins, “Performances do tempo espiralar,” in Graciela
Ravetti and Márcia Arbex (eds.), Performance, exílio, fronteiras: errâncias
territoriais e textuais. Belo Horizonte: FaLe/ufmg/PosLit, 2002.
17/ For a more in depth discussion, see Goli Guerreiro, “As trilhas do
Samba-Reggae: a invenção de um ritmo.” Latin American Music Review,
v. 20, n. 1, pp. 105-40, 1999.
Our trip to Jamaica fulfilled the goal we had from the
beginning: to build the Bienal’s relationship networks
through connections with independent spaces, autono-
mous communities, social movements, and collectives.
From this event we built another bridge, this time between
nls and Sertão Negro, a space run by artist Dalton Paula in
Goiânia, in Midwest Brazil, where we commissioned a res-
idency program that will feature artists Juliana dos Santos,
Mário Lopes, and MaMa G. In the Bienal Pavilion, the list of
movements grows: Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho — mstc,
MAHKU, and Zumví, to name just a few.
As we will see below, in addition to a debate that
goes beyond the regulation of bodies, nature, and geogra-
phy; land disputes, migration, and forced displacements;
the notions of home, shelter, and borders; survival strate-
gies and the flows of communication and knowledge that
are organized in the movement, what these practices have
in common is the way they find diverse and often unimag-
inable solutions to perform their impossible contexts in
terms of expression and language.
a history that takes place in language and
through language
Living between an old and a new world, between phys-
ical and spiritual borders, between image and text, is
how we can say that the self-described “Chicana, tejana,
working class, sapatão feminist poet, writer and theorist”
Gloria Anzaldúa also lived. In more than one of her many
drawings presented at this Bienal, we observe how the
author mobilizes the concept of nepantla — meaning “place
in the middle” in the indigenous language of Nahuatl
Mesoamerica — to articulate how the psyche resembles
border towns. Describing the United States-Mexico border
as a place where “the Third World opposes the First and
bleeds” and how the life force of these two worlds merge
“to form a third country — a border culture,”18 she presents
how nepantla theory disrupts the way events are ordered in
18/ Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4.
ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012, p. 3.
time precisely by sustaining lived experiences that emerge
between spaces.19
These notes, diagrams, and transparency draw-
ings that, in the 1990s, were projected on the many walls
where Anzaldúa presented her workshops and lectures
as a teacher also highlight how the author understands
the construction of her identity as performative, and how
that same expression was performed through language.
Writing in the first person articulating lived experience
as episteme, she states: “When I studied painting and
writing, I discovered that I could create concrete universes.
Rather, I didn’t create them; I was the conductor for them,
the channel.”20
Anzaldúa’s drawings relate to other radical spaces
of imagination and help expand discussions between art
and politics and the poetic and utilitarian dimensions of
language. After all, what do these impossible contexts cre-
ate in terms of language, and how has artistic production
been more or less able to express them? The ways in which
these ethical contexts directly affect the work/effort (labor)
of creation, regulating, defining or (dis)enabling aesthetic
choices, constituted an important element that drove the
selection of artists and works for the exhibition.
As we will see in many works, the impossible refers
to the political, legal, economic, and social contexts in
which many of the artists are inserted, but also to the way
in which such artistic and social practices find strategies
to circumvent the effects of these same contexts in their
modes of manifesting, expressing, and producing art.
These are works that escape the theme-figure norm, the
self-image of regulation, the systems of capture staged by
the regimes of ultra-visibility, the encyclopedic history of
Western art, and the representative literality commonly
present in the convergences between art and politics.
Poetics that are of the order of improvisation, but that
19/ Id., “Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera,” in AnaLouise
Keating (ed.), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham: Duke University Press,
2009, pp. 176-86.
20/ Id., “Creativity and Switching Modes of Consciousness,” in AnaLouise
Keating, op. cit., pp. 103-10.
32
33
also refer to organized, disobedient, irregular, monstrous,
or sufficiently fugitive movements that they cannot even
be categorized. It is this impossibility of essentializing
them, making them predictable, or containing them that
also causes the feeling that we are building a Bienal that,
although extremely political, mobilizes multiple systems
of representation.
An exercise in abstraction and radical imagination
that lies behind the provocation “imagine if there was a les-
bian sauna,” from the Sauna lésbica [Lesbian Sauna] proj-
ect, which encourages the public to break with stereotypes
and what we could imagine, but that the installation space,
due to its disruptive capacity, plays with, tensions, and
subverts. Or what pink-blue (2017), an installation by artist
Kapwani Kiwanga, tells us, in which pink and blue lights
transcend their normative meanings and reveal sophis-
ticated surveillance technologies. Also in the way Julien
Creuzet finds beauty and spatializes his poetry in materials
that could be considered ‘worthless’, creating sculptures
animated by the singing of water mothers, from which
sprout transgenic fish, boat sails planted by seeds and
many other indecipherable images. Or in the way Otávio
Caetano attracted, as he himself said, “lives of value” to the
Quilombo Cafundó and made the community a feature in
the newspapers, by making Cupópia, the ‘secret’ language
spoken in the quilombo derived from Quibumbo, generate
curiosity and visibility, mobilizing society against the vio-
lent land dispute they faced in the 1970s, by strategically
performing it between one corner or another of the city.
A strategy of self-defense and sound expression similar to
that found by Stella do Patrocínio, a victim of eugenicist
policies and psychiatric incarceration, who found in her
voice and in what she herself called Falatórios [chatter]
a form of rebellion against the cloistered space. As do
Patrocínio said, according to an unsigned and of unrecog-
nized date newspaper: “I came to stay. Here I will watch the
end of the world.”21
21/ Stella do Patrocínio: a história que fala. Available at: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=ev10K_1JEmg. Accessed : Jul. 19, 2023.
the impossible
The project of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo — choreogra-
phies of the impossible — arises in an important and decisive
context of collective and social mobilization regarding
debates on justice, power relations, institutional criticism,
and representation in contemporary art. As someone who
has worked and actively followed these discussions over the
last ten years, and considering the international relevance
of the Bienal de São Paulo, the absence of Black-Brazilian
curators, which has marked its last 34 editions, at the very
least indicates, with the choreographies of the impossible, the
singularity of Brazil in the debate, especially considering the
knowledge that the experience of the impossible, from here
on, has produced.
Considering that almost 60% of the country’s
self-declared population is Black and Indigenous,22 and
that the Brazilian colonial system received the largest
number of enslaved Africans in the world, what a sociolog-
ical explanation based on the logic of exclusion does not
reveal about this singularity is that it was racial differ-
ence, the most effective tool used in the 20th century to
camouflage the ways in which the accumulation of capital
occurred through the exploitation of enslaved bodies and
Indigenous native lands, “transubstantiating the effects of
colonial mechanisms of expropriation in natural defects
(intellectual and moral) that are signaled by physical, prac-
tical, and institutional differences.”23
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the thinker and artist who,
over decades of extensive intellectual production, has made
it possible to name the impossible. Offering us analytical
tools and modes of intervention through a Black feminist
poetics, the concept of the “unpayable debt” has been essen-
tial for expanding thinking on reparations in the country.
Through this concept, the author, instead of producing an
institutional critique of specific cases in which the appli-
22/ According to 2022 census data, conducted by the Brazilian Institute
of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
23/ Denise Ferreira da Silva, A dívida impagável. São Paulo: Oficina de
Imaginação Política e Living Commons, 2019, p. 35.
cation of the law proves unachievable, shows why justice
always fails in the face of Black bodies and Indigenous terri-
tories: the debt is therefore unpayable
because the legal form of the title governing the
master-slave economic relationship (property)
authorizes the use of total violence in order
to extract the full value created by slave labor,
resulting in descendants of slaves living in scar-
city or economic lag.24
Recognizing that racial grammar organizes global space,
her Black feminist poetic proposal
glimpses the im/possibility of justice, which,
from the perspective of the subaltern racial
subject, requires nothing less than the end of
the world in which racial violence makes sense,
that is, the Ordered World before which decolo-
nization, or the restoration of the full expropri-
ated value of native lands and slave bodies, is as
improbable as it is incomprehensible.25
It is this negative accumulation that brought us here and
that helps to formulate the following definition: the chore-
ographies of the impossible present strategies and politics
of movement, created by a set of artistic and social prac-
tices, both to imagine worlds and to accelerate the end of a
world, where the ideas of freedom, justice, and equality are
impossible achievements. Considering that the art system
is also a field of contestation of the impossible, practices
can be understood as a politics of movement where they:
1) challenge, resist, or refuse global systems of violence that
shape our social imaginary and delimit the notions of the
possible and the impossible. In doing so, they: 2) speculate
and anticipate what is yet to come (may come to be) through
improbable movements that intervene in the regulated flows
24/ Ibid., p. 153.
25/ Ibid., p. 37.
of movements and their representations, creating a discon-
tinuum in time in which the enigmatic nature of artistic
making is realized. This in-between place is the space in
which imagination seeks to gain movement and where the
output of the artists and agents that form the 35th Bienal de
São Paulo is located.
the difference
I remember that Ferreira da Silva was one of the first
people to radically encourage me to reflect on why this
curatorial formation was still necessary. Because it was
still an impossible gesture. Or a percentage, a portion of
what could be completely impossible. A risk, therefore,
all around. A risk produced by its exceptional difference.
And which carried a potential difference, capable of
producing a value that was sufficiently ‘different’ and,
so to speak, spectacular and innovative. The impossible,
the more than impossible or the almost impossible had
happened, and it was the condition of the possibility of
signification — what the curatorial team meant (precisely
our difference), that which was capable of producing
the syntax of the oeuvre/manoeuvre of curatorial (art),
making it a performance that deserved to be witnessed.
And lived.
It is curious that whenever I am lost, I lose myself
in the words of the thinker and poet Fred Moten, and then I
find myself:
But this internal difference of the work of art is
nothing other than the mirror through which the
observer is absorbed into the dangerous whirl-
pool of his own different interiority, the place
where they lose themselves in the very act of
finding themselves, the place where loss consti-
tutes the foundation of self-mastery. Therefore,
the consciousness of art is nothing other than the
consciousness of oneself.26
26/ Fred Moten, Na quebra: a estética da tradição radical negra, trans.
Matheus Araujo dos Santos. São Paulo: n-1; Crocodilo, 2023, p. 340.
34
35
To be in performance, to be in gerund, considering all
that is within, to “make of subsistence an art,”27 a tactic,
an improvisation, is a poetic movement, a Black femi-
nist practice, which, as a critical and creative gesture, “is
always in reference to a way of existing as a condition of
the world, and not as the condition of being in the world,
thus producing that which is at once a feat, an action, a
burden and an artifact.”28 Dancing the choreographies of the
impossible means, then, the way I see curatorial practice
as a performative utterance, in which the production of
meaning is constituted through repeated acts or practices
of a speaking that is doing, in which discourse consti-
tutes reality.
The first agreement I made, then, when I managed
to name the impossible, was to produce wellbeing. The
second was to produce exits, to practice refusal: at which
point I learned that “she would celebrate the fact that every
day something tried to kill her and failed.”29 Getting in and
out alive (I remember the advice) would be a success. In
this work, a considerable part of the effort was to refuse the
idea that, in the end, beauty had not been possible for me:
“To act on the desire to oppose, the desire not to collab-
orate, is to object. How can such resistance suspend the
process of subjection?”30 Moten asks and answers:
This is what objection is, what performance is —
an internal complication of the object that is at
the same time its withdrawal into the external
world. Such withdrawal makes communica-
tion possible between seemingly unbridgeable
spaces, times, and people.31
The escape from a salvationist, melancholic, and romantic
position, which nevertheless sought to sustain practices
27/ Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, op. cit., p. 250.
28/ Denise Ferreira da Silva, “How.” e-flux, n. 105, Dec. 2019.
29/ Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, op. cit., p. 250.
30/ Fred Moten, op. cit., p. 341.
31/ Ibid., p. 356.
of solidarity, and a healthy pessimism, was the tone found
to expose the limits and contradictions of the politics of
representation that the market-of-difference arranges,
as well as the idiosyncrasies that the project of the
35th Bienal reveals.
Considering that cultural difference is what delim-
its, in the modern text, the scope of the ethical notion of
humanity, and that the critical tools available, precisely
because they are also constructions of modern thought,
“are not capable of effectively interrupting the employ-
ment of a total violence that in another context would be
unacceptable against those who are on the ‘Other’ (cul-
tural) side of humanity,”32 Ferreira da Silva leaves us with
a proposition:
only the end of the world as we know it, I am
convinced, will be able to dissolve the idea of
human collectivities as ‘foreign’ with the fixed
and irreconcilable moral attributes that cultural
differences engender.33
It is this radical liberation of the creative capacity of the
imagination that sustains Metaphysics of the elements — The
Studio (2023), an installation in which the artist, through
tools, practices, and texts, leads us to think: “What if the
end of the world as we know it is just right there, any-
where, and everywhere, as a hidden dimension?” It is fire,
an uncontrollable, incomprehensible, unpredictable, and
disturbing matter, that the artist manipulates. Through
a set of tetrahedrons made of equally manipulable iron
structures, Ferreira da Silva reconfigures the geometric
form of fire in classical Mediterranean philosophy to build
a collective-collaborative-implicative space. In its insepa-
rability, its iteration is boundless and only exists with and
in combination with the exhibition as a whole. If at first
the tetrahedron sculptures are loose around the pavilion,
32/ Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Sobre diferença sem separabilidade,” in Jo-
chen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (ed.), Incerteza viva: 32a Bienal de São Paulo,
catalog. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016, p. 58.
33/ Ibid.
when brought together they form The Studio, a space
in which the end of the world is studied and practiced and
which, hosting activities such as the Black Feminist Forum
and the Echo Tarot Reading Room, is art making art.
the politics of movement
When we bring the term “choreography” closer to dance
and performance studies, we observe that implicit in the
West’s historical relationship with the choreographic is the
creation of a disciplined body that moves according to the
commands of a given script. In his precise reflection on the
different ways in which the choreographic relates to the
law, André Lepecki, in exhausting the history of Western
dance, proposes a critical analysis by presenting the
episode in which “Western dance merged its being with
writing to create the neologism orchesographie (a writing,
graphie, from orchesis, dance), the title of Thoinot Arbeau’s
famous dance manual of 1589.” “Here is a powerful inau-
gural duet for us to consider choreography’s onto-historical
relationship to the force of the law,”34 he says. “At the criti-
cal moment when dance meets its fate as choreography, we
see the coordinated work of a lawyer and a priest.”35
This episode that inaugurates the inscription of
the word and the meaning of choreography in Western
history is important because it reveals how the modern
production of knowledge maintains itself and acquires the
force of law by inscribing itself in time and space through
a “pedagogical homosociality”36 that remains even through
absence. From a philosophical point of view, it also serves
as an image to question the Cartesian project of the world
and to help us reflect on the models of governance and the
economies of law, which regulate the notions of movement
and freedom.
Taken by these considerations, I met Saidiya
Hartman at a restaurant near Columbia University while
34/ André Lepecki, Exaurir a dança: performance e a política do movimento,
trans. Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa. São Paulo: Annablume, 2017, p. 63.
35/ Ibid.
36/ Ibid.
on a research trip to New York. I was interested in further
reading about the politics of movement when she brought
up the name of the author Hagar Kotef, which I immedi-
ately began reading as soon as I arrived at Adam Clayton
Powell Street and 137th Avenue.
The intersection between the two readings was key to
articulating how “the creation of this being-for-movement”37
that is modern, rational, universal, of which Lepecki speaks
is intimately connected to the ways in which for Kotef “the
idea of moving freely remains at the heart of a liberal con-
ception of freedom” in which “movement was constructed as
a threat to, rather than an articulation of freedom.”38
Reflecting on the effects of colonization through an
analysis that examines Israel’s mechanisms of control over
the movements of Palestinians, Kotef shows how the founda-
tion of these contemporary structures of global (im)mobility
can be attributed to a liberal political thought that equated
freedom and citizenship with movement, while regulating
mobility according to a matrix of racial, class, and gender
exclusions. Issues that, from the point of view of the politics
of movement, lead us to consider that those who write and
produce the choreography are the very impossible contexts
in which each of us lives: they are the laws, the norms, the
violence that regulate, restrict, and make impossible the
freedom of movement. Both in the sense of the regulation
and surveillance of bodies, and in the conformation of a
social imaginary guided by a progressive sense of time.
However, if “the law is a cadence, a rhythm that cir-
culates through bodies,”39 how do these impossible bodies,
for which the law serves not to bring about a demand for
rights but to frame as criminality, disobey and create their
own choreographies to transform their impossible bodies
into possible ones? By providing a reading of the vari-
ous means by which movement is produced, whether as
freedom or as a threat, we find in the multiple discursive,
ideological, spatial, and temporal natures in which these
37/ Ibid.
38/ Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Gover-
nances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, p. 4.
39/ André Lepecki, op. cit., p. 62.
36
37
artistic practices, which make up the choreographies of the
impossible, are located, symptoms common to disciplinary
contexts and regimes in which total violence is applied as a
model of governance.
If, on the one hand, there is an active effort to
prevent this freedom and an impossibility to conceive the
movements as a manifestation of freedom, on the other
hand, when we give to the choreographies the impossible as
their context space, when we broaden their perspective by
poetically naming them as choreographies of the impossible,
the title already produces a disobedient formulation, which
disorganizes, escapes, and tensions the choreography of the
modern subject and the etymological siege of the word. As
Leda Maria Martins teaches us, as a third place, a crossroads
is born here, “a place of intersections, where the lord of
crossroads, doors, and borders reigns, a dynamic principle
mediating all acts of creation and interpretation of knowl-
edge.”40 As a semantic operator, Èsù Elegbara establishes the
process of double speech, dialogical relations, and the cross-
roads of meanings and discourses. As I once heard from the
quilombola thinker Antônio Bispo dos Santos, Nêgo Bispo,
“those who have never been at the crossroads do not know
how to choose paths.”
Considering that the history of Western humanism
is intertwined with the Atlantic slave trade and colonial-
ism, and that freedom of movement is what conditions
the system of slavery, a considerable part of our project is
dedicated to understanding the most diverse effects of the
total expropriation of bodies and natural resources in the
African diaspora and Indigenous territories. However, the
quest to understand how the expansive force of Western
thought became universal, through science and modern
technologies, and the construction of a global axis of time
in which European modernity becomes the metric of
synchronization of all civilizations, takes on heightened
attention in our discussions.
It is the effects of this imperative order of Western
time in the most varied geographies that led us not only to
40/ Leda Maria Martins, A cena em sombras. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1995.
look at certain territories, borders, and geopolitical con-
texts, but also to claim an epistemology of time capable of
breaking with historical linearity and the choreographic
textbook. Also, and above all, of offering us methodological
strategies that would allow us to escape the totalitarian
and encyclopedic complex immanent to the concepts of
biennials as historical events — despite being aware that we
cannot escape the effect of their historicity.
Tensions that help to understand how the term
“choreography” has been broadened through its ability to
incorporate and reflect the social context in which we live,
because it considers that the knowledge practiced in every-
day performances are the ones capable of offering a set of
strategies, technologies, and multiple ways of doing.
This is what we are learning from artists and their
practices, when, for example, those practices resonate the
modes of governing populations within the framework of
liberal democracies, ultra-nationalist, imperialist, authori-
tarian, and neo-fascist regimes, but also when they turn to
the systems of governance that have enabled the accumula-
tion of capital in its most remote origins through movements
of expropriation, surveillance, control, eviction, displace-
ment, imprisonment, erasure, dispossession, exclusion,
extraction, and domestication. Therefore, I also like to begin
from the understanding that the politics of movement in the
choreographies of the impossible are those that negotiate the
limits between the possible and the impossible, challenging
the liberal concept of freedom and also of justice and equal-
ity. Practices that construct spaces and times of perception
that challenge the rigidity of the linearity of Western time.
time
It was, therefore, through the book Performances do tempo
espiralar: poéticas de um corpo-tela [Performances of Spiral
Time: Poetics of a Body-Screen], the concept and title of
the book by Leda Maria Martins, that we found the fun-
damental bases that shape what we call choreographies of
the impossible.
As the cover and title of the first movement, of our
educational material reflects, “here, in a choreography of
returns, to dance is to inscribe in time.”41 And it is these
poetics of the body-screen that radiate performatively
crossing artistic languages, disciplines, media, and mate-
rialities that are gathered in the Bienal Pavilion. They are
bodies moved by a spiral time, where to write knowledge is
“synonymous with an embodied experience, of a full-bod-
ied knowledge, which finds in this body in performance its
place and environment of inscription.”42
I also believe that, as a methodological possibility
for the exhibition, it was through these curvilinear tem-
poralities that we refused the ambition of trying to close,
exhaust, globally cover, thematize, and historically catego-
rize all the possibilities of creation and escape which, over
time, continue to take place in the most different regions of
the planet. Just as every form of oppression and violence
is unimaginable, so too are the generative, situated, and
plural movements that are trying to create the possible
despite the impossible. It is this spiral axis that made it
possible to come and go, through a gesture that begins with
and from the ways in which some global events, situations,
and dynamics reflect and rebound in the Brazilian context,
making it possible to incorporate, in the curatorial process,
the lessons learned and encounters along the way.
Along this path, there are many artists who seek to
destabilize how time is inscribed in space or its sequenti-
ality and causality. Such is the example of stanley brouwn’s
path towards the void; or the search to create movements
that are outside of time, such as the self-defense exercises
proposed by the duo of Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira;
or the way Ana Pi and Taata Kwa Nkisi Mutá Imê propose
an investigation that has the nkisi Tempo/Kitembo, a deity
of the candomblé cults of the Angola nation, as its creative
force. Or the many other paragraphs that I hope we will
spend not in this text, but walking, living, feeling, and
learning in space.
The construction of this exhibitive narrative, which
is choreographed without themes or chronological catego-
41/ Id., Performances do tempo espiralar: poéticas do corpo-tela. Rio de
Janeiro: Cobogó, 2021, p. 81.
42/ Ibid., p. 36.
ries, and which, in architecture, challenges the unavoid-
able modern geometry of the building, can generate
feelings of frustration and sensations of lack and failure.
I think, however, that these discontinuities, gaps, voids,
breaks, and breaths serve another function. They are an
invitation and a call to action, in which each visitor can,
whether out of curiosity, provocation or empathy, reflect
on past or everyday events based on their perspectives.
As well as finding moments of introspection and expan-
sion, through the volumes, enclosures, and scales that the
expographic experience offers in the choreographies of
paths created by the architecture firm Vão.
An exhibitive narrative that makes the mediation
and education work carried out by the Fundação Bienal’s
educational team even more essential to the project. Both
because it reaffirms the relevance of holding a Bienal, which
is free and also supported through public funds, and because
of the challenge of creating mediation tools that help to
elaborate the complexity of some debates with the public.
A good example is the mobilization that the proposal to
work with the book The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School43
by the writer Sonora Reyes provided, through a rapproche-
ment of the team with the Gender and Diversity Center of
the Municipal Secretary of Education of São Paulo to think
about sexuality in the school environment. As the highlight
of the second publication, the aim was to avoid reactions
similar to mine or those of other readers, as well as of the
Guarani thinker and psychologist Geni Núñez, from whom
we commissioned a text about and based on the book, and
who, in the very first lines, exclaims: “how I wish I had read
this before!”
As I write this text, the third movement of the edu-
cational publication is under development. The reverber-
ations of three months of exhibition will set the tone for
this new content. Aware of the incompleteness of these
43/ Geni Núñez, “Desviar para se encontrar: reflexões com base no
livro “The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School,” in Fundação Bienal de
São Paulo (ed.), Meu modo de pensar é um pensar coletivo / Antes de estar
em mim já esteve nelas. Educational publication of the 35th Bienal de São
Paulo — choreographies of the impossible. Movimento 2. São Paulo: Bienal,
2023, p.38.
38
39
movements, the desire remains that the choreographies of
the impossible expand our capacities both to perceive and
anticipate collective survival strategies of a world to come.
Feelings shared intensely with Sylvia Monasterios and
Tarcisio Almeida, curatorial assistants and people without
whom this project would not be viable.
However, if these practices produce dissent in the
spaces to which they belong, what would they create when
gathered here? What kinds of consensus and dissent will
the choreographies of the impossible, when in dialog in
space, allow us to enter? The choreography of returns that
Leda Maria Martins speaks of is the end and the beginning
of an essay that is written by a literal desire for circulation.
the terrible beauty
Observing the fantasmagorical condition of the choreo-
graphic book, its force of law and its spectral becoming, I
like to think of the ancestral haunting that those who dance
with the impossible produce. And I have many reasons for
that. They take me to those paintings hanging on the walls
and to the walls of my memory — to return to the emblem-
atic work of Rosana Paulino. If the Mona Lisa, at some
point, was my ghost, I owe to sound the escape points I
found to avoid her eyes: “sound gives us back the visuality
that ocularcentrism has repressed,”44 says Fred Moten.
In the abundance, wealth, and prosperity of the
“oralituras” passed down through generations in my home,
from which I had the chance to access almost two centu-
ries of history, it was the ghostly quality of ancestry, its
falsettos, overtones, moans, and cries that set the frames
that separated me from the old world shaking. Advice, sto-
ries, tales, and proverbs disturbed the imperative frontier
of the visual and brought me closer to artistic expressions,
which regardless of language, were animated by this vital
energy. Six generations where seeing was not the basis of
respect and belief in what was being taught. Generations
who blindly believed what they felt and, despite little mate-
44/ Fred Moten, op. cit., p. 337.
rial evidence, knew that “what is repeated in the voice and unavoidable reproducibility of the primary scene of orig-
body is an episteme.”45 At home, it was the ancestry that inary violence that animates performances of the impos-
spiraled, collapsed its gaze, made its guard, made its leaps. sible, and to trust the conditions that disrupt language by
It’s hard to forget Luiz de Abreu, who although unable to making room for unimaginable forms of expression. Art
see, transferred a samba, O samba do crioulo doido [The does not pay for the impossible as much as “the blues isn’t
Samba of the Crazy Creole] (2004) — the most classic of all worth the price of pain paid to produce it, but it is part of
classic phenomena of Brazilian music and dance, becom- the condition of the possibility of the end of extortion.”48
ing a doctor in the contemporary art of transmission. The Finding the measure between beauty and its terri-
angles of perspective into which the Mona Lisa’s gaze ble dimension: this is the choreography that pursues the
does not penetrate lead me to the spatial movement that I character of the writer of a history that speaks.
learned, some years ago, from Torkwase Dyson, from her
black compositional thinking and her questioning both translated from Portuguese by philip somervell
about the ocular experience of black people in emanci-
patory spaces and in enclosed spaces, producing through
abstraction and her drawings and sculptures, unimag-
inable and unknown ways of seeing.
Finding these forms and their wonders, and refus-
ing the impossible as an ontological destiny, has never
been, from the beginning of this text, a naïve, deluded, and
disingenuous expression of how the history of degradation
and violation underpins the production of value specula-
tion in the field of art. I believe that everyone here is aware
of what “making an art out of living”46 means, a maneuver
that Hartman called “terrible beauty.” The question that
remains is: would it be possible not to re-enact the specta-
cle of subjection.47
To think the regimes of hypervisibility immanent
to the idea of an exhibition, the limits between specta-
cle and terror, violence and pleasure, looking and being
looked at, is undoubtedly one of the main challenges of the
choreographies of the impossible. What available curatorial
strategies can be mobilized to maintain the integrity of this
terrible beauty? I cling to the intuition that this is a ques-
tion of measure, dosage, energy, and sensations, rather
than thinking about the tragedy of fetish and praise. I also
think that perhaps it is less a question of trying to avoid the

45/ See note 15.

46/ Saidiya Hartman, 2022, op. cit., p. 12.
47/ Id., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury America. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2022, p. xvi. 48/ Fred Moten, op. cit., p. 277.
Sketch. Suggestion of visitation route, inversion of the
second / third floor. Image: Vão Arquitetura
 abbreviated introduction to
movement and the ordering of freedom
hagar kotef
“People have always moved — whether through
desire or through violence. Scholars have also
written about these movements for a long time
and from diverse perspectives. What is interest-
ing is that now particular theoretical shifts have
arranged themselves into new conjunctures that
give these phenomena greater analytic visibility
than ever before. Thus we (…) have old ques-
tions, but also something very new.”
— liisa malki
“OF ALL the specific liberties which may come into our
minds when we hear the word ‘freedom,’”1 Hannah
Arendt argued,
freedom of movement is historically the old-
est and also the most elementary. Being able
to depart for where we will is the prototypical
gesture of being free, as limitation of freedom of
movement has from time immemorial been the
precondition for enslavement.2
Accordingly, Arendt claims that freedom of movement is
“the substance and meaning of all things political. We live
within political systems that have an increasing interest in
physical movement, or perhaps just an increasingly effec-
tive control over it. These systems are, to a great degree,
organized around both the desire and ability to determine
who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces: Who may
enter a national state, a gated community, a particular
street, a playground? Who is permitted to reside in such
spaces and for how long? The “guest” worker, for exam-
ple, may stay, but only on the condition that she will leave
when no longer needed; the “undocumented” immigrant,
however, is always already “illegal” by her very act of
staying. These political systems also operate by determin-
ing who (or what) should be contained and constrained:
1/ Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times. London: Cape, 1970, p. 9.
2/ Ibid.
42
43
young African American men in prisons, asylum seekers
in detention camps, demonstrations within tightly policed
enclaves. They determine for which circulating good (or
capital) a tax must be paid; the exportation of what sorts of
goods (or capital, or people) should be hindered or pro-
moted. They control which segments of borders, public
spaces, and particular estates, should be entrenched and
which segments should be left breached.
As Foucault demonstrates throughout his work,
these systems are the substance through which the modern
subject emerges. From their early establishment as systems
of confinement, to more complex modes of distributing
bodies in space that Foucault identifies as the essence of
disciplinary power, and to a later attentiveness to circulation
that eventually becomes according to him “the only political
stake and the only real space of political struggle and contes-
tation,”3 these systems have functioned as the transmission
medium for the formation of modern subjectivity. In other
words, both subjects and powers take form via movement
and its regulation. Different technologies of regulating, limit-
ing, producing or inciting movement are therefore different
“technolog[ies] of citizenship,”4 as well as of colonization,
gender-based domestication, expropriation, and exclusion.
If I have one argument on this book,5 it can be
summarized — somewhat reductively — as follows: In a long
tradition, that in political theory is often termed “liberal”,
and within which we largely still live today, movement and
freedom are often identified with each other. Movement,
that is, is the material substance of a long-standing con-
cept of freedom. Yet for movement to become so tightly
interlaced with freedom, an entire array of mechanisms,
technologies and practices had to be put in place so that
this movement would become moderated enough (one
3/ Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France,
1977-78.
4/ William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police
of Aliens,” Citizenship Studies 6, no. 3, 2002, p. 267.
5/ This text is a brief introduction edited by the author from her book
Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
could say: tamed, domesticated.) Movement became the
order of freedom. Slightly more elaborately, I propose four
main arguments.
First, I argue that subject positions (or identity
categories) and the political orders within which they
gain meaning cannot be divorced from movement. We
cannot understand, for example, the formation of gender
categories without understanding the history of separate
spheres and the history of confining women of certain
races and classes to the home. We cannot grasp poverty
without thinking about a history of vagrancy, migratory
work, or about homelessness (as a concrete situation or as
a specter). We cannot account for racial relations in the US
without considering, on the one hand, mass incarceration
and, on the other, the history of slave trade and the middle
passage. We cannot explain the current legal situation of
Bedouins in Israel — the repeated acts of house-demo-
lition, of expropriation, the systematic denial of tenure
rights — without understanding the myth of nomadism.
The history of movement, as well as its images; the prac-
tices of controlling it as well as the fear of it; the tradition
of cherishing it as a right as well as the many exclusions
that are embedded into this tradition — all are crucial in
understanding social and political hierarchies, practices of
rule, and identities.
Second, I examine this claim in regard to one,
historically privileged, subject position: the liberal sub-
ject. The particular features of this subject have changed
through history (including and excluding different groups),
and there is very little agreement in the literature on
where this subject — and the discourse of liberalism more
broadly — begins and ends. I have no stakes in marking
these changes and disagreements. For the current purpose,
it is sufficient to say that we can nonetheless characterize
this subject via endeavors to mark him as “universal,” and
often as an abstract entity. In other words, it is a sub-
ject who is a mere anchor for rights and liberties, whose
essence is rationality or “mind.” Through a reading of lib-
eral freedom as pivoting around free movement, I argue —
counter to this understanding of liberal subjectivity — that
at least until the end of the 18th century, the liberal subject
was largely configured as corporeal. My point here is not
merely to rehearse the well-established critique that this
figure was in fact racialized, classed, or gendered. My point
is rather that in the 17th and 18th centuries, even within
the logic of liberalism, the subject at the core of liberal
theory had a corporeal dimension: the capacity of locomo-
tion. Moreover, even after the liberal subject underwent
processes of abstractness, roughly at the turn of the 19th
century, it nevertheless appears as an embodied entity
whenever it could be imagined as a moving body. Indeed,
whereas after the 18th century movement might no longer
be explicitly proclaimed as one of the most important
rights of liberal subjects, freedom of movement remains at
the heart of the liberal conceptualization of freedom.
Asking the question of the political meanings of
movement is, perhaps above all, asking how our bod-
ies affect, are affected by, become the vehicle of, or the
addressees of political orders, ideologies, institutions,
relations, or powers. Asking this question in regard to
liberal discourses directs us away from the prevalent
reading of this political tradition, contending that liberal-
ism perceives and produces subjects as essentially reason-
ing judicial entities. My purpose, however, goes beyond
proposing a more nuanced understanding of the liberal
subject. Eliding the moving body from liberal subjectivity
obscures major modalities of the exercise of liberal power.
Accordingly, the aim of this analysis is to bring these forms
of power to the surface. It is done here not merely in order
to show their historic operations, but also to echo contem-
porary political orders; to point to a political rationale that
still governs contemporary political trends.
For this purpose, I show how this liberal concept of
freedom emerged in tandem with other configurations
of movement, wherein movement was constructed as a
threat rather than an articulation of liberty. Here we arrive
at the third argument at the core of this book. The move-
ment through which liberal subjectivity obtained material
presence and through which “liberty” became a physical
phenomenon was not unbound, unrestrained movement.
Rather, this movement was given within many constraints
and was secured by many anchors which provided it with
some stability. Beyond questions of volition and intention
which themselves constrain movement, movement has
been conceptualized and has materialized within sets of
material, racial, geographic, and gendered conditions in
a way that allowed only some subjects to appear as free
when moving (and as oppressed when hindered.) The
movement (or hindrance) of other subjects has been con-
figured differently. Colonized subjects who were declared
to be nomads, poor who were seen as vagabond or thrown
into vagrancy as they lost access to lands, women whose
presumed hysterical nature was attached to their inability
to control bodily fluids — all were constituted (or rather
deconstituted) as unruly subjects whose movement is
a problem to be managed. This configuration was the
grounds for justifying non-liberal moments — and spaces —
within liberal regimes.
This argument has two opposite trajectories whose
causal relation is not completely clear. On the one hand, we
see an inability to conceive some movements as a manifes-
tation of freedom, and on the other, an active effort to deny
and thwart this freedom. There is a certain co-production
between these two directions but its nature changes across
different discursive fields, ideologies, and times. By provid-
ing a reading of several means through which movement
is produced as freedom or as a threat, as an iconography
of self-regulation or as a proof of undisciplinability, this
third layer also offers a critique of the modes of governance
that crystallize around these two main configurations of
movement: surveillance, enclosure, eviction, imprison-
ment, siege.
The fourth layer of this book is an endeavor to
show how this split in the configuration of movement, as
well as the modes of governance that are formed alongside
this split, are mapped into contemporary spaces. Within
this mapping I focus on the regime currently in place in
the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). This regime’s
focal point of interest (and major political technology) is
maximizing the control over the movement of people and
goods; in other words, it is a regime of movement. As one
of the most perfected and elaborate systems of controlling
a population via controlling its movement, this regime
44
45
offers a condensed laboratory for examining technologies
of regulating movement and the subjects emerging through
these technologies. Whilst abnormal in its radicality, this
particular context is by no means privileged, but is rather
one manifestation of a global trend — a trend that is far
from being new, but that has been critically intensifying in
recent years.6 Thinking on and from this particular context
is a way of marking some of the contemporary stakes of my
theoretical analysis. As the argument unfolds, this context
supposes neither to circumscribe these stakes, nor to sug-
gest we can see here a single political structure extending
from 17th century England to 21st century Israel/Palestine,
or even a certain continuum. This context aims, rather, at
opening many other points of resonance, that eventually
demonstrate how different configurations of motion par-
take in justifying different modes of governing populations
within the frame of liberal democracies.7
regimes
Different forms and technologies of ordering movement
have always been central to the formation of different
political orders and ideologies. From the tethering of serfs
to the land under feudalism to the modern territorial state
and its demarcation of borders, political orders are in
many ways regimes of movement. The modern state — to
6/ Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Mae Peutz, The Deportation Regime:
Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010; Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples
and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refu-
gees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1, 1992.
1/ 7/ It is important to stress here that it is highly problematic to call Israel
“liberal” or “democratic,” given that roughly a third of the people under its
rule are not citizens and are denied of basic rights and liberties. Neverthe-
less, if we look at the practice, rather than the mere ideal of democracy, this
is their rule, rather than exception. Ever since the emergence of democracy
in Athens, the institutional slavery in America, or the lack of voting rights
to women in most liberal democracies until the middle of the 20th century,
democratic regimes include (and some would say: are based upon) an exclu-
sion of large groups of people from their egalitarian principles. To a lesser
degree this is the case with most — if not all — democracies still today. It is
therefore possible to say that Israel shares the logic of liberal democracies
that were — many still are — colonial and imperial in nature.
take what is perhaps one of the most relevant examples —
especially after the invention of the passport,8 and increas-
ingly with the evolution of technologies of sealing and
regulating borders, is to a great degree a system of regulat-
ing, ordering, and disciplining bodies (and other objects)
in motion.9 Indeed, alongside these apparatuses of closure
and controlling movement, an elaborated ideology and
theory of the state was developed, which ties these modes
of confinement to freedom. Enclosure, hindrance (or other
modes of slowing things down), and hedges of various
types, were seen as preconditioning freedom, rather than
standing in an opposition to circulation, flow, and above
all liberty. Most of the great thinkers of the state could not
conceptualize freedom without the possibility of its man-
agement, without some form of closure that would render
movement a principle of order rather than chaos.
This understanding of the modern state is perhaps
most explicit in John Torpey’s work. If Max Weber sees the
formation of the modern state as a function of monopoliz-
ing the legitimate means of violence, Torpey follows this
formulation to propose that the modern state consolidated
also by monopolizing the “legitimate means of movement.”
While Torpey presents his analysis as parallel to Weber’s,
I propose these two processes or ideologies are inextrica-
bly linked, and seek to explore how they work in tandem.
Did one of these processes of monopolization condition
the other? Is one a means for the other? Does one serve
to justify the other? Can one be thought of in terms of the
other (violence as movement; movement as violence)? Was
violence but another movement to be monopolized?
State violence, moreover, has its own movements:
invasion, infiltration, conquest. J.S. Mill provides a lucid
manifestation of how such movements further draw on
myths or imaginaries of other movements. For Mill, Europe
8/ John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship,
and the State. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
9/ James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998; Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern
Western World. New York: Routledge, 2006.
is a site of motion. It has a “remarkable diversity,” that
constantly facilitates movement: “the people of Europe,”
he writes,
have struck out a great variety of paths, each lead-
ing to something valuable; and although at every
period those who traveled in different paths have
been intolerant of one another, and each would
have thought it an excellent thing if all the rest
could have been compelled to travel his road, their
attempts to thwart each other’s development
have rarely had any permanent success.10
Mill’s Europe is a space in which people are in perpetual
non-homogeneous movements (to varied locations, using
myriad “roads” and “paths”) which facilitate (perhaps pro-
duce) one homogeneous movement of society as a whole:
progress. This progress is precisely what justifies Europe’s
expansion to the “greater part of the world” which has
“become stationary.”11 “The tutorial and paradigmatic obses-
sion of the empire and especially imperialists are all part of
the effort to move societies along the ascending gradient of
historical progress,” argues Uday Mehta. Accordingly, “the
liberal justification of the empire” relies on the argument
that since most of the world has lost its own capacity of
movement, without Europe’s mobile (almost motorist) pow-
ers, the rest of the world would not be able to move (read:
improve). Progress in its global articulation “is like having a
stalled car towed by one that is more powerful and can there-
fore carry the burden of an ascendant gradient.”12
The combination of Europe’s movement and Asia’s
stagnation stands at the foundation of Mill’s justification of
the imperial project. Yet this stagnation threatens Europe
10/ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Cambridge Texts in the History of Politi-
cal Thought. Cambridge England; New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989, p. 72 (my italics).
11/ Ibid, pp. 70; 72.
12/ Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury British Liberal Thought. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press,
1999, pp. 81-82, 94.
itself: “unless individuality be able successfully to assert
itself against this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its noble
antecedences and its professed Christianity, will tend
to become another China.” Europe may, in other words,
“become stationary.”13 To avoid this fate, Europe has to
endure in its motion — an endurance Mill seems to sim-
ply assume. (And it is quite striking that this assumption
is made concurrently with his terrified warning that this
endurance is about to fail.) One may speculate, perhaps,
that the motion into the East was one way to guarantee
Europe’s freedom-as-movement.
Earlier in the 17th century, the portrayal of America
as a site of excessive movement served to justify similar
projects of expansion. The movements of armies, trading
companies, private military powers, settlers, capital, and
goods, constituted zones which were characterized by
their own regimes of movement: the colonies. The colony
— which Ann Stoler defines as a non-stable space for the
management, re-taming, confinement, containment, dis-
ciplining, and re-forming of movement — came to address,
but also demonstrate, and thereby construct, the presum-
ably dangerous and wild movements of the colonized. As
Stoler argues, this regime of movement was established
in opposition to “the normative conventions of ‘free’
settlement, and [to] a normal population”.14 Hence, these
oppositions embedded into movement were given within a
wider regime of movement stretching at least from colo-
nization to globalization. The latter, too should be seen as
a “government of mobility,”15 rather than as a mere open-
13/ John Stuart Mill, op. cit., p. 72.
14/ Ann Stoler, “Colony.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Available at:
www.politicalconcepts.org/colony-stoler/. Accessed March 2012.
15/ Serhat Karakayali and Enrica Rigo, The Deportation Regime, eds.
Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010, p. 127; see also Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights:
From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006.
46
47
ness of borders.16 What Didier Bigo observes in relation to
Globalization — that “a differential freedom of movement
(of different categories of people) creates new logics of
control that for practical and institutional reasons are
located elsewhere, at transnational sites” — has thus been
characterizing the global movements of the world at least
since the 17th century.17 “Mobility gaps” is Ronen Shamir’s
apt term for the outcome of this logic.18
subjects
The above opposition, between settlement and unbound
movement, operated on two levels. The first was the
individual body itself. Within this level, this “opposition”
emerges rather as a balance: a balance between movement
and stability which is also a balance between freedom
and security. At stake, for liberalism, has always been the
reconciliation of its concept of freedom with social order.
The idea of the autonomous individual who must not be
controlled despotically (who no longer needed to be con-
trolled despotically) rested upon the assumption that this
individual can control and self-regulate herself. Foucault’s
work is a notable venture point from which to study the
articulations of this idea, but already in Hobbes, before the
technologies of power explored by Foucault were put into
effect or even systematically theorized, we find its kernel.
The subject’s freedom in Hobbes is also a function of his
16/ As William Walters puts it: we witness a conjunction of logics and
schemas of governance which produces “a particular politics of mo-
bility whose dream is not to arrest mobility but to tame it; not to build
walls, but systems capable of utilizing mobilities, tapping their energies
and in certain cases deploying them against the sedentary and ossified
elements within society; not a generalized immobilization, but a strategic
application of immobility to specific cases coupled with the production of
(certain kinds of) mobility” (“Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics.”
Citizenship Studies 8, no. 3, 2004, p. 248.
17/ Didier Bigo, “Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the
Social Practices of Control of the Banopticon,” in Borderscapes: Hidden Ge-
ographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, eds. Carl Grundy-Warr and Prem
Kumar Rajaram (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2007), 9—10.
18/ Shamir, “Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility
Regime,” Sociological Theory 23, no. 2, 2005, pp. 197—217.
willingness to control and confine his movements: once he
agrees “not to run away”19 and submits his actions to the
will of the sovereign, the shackles imprisoning him can be
removed, and this is precisely the meaning of his freedom.
Given that Hobbes defines freedom as unimpeded move-
ment, freedom emerges as the outcome of its very limitation,
as long as this limitation is internal. Locke can be read as
putting forth a different model, that nonetheless obeys a
very similar principle: freedom — as movement — is pos-
sible only within a system of enclosures. Ultimately, this
combination of stability and movement enabled liberalism
to craft the idea of an ordered freedom. The liberal subject
was carved within “a certain ‘epistemology of walking:’”
it was a subject “walking on his two feet” in a stable, and
firm manner;20 a subject whose stability came to define his
body, as well as his social and material backdrop: a home, a
homeland, an owned domain.
On the second level of the imagined balance
between settlement and movement, we find that these
notions are superimposed, time and again, on spatial divi-
sions. “Home,” location, rootedness, and other factors that
render movement desirable and “free” are in various ways
preserved to very particular subjects. Notwithstanding var-
ied models of localization, Africans, indigenous Americans,
or Asians, as well as women and paupers keep appearing
in the texts of liberal thinkers as either too stagnant or too
mobile. Thus, the balance presumably achieved within the
body of the liberal subject becomes a schism, a contrast,
between those who can control their movements, and thus
rule, and those whose movement is hindered or excessive,
and thus cannot. This mapping bisects the freedom of the
movement of white, male and propertied bodies, from the
presumed threat carried by colonized (“savages”), poor
(“vagrants”), or female (seen as either confined to the
domestic sphere or as hysterical — or both).
19/ Hobbes, Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996,
p. 141.
20/ Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance
and Everyday Movement, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 80, 81.
Tim Cresswell shows that this binary splitting movement
stands at the core of liberal citizenship. Whereas the
mobility of citizens is almost sanctified as a right, and is
taken to construct “autonomous individual agents who,
through their motion, [help] to produce the nation itself,”
there are always “unspoken Others [who] are differently
mobile”; others whose mobility is “constantly hin-
dered”: “Arab Americans stopped at airport immigration,
Hispanic-Americans in the fields of American agri-busi-
ness or African Americans ‘driving while black,’”21 and we
can add here Palestinians at checkpoints — a case which
stands at the core of this book. Accordingly, as a matter of
general rule, the subject who is most mobile is the (west-
ern) “citizen:” a subject-position which is often tied rather
to stability and sedentarism.22
At stake are complementary processes through
which a “sedentarist metaphysics of rootedness” and
a “metaphysics of movement” meet in a single order:
First, citizenship relies on a process of “taming mobil-
ity,”23 which serves to support the sedentarist ideology
of the nation-state within a factuality wherein people
are, and were, always mobile.24 Second, once this image
of stability is established for particular categories of
now-“rooted” people, it serves to facilitate their grow-
ing mobility. Movement and stability thus precondition
each other. Finally, these particular categories are formed
vis-à-vis other groups, which are simultaneously presum-
ably-less-rooted and yet constantly hindered. The immi-
grant, the nomad, and certain modes of what we have come
to term hybrid-subjectivity, all represent subject positions
which are configured through their mobility, but which
more often inhabit spaces of confinement: detention and
deportation camps, modern incarnations of poor houses,
21/ Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, 161.
22/ Ibid.; Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.”
23/ Serhat Karakayali and Enrica Rigo, “Mapping the European Space
of Circulation.”
24/ Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999).
“international” zones in airports.25 The flux that is fre-
quently celebrated as subversive has repeatedly served to
restrict movement-as-freedom, to facilitate non-free move-
ments (expulsion, slave trade, denial of land tenure).
bodies
Disability studies have long called our attention to the rela-
tion between ability and citizenship; between particular
assumptions regarding the “normal” manners of carrying
our bodies in space, and the construction of democratic
spaces, which are, ultimately, spaces of accessibility- of
possible and impossible movements. Accordingly, the
process of subject formation is, to a great degree, a project
of “normalizing” movements. Indeed, a reading in political
theory reveals almost an obsession with this need to edu-
cate the body in “proper” modes of movement.26 So strong
is this obsession that, according to Andrew Hewitt, by the
19th century walking became what embodied “bourgeois
self-consciousness.”27
“How subjects move or do not move tells us much
about what counts as human, as culture, and as knowl-
edge,” argues Caren Kaplan.28 Indeed. But this is only part
of the story. How the movement of subjects is described or
imagined tells us almost as much. Movement is a technol-
ogy of citizenship or subjectivity, as I noted above. Through
the production of patterns of movement (statelessness,
deportability, enclosures, confinement,) different catego-
ries of subjectivity are produced. Regimes of movement
are thus never simply a way to control, regulate, or incite
movement. Regimes of movement are integral to the
25/ Zones which are defined as exterritorial, and in which asylum seek-
ers or immigrants to Europe may find themselves detained. Council of Eu-
rope, Report by the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography
(2000) Arrival of Asylum Seekers at European Airports, Doc. 8761, 8 June.
26/ See Barbara Arneil, “Disability, Self Image, and Modern Political
Theory,” Political Theory 37, no. 2, 2009.
27/ Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance
and Everyday Movement, 81.
28/ Caren Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility
and Location in an Era of Globalization,” PMLA 117, no. 1, 2002, p. 32.
48
49
formation of different modes of being. But movement is
also a perspective from which to think about subjectivity.
In Erin Manning’s words: “A commitment to the ways
in which bodies move,”29 is a commitment to thinking
about the subject in particular ways. Manning, like many
before her, proposes that such a commitment is a way to
think against a stabilization of the body within “national
imaginaries.”30 As I briefly suggested earlier, I think this
claim is somewhat rushed. The tendency to celebrate the
deterritorialization effects of movement often “overlook[s]
the colonial power relations that produce such images
in the first place.”31 Manning, however, makes another
claim regarding this commitment that is worthy of further
exploring: to think bodies through movement, she argues,
is to think the subject against the nexus of identity, since
“a moving body […] cannot be identified.”32 The question
of movement is thus also the question of the contours and
limits of subjects/bodies.
If movement is a way of thinking about a certain
openness of these contours; if it is a movement that even-
tually comes to contain a plurality of people in which, as
Arendt portrays it, “each man moves among his peers;”33 if it
is a movement through which a plurality becomes a body (a
social movement, an empire, a state as an orchestrated col-
lective movement), then a commitment to thinking on and
through movement is more than a commitment to thinking
of the flexibility, if not impossibility, of identity. It is also (and
the two are intimately connected) a commitment to thinking
the possibility of non individual bodies and to be attuned
to the moments in which the very impossibility of indi-
vidual bodies is revealed. At times, movements injure us.
Some movements open wounds in our bodies. Others open
wounds in our wills. Melville’s Ishmael, the narrator of Moby
29/ Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xv.
30/ Ibid.
31/ Tim Cresswell, op. cit. p. 54.
32/ Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, xviii.
33/ Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books,
2005), 117, my italics.
Dick, probably describes it best. Situated on the deck of the
ship, tied to Queequeg with a rope, he watches the motions
of fellow crewman becoming his own: “my own individu-
ality was now merged in a joint stock company of two . . .
my free will had received a mortal wound,”34 he describs
it. At this moment he understands that we are all tied to “a
plurality of other mortals” in some “Siamese connexion” that
renders one’s movements also the other’s; that breaks the
ties between individual volition and action;35 but also: that
opens up volition itself. At times movements fortify us. They
enhance our own movements with a cohesive motion of
other bodies, of a body larger than us. A collective movement
of people — a march, a war, an occupation movement such as
the ones we have seen recently from Tahrir Square to Occupy
Wall Street — charges our individual movement with mean-
ing and power it could not inhabit and produce on its own.
Importantly, there is also a movement between these two
poles: injury and fortification.
technologies
Let us take a particular test-case through which the logic
I trace here can be examined: the “regime of movement”
Israel employs in the oPt; an extensive bureaucratic system
of permits, backed by a dense grid of physical and admin-
istrative obstacles, which fragments both the space and the
social fabric, pervasively regulates the circulation of people
and goods, and manages the Palestinian population by the
means of this regulation. Since these many obstacles are
situated also within Palestinian territories (and not only on
some imaginary, non-existent “border” between the oPt and
“Israel”), this system prevents — or at least severely hin-
ders — what many see as mundane, daily life: going to work,
attending a relative’s wedding, shopping at the market, or
34/ Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988, p. 287.
35/ Ibid. Or, in Arendt’s words, “no human life, not even the life of the
hermit in nature’s wildness, is possible without a world which directly
or indirectly testifies to the process of other human beings,” The Human
Condition. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 22.
going to school. All are simple routines for most people, but
they are denied to most Palestinians or are “purchased” with
the cost of valuable time; time that is robbed, as Amira Hass
put it, and “cannot ever be returned.”36
In other words, “scarcity of time disables space.”37
It narrows the land and disables the possibility of forming
a political community. What thus emerges is a mode of
controlling the space and the population inhabiting it by
controlling the temporality and continuity of the move-
ment within it. Halper has termed this system “the matrix
of control”:
It is an interlocking series of mechanisms, only
a few of which require physical occupation of
territory, that allow Israel to control every aspect
of Palestinian life in the Occupied Territories.
The matrix works like the Japanese game of Go.
Instead of defeating your opponent as in chess,
in Go you win by immobilizing your opponent,
by gaining control of key points of a matrix so
that every time s/he moves s/he encounters an
obstacle of some kind.38
Writing in 2000, Jeff Halper could have seen only the seeds
of the dense grid of checkpoints that would become the
predominant component within this matrix. One can see
the checkpoints as valves wherein, first, individual moving
bodies are inspected and allowed (or denied) passage, and
second, the circulation of an entire population, as well as the
goods it consumes and produces, is managed. Yet, I would
like to propose that the regular operation of the checkpoints
entails, in addition, particular and peculiar disciplinary
practices: in one of their facets, the checkpoints are part of a
36/ Amira Hass, “The Natives’ Time Is Cheap,” Ha’aretz, February 23 2005.
37/ Ariel Handel, “Where, Where to and When in the Occupied Palestin-
ian Territories: An Introduction to a Geography of Disaster,” in The Power
of Inclusive Exclusion, ed. Adi Ophir et al. ( N.Y: Zone books, 2009).
38/ Jeff Halper, “The 94 Percent Solution: The Matrix of Control.”
Middle East Report 216i 2000. Available at: http://www.merip.org/mer/
mer216/94-percent-solution. Accessed June 2014.
network of corrective technologies that are meant to fail. These technologies. Yet this case enables us to see much more.
quasi-disciplinary practices constitute the Palestinians While de-facto, the limitations upon movement in the West
moving through the checkpoint as the always-already failed Bank are limitations upon the freedom(s) of Palestinians,
products of a system that operates within a disciplinary free movement is given in this context primarily within
logic, that has a disciplinary form, yet that is built to fail the paradigm of security (as it is in contemporary assump-
precisely because at stake is not the construction of normal- tions regarding immigration and international traveling
ized, self-governing subjects. What is at stake is, rather, the in general.) Put in the words of the Israeli human rights
possibility of bridging non-democratic modes of governance organization B’tselem, “Palestinian freedom of movement
(occupation) with a framework that insists on its democra- has turned from a fundamental human right to a privilege
ticity. A genealogy of circulation and of the political technol- that Israel grants or withholds as it deems fit.”40 This book,
ogies regulating it may become, accordingly, a genealogy of then, can be seen as an inquiry into the constant coupling
the regimes and powers circumscribing it. and de-coupling of freedom and security (or order), medi-
Many scholars of militarized spaces have worked ated by changing modalities of movement. The normaliz-
to show how state violence operates at the level of popula- ing project through which disciplinary subjects appear; the
tions rather than individual bodies. William Walters’ argu- technologies of movement through which such subjects
ment regarding the camp is a good case in point. The camp, are deconstituted; the maritime map through which both
according to him, is no longer a disciplinary site, since order and its disruptions are globalized.
states are no longer interested in producing a “positive
kind of subjectivity” in regard to the populations inhabit-
ing them: the deportable.39 Similar arguments can be found
in many other contemporary analyses of different regimes
of movement. I seek to to understand how a population
which is controlled via movement is produced by technolo-
gies of subjectivation. In other words, I ask about the local
and concrete apparatuses through which subjects become
moving bodies that can be ruled primarily by managing
their location and circulation.
The focus on checkpoints, closures, sieges, walls,
deportations, and other measures regulating movement
in the occupied Palestinian territories may be taken to be
but one manifestation of my claim regarding the conjunc-
tion of freedom and movement. If movement is indeed the
manifestation of liberty, and, moreover, is interlaced with
notions of liberal subjecthood and thus citizenship, as this
book sets out to argue, then it is almost trivial that a state
of occupation — which is by definition an elimination of
citizenship and a denial of most political rights — would
incorporate a control over movement into its political
40/ Bt’selem, “Ground to a Halt: Denial of Palestinian’s Freedom of Move-
39/ Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of ment in the West Bank,” 2007, pp. 7-8. Available at: www.btselem.org/
Aliens,” op. cit., p. 95. publications/summaries/200708_ground_to_a_halt. Accessed 17 Jul. 2023

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51
ahlam shibli In a text about Ahlam Shibli’s work,
critic and Art historian T.J. Demos
recalls the philosopher Roland
Barthes and points out: “Death
is the eidos of photography, its
ideal form and most distinguished
expression. In fact, there can be no
photograph that does not render
absent what it represents.”1
In the 68 photographs of the
Death series (2011-2012), Ahlam Shibli
seems to confirm and at the same

Untitled (Death n. 48), Palestine, 2011-2012

Chromogenic print, 38 × 57 cm.
The Old City, al-Kasaba neighborhood, Nablus, February 5, 2012. In a vegetable shop, a poster showing the
martyrs ‘Abd al-Rahman Shinnawi, ‘Amar al-‘Anabousi and Basim Abu Sariyah from the Faris al-Leil (Knight of
52
53
time reverse this assumption. She
confirms it insofar as the subject of
the series is the regime of images
and the visual culture of martyr-
dom in Palestine. Conversely, she
questions it since, when death is the
object, absence ceases to hover like a
specter over the photographic image.
Brought to light, detected, death
challenges the statute of photogra-
phy itself, threatening it with the loss
of its absenting qualities.
the Night) resistance groups which belong to al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. On the margins of the poster, a picture
of Naif Abu Sharkh, the head of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Nablus. The poster carries a sticker showing a
raised fist with the Palestinian colors and reading, “We want the occupation to lose. Boycott Tapuzina [an Israeli
soft drink]. Palestinian National Initiative.”
In Shibli’s Death, the loss of human
lives is echoed by the potential loss
of Barthes’ photographic eidos.
Posters, photographs, paintings
and banners of Palestinian martyrs
of the Second Intifada (2000-2005)
populate Shibli’s images. The work is
certainly a stark statement, a testi-
mony to the violence exercised by
the Israeli state on Palestinians, an
act of rebellion against the political
and physical elimination of Palestine
and its inhabitants. It is, moreover, a
testimony to the ubiquity of death in
Palestinian society. Indeed, images of
martyrs populate public space as well
as domestic space.
Looking at the composition of
photographs that complete the
series, one would be tempted to
consider it as a single image and, to
recall Barthes again, of an image we
have learned to recognize the punc-
tum, that is, that detail that breaks
the relationship between the viewer
and the intentionality of the photog-
rapher. There are at least two images/
details that punctuated my vision
in this overview. The first portrays
two young boys, seemingly serene,
inside a Palestinian cemetery. The
second captures two smiling women
at home, under the image of a martyr,
caring for an infant. The punctum is
a rupture, a twinge, a wound; con-
sequently, these two details in the
series do not offer trivial consolation
in the face of death’s pervasiveness,
of its constant presence in the life a
colonial regime such as that to which
Palestine is subjected. On the other
hand, they still flash life as a ripple in
the status quo, a tear in a necropoliti-
cal present.
marco baravalle
_
1/ T. J. Demos, “Disappearance and precarity:
On the photography of Ahlam Shibli,” in Ahlam
Shibli: Phantom home. Essays by T.J. Demos and
Esmail Nashif. Exhibition Catalog. Barcelona/
Paris/ Porto/ Ostfildem: Museu d’Art Contem-
porani de Barcelona (macba) / Jeu de Paume /
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves /
Hatje Cantz, 2013, p. 16.
aida harika yanomami, In 2023, we witnessed open
edmar tokorino yanomami attacks and genocide against the
and roseane yariana Yanomami people. The threats
yanomami from illegal mining and its
socio-ecological consequences are
not new, and the Yanomami have
long sought to protect themselves
through organizations, but also
by reinforcing their culture and
tradition. Yanomami indigenous
cinema is recent, but it is power-
ful, dynamic, and assertive.
Yuri u xëatima thë [Fishing with
Timbó] and Thuë pihi kuuwi
[A Woman Thinking] tell intimate
stories about two of the Yanomami
people’s rituals. The first deals
with the custom of fishing with
macerated vines placed in rafts
in certain stretches of the river
during drought times. The second
follows the thoughts and views
of an indigenous woman on the
preparation of yãkoana for ritual

Thuë pihi kuuwi, 2023

A Woman Thinking. Directed by: Aida Harika Yanomami, Edmar
Tokorino Yanomami and Roseane Yariana. Video, color, sound; 9’.

54
55
use by shamans. Both are directed
by Aida Harika Yanomami, Edmar
Tokorino Yanomami, and Roseane
Yariana Yanomami, members of the
Hutukara organization, and were
filmed in the Watorikɨ community.
Yuri u xëatima thë begins by
placing us in a collective scenario
and, after a turn in the script,
follows a conflict involving a single
character, blurring the boundary
between reality and fiction. Thuë
Yuri u xëatima thë, 2023
Fishing with Timbó. Video still. Video, color, sound; 10’
pihi kuuwi, the narrator places us
inside her mind, and we see what
she sees over the course of an
entire day in which she watches the
preparation of the yãkoana. The
ritual is one of the most important
among the Yanomami: it is when
the shamans come into contact
with the xapiri spirits, calling them
to dance and enter a trance and
dream state. It is the shamans’
contact with the xapiri that protects
the entire community and, as Davi
Kopenawa describes in A queda do
céu [The Falling Sky], the oldest sha-
mans teach the new generations to
respond to the spirits’ call, because if
they don’t, they will remain ignorant.
Rituals, traditions, the Yanomami
people’s connection with dreams
and their cosmologies have shaped a
belief system about the preservation
of worldly existence, and are power-
ful weapons through which life and
our possibility of a future pulsate.
pérola mathias
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
aline motta

56
57
Aline Motta marshals the material of
history to make meaning. By turns
poet and filmmaker, photographer
and performance artist, hers is a
speculative practice. Building and
bending worlds through the process
of annotation and redaction, she
speaks into the silence of archival
oblivion in order to make visible the
unfamiliar and unknown. Beyond the
frame of imperial fecundity, lie the
intimate narratives she unravels. The
A água é uma máquina do tempo, 2023
Water is a Time Machine. Video still
forging of Brazilian colonial history
has fractured, bleached, burdened
her familial lines, which she retraces
– following the tug of an umbilical
cord, which births her mother, then
her grandmother. Across image and
text, her epic work A água é uma
máquina do tempo [Water is a Time
Machine] asks, “might it be pos-
sible to fabulate new kinship ties,
new lineages, and even new forms
of filiation?1
From cradle to grave, womb to
tomb,2 Motta moves meticulously
through her own family’s traces.
All the while, she examines the
matriarchal force which makes all
possible. Seas of pages, lines of ink,
pools of blood – all are engulfed
in the spiral of time, illuminated
through the forms of care that
Motta positions at the beating
heart of her artistic practice. Yet
these gestures are not easy, nor do
they configure normative significa-
tions of love or femininity. Rather,
they are bruised and battered,
insistently blackened forms of
support. Indeed, as theorist in
African American studies Saidiya
Hartman argues, these very “forms
of care, intimacy, and sustenance
exploited by racial capitalism, most
importantly, are not reducible to or
exhausted by it…This care, which
is coerced and freely given, is the
black heart of our social poiesis, of
making and relation.”3
oluremi onabanjo
_
1/ Aline Motta. 2021. “A água é uma máquina do
tempo.” eLyra: Poesia e Arquivo, n. 18, p. 333-337,
2021. (Depoimentos). Available at elyra.org.
Accessed in 28 May 2023. Translation mine.
2/ Here I invoke Christina Sharpe, In the Wake:
On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016, p. 87.
3/ Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World:
A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls: A Crit-
ical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society,
2016, 18 (1): p. 171.
amador e jr. Artificial intelligence will soon knock
segurança patrimonial us off our feet, but for now we can
ltda. still glimpse remnants of humanity
in certain trades whose existence
wavers between contradictions and
resistance. Such is the situation of
the art critic, and also of the security
guard, a profession that is the source
of artistic research for Antonio
Gonzaga Amador and Jandir Jr.
This is from where the Amador and
Jr. Segurança Patrimonial Ltda. per-
formance company emerges. Duly
uniformed – suit and tie always –
they have been making their mark
on the market over the years. The
duo specializes in safeguarding art
galleries, exhibitions, salons, bienni-
als, and the like. Sometimes you will
see them standing right in front of a
work, stalling its appreciation (Sem
título [Untitled], 2016); in others, you
can find them immersed in books
(Ler [Read], 2023), staring down-

Untitled, 2016
Performance documentation, Museu Nacional de
Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro (2016)

58
59
wards (Chão [Floor], 2023) or even
with eyes tightly closed during work-
ing hours (Vigilante [Watchman],
2016). All in order to serve you bet-
ter, ladies and gentlemen.
In these performances, the
weapons used to defend the her-
itage of others are mockery and
irony, but the game is not restricted
to the scope of humor. Antonio and
Jandir use their own bodies to set
up logic bombs through a tensioned
presence; they mine a field where
the structures of our formation are
exploding under our feet: institu-
tional racism, the exploitation of
workers, the precariat, the sinister
persistence of slavery, in other
words, the maintenance of the elites
who consume art.
Formally, it is an overlap. Amador
e Jr. Segurança Patrimonial Ltda. has
the expertise to double the spaces
where it performs; if the floor area
is 100 square meters, it can easily
reach 200 square meters, or even
more. However, it is worth remem-
bering that this unusual phenom-
enon can only be achieved on the
brain surface of the public, who, if
not obtaining the additional terrain,
will at least be able to leave having a
good laugh, without having under-
stood the joke.
igor de albuquerque

translated from Portuguese by

philip somervell

Nada! Artes aquáticas, 2019

Swim! Aquatic Arts. Performance documentation,
Centro Esportivo e Educacional Golfinhos da Baixada,
Queimados (2019)
amos gitaï

Bait, 1980
House. Film stills. 16 mm film transferred to video; 51’

60
61
“Gitaï wants this house to
become both something very
symbolic and very concrete,
to become a character. One
of the most beautiful things
that film can ever accomplish:
people looking at the same
thing and seeing different
things. And being moved by
this vision.”
– serge daney,
Libération, March 1, 1982
Amos Gitaï has been documenting
a single house in West Jerusalem
for over four decades to narrate the
history of a complex region through
various artistic forms. His projects
started with a documentary trilogy
shot over 25 years: Bait [House]
(1980), A House in Jerusalem (1998),
and News from Home / News
from House (2005). In these films
the architectural space reveals a
political state.
Bait is Amos Gitaï’s first film, shot in
1980 immediately after he returned
from Berkeley where he had com-
pleted a Ph.D. in architecture. This
black and white documentary shot
on 16mm film traces the changing
owners and occupants of a house
starting with the original owner,
a Palestinian doctor who fled the
house in 1948. The Israeli govern-
ment then confiscated the house
and rented it under an “absentee”
law to an Algerian Jewish immi-
grant couple. At the time of the
filming an Israeli professor of econ-
omy bought the house. He decided
to transform it from a single-story
house to a three-story villa. But to
achieve the construction he had
to hire Palestinians from the refu-
gee camp and use stones from the
mountains of Hebron. The archi-
tectural site of the House, there-
fore, become at the same time a
microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian
relationship as well as a metaphor
for Jerusalem. The film becomes an
open stage for different occupants,
workers, and developers to share
their biographies and visions. The
broadcast of the 1980 film House
was banned at the time by the
Israeli television.
edited by juliana de arruda sampaio
ana pi and "The unity is submarine..."
taata kwa nkisi mutá imê − edward kamau brathwaite

EXERCÍCIOS DAS MARGENS DO TEMPO, 2023

Exercises for the Margins of Time. Photography and digital manipulation.
Study for the work commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the
35th Bienal
62
63
Ana Pi is a mover of body and spirit
who integrates notions of transit
and displacement through ordinary
gestures, colors, and sounds. Taata
Kwa Nkisi Mutá Imê is the head
of Casa dos Olhos do Tempo que
Fala da Nação Angolão Paketan
Malembá–Nzo Mutá Lombô Ye
Kayongo. Since the 1980s, she has
shaped a methodology for teach-
ing and researching sacred dance
throughout the African Diaspora,
engaging nkisis, voduns, orixás,
caboclos and encantados through
movements that balance mental,
physical and spiritual dimensions.
Together, “these practitioners make
use of spaces that cannot be seen.”1
In tandem, they write with their
bodies, stitching together spaces
and memories in order to move
beyond the choreography of the
stage into movements of every-
day life.
Their collaboration has birthed a
transnational expressive project
that triangulates Brazil, France, and
Senegal. In form, “the networks of
these moving, intersecting writings
compose a manifold story that
has neither author nor spectator,
shaped out of fragments of trajec-
tories and alterations of spaces.”2
It is an embodied, poetic rumina-
tion on pathways across beaches
and cobbled streets, entering and
emitting from institutional collec-
tions at the Institut Fondemental
d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), Dakar,
Senegal, and Musée du Quai Branly,
Paris, France. These makers share
a commitment to the errant, which
in reality is “the postulation of an
unyielding and unfading sacred.”3
While they acknowledge a form of
thinking inscribed through vision,
they embrace knowledge that ema-
nates from the body in the traces
we leave, in the sighs we emit.
Theirs is a collaboration committed
to the peripheral — a mental space
where the unsure can become
a place of construction; a place
where one goes looking for the
image seared in the mind’s eye, but
returns with seeds, ready to grow
new worlds.
oluremi onabanjo
_
1/ Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in
The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), trad. Steven
Rendall. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2010, p. 93.
2/ Ibid, p. 93.
3/ Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990),
trad. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press. 1997, p. 21.
this participation is supported by:
Institut français.
anna boghiguian Anna Boghiguian’s work is a poly-
phonic narrative that unfolds
through drawings, paintings,
dioramas, installations and texts.
It is, at the same time, an astonish-
ing tool of historical investigation
that, without yielding anything in
terms of poetics, is able to analyze
specific contexts, fragments of
individual lives, and wide-ranging
phenomena. The latter is the case
in Woven Winds – The Making of
64
65
an Economy – Costly Commodities
(2016-2022), in which, through
drawings, texts, collages and
self-supporting cutouts, the artist
recounts the genesis and devel-
opment of the cotton trade, an
activity that both anticipates and
prophesizes the contemporary
globalization of the economy.
Malcolm Ferdinand, a scholar
of political ecology, prefers to
refer to our era with the term
Plantationocene (the age of the
plantation) to emphasize the
responsibilities of colonialism in
the current social and ecological
crisis. Boghiguian’s work seems
to corroborate this thesis. Indeed,
before her work, the viewer is
immersed in a story populated by
enslaved West Africans deported
to the New World to work on
cotton (and other) plantations,
those same plantations that
watercolor paintings from Woven Winds − The Making of an
Economy – Costly Commodities, 2016
Pencil and watercolor on paper. 18 pieces, 41,8 × 29,5 cm (each)
replaced indigenous forms of culti-
vation and circulation of products
to make way for an extractive,
profit-driven production model.
The dramatic stories of the
enslaved are intertwined with
those of European migrants. In
fact, Boghiguian depicts a ship in
the act of unloading its cargo of
poor Europeans (such as the Irish
forced to flee the Great Famine
of 1845, which lasted until 1849)
landed in the United States to
contribute to the formation of the
great wealth of that nation that, as
the artist points out, owes much
to the cultivation of cotton and the
fact that it was organized on the
basis of chattel slavery.
A tireless traveler, Boghiguian
trained between Egypt, Canada,
and Mexico. Her art is a form of
recording reality and context, but
never with a detached gaze. On the
contrary, this artist’s work is always
positioned with respect to the
social conditions of the present and
often includes an interrogation of
the historical events that produced
them. At the same time, the artist’s
great love for Symbolist painting –
Gustave Moreau and William Blake,
for example – emerges through a
surreal vein that is an integral part
of her poetics, deconstructing the
official languages of power, des-
ecrating their “sacred” represen-
tations: a hallucinated and ironic
dream in which the artist moves
her own poetic attack on absolute
power and its incarnations.
marco baravalle
anne-marie schneider From her first drawings in the
1980s, focused on the overflowing
potential of writing and line to her
later incursions into the planes of
color and in the experience of a
polychromy that is situated towards
the sensitive, the stroke seems to
be the element that gives unity to
the deliberately fragmentary imagi-
nary of Anne-Marie Schneider.
The artist explains that, while
creating, she works with con-

Untitled (Blue Interior), 2012

Acrylic on paper, wood frame and
plexiglass, 10 pieces, 30 × 30 cm (each)

66
67
sciousness and unconsciousness
at the same time. In this way, the
pieces selected for coreografias
do impossível are a repository of
mental images that are transfered
to paper. Replete with biographical
resonances and allusions to social
issues, the artist tries to register –
or choreograph – through them the
tremor that is the self, but also, as
that Rimbaudian aphorism pointed
out, “is another”.1
In her works abound lonely char-
acters or in disturbing relation-
ships, distorted faces that are
confused with their own masks,
bodies that mutate and extend in
the domestic space, emotional
architectures where the boundary
between person and structure is
blurred. In the words of the critic
Jean-François Chevrier, these
bodies-house understand what sur-
rounds them “as an unstable com-
plex worked out by the violence of
affections”.2
The incongruous deformations
make their way into a practice of
their own that looks at both the
grotesque and the fable; whether
from the absurd, irony or criticism.
Thus, the drawings and paintings
of Anne-Marie Schneider sketch a
self-constructed semblance: one
that doesn’t stop recomposing itself
through the recovery of gesture, of
the remains and confusions of the
speech, of the scenes that – as the
referenced Virgina Woolf explained
– produce a wave in the mind.4

beatriz martínez hijazo

translated from Spanish by

ana laura borro

_
1/ This phrase by French poet Arthur Rimbaud,
“Je est un autre” appears in a letter from 13
May 1871, addressed to his professor Georges
Izambard.

2/ Jean-François Chevrier, “Stroke film color”

(Trazo película color). In Anne-Marie Schneider,
Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofía and Éditions L’Arachnéen, 2016.

3/ Virginia Woolf, “A wave in the mind” [Letter

to Vita Sackville-West], March 16, 1926. In
Virginia Woolf. About writing (Sobre la escritura),
ed. Federico Sabatini, Barcelona: Alba Editorial,
2015, p.34.

Untitled (Brick Door with Personage), 2019 this participation is supported by:
Acrylic on paper, 46 × 42,3 cm Institut français.
archivo de la memoria The Archivo de la Memoria Trans
trans (amt) [Trans Memory Archive] (AMT)
seeks to protect, construct, and
recover memories of the trans
community through photographs,
videos, and newspaper and maga-
zine clippings. Created in Argentina
and with a collection of approx-
imately fifteen thousand pieces,
the archive exists and grows daily
through donations. Challenging pre-
vailing narratives, the AMT serves

Fondo Documental [Fonds] Fondo Documental [Fonds] Marcela

Malva Solís, c. 1965 Soldavini – La Rompecoche, c. 1985
Photography Photography

68
69
as a depository for a deliberately
erased collective memory, reminding
society of the experiences of trans
people, who have faced hostility and
incomprehension in society and suf-
fered from negligence of the state.
The archive arose out of the
visionary ideas of activists María
Belén Correa and Claudia Pía
Baudracco. After Claudia’s death in
2012, María Belén started developing
the project. She created a Facebook
Fondo Documental [Fonds] Vanesa Sander, c. 1990
Photography
group, Archivo de la Memoria Trans,
to connect with people involved in
this history of struggle. In 2018, the
group had over a thousand trans
women participants, Argentinan
and otherwise. The initial idea
was to gather the members, their
memories, and their photographs,
first, preserving that material in a
library, and later in a virtual space.
Before long, this objective expanded
and soon transformed into a col-
lective effort to construct a com-
mon memory.
The AMT is hugely significant as
a place of memory and preserva-
tion, as well as being another form
of activism.1 It serves the double
purpose of constructing an archive
that sheds light on the lives and joys
of trans people and also documents
the challenges that community has
faced in Argentina. The public can
access its content through various
online platforms, promoting an
inclusive space for engagement,
discussion, and action on iden-
tity and resistance. In preserving
photo albums and so many other
personal memories, the archive
takes on the role of a kind of family
reunion. These sets of images hold
the visual narratives of an affective
network based on support, protec-
tion, and the celebration of life, and
preserve the memory of the friends
who are no longer with us.
In the 35th Bienal de São Paulo,
the archive takes on the form of a
wall of memories, a collage of over
three thousand pieces, including
newspaper and magazine articles,
personal photographs, images of
intimate moments, and portraits of
everyday life. Through this instal-
lation, these documents become
windows into lives from a past that
echoes strongly today. Each pho-
tograph holds a memory, and the
mural transforms into a monument
to struggle.
sylvia monasterios
translated from Portuguese by
georgia fleury reynolds
_
1/ See Memorias reveladas, by Quentin Worth-
ington (France, 2019, 23'), documentary on the
creation of the amt.
arthur bispo do rosário the gaze that wishes to un-decree
the ugliness assigned to madness,
to madnesses, needs to be every-
thing but clinical. it is a gaze that
needs to reach everything, while
carefully un-hitting targets (usually
dark ones). and which requires a
gesture that does not need to cover
everything, away from the colonial
delirium of conquest, of cataloging,
of categorizing, which cannot listen
to the voice of self-determination.
70
71
to this day, madness has been treated
as an ugly wound shelved in walls
higher than museums’ white pillars.
thus, some museums take upon
themselves the task of breaking the
interdiction imposed when madness
is called ugliness, when it is con-
demned to hiddenness, thus assign-
ing programed unintelligibilities to it.
still i wonder with which cloak
was arthur bispo do rosário’s (1909
[1911]-1989) body buried after his
passing; i wonder if any of the
cloaks he made escaped the fate
or fury of that, in the name of “the
discovery of beauty”, had them
removed from the psychiatric cubi-
cles where the sailor, the boxer, the
lame, was detained for being con-
sidered mad before being labeled
an artist – a title he refused –, there
where he wove them.
i wonder if any of the cloaks
fulfilled the black prophet’s dream
Arthur Bispo do Rosário with the work
Semblantes [Faces], undated
of covering his body, and unveiling
his soul, on his last judgment day?
a day that ultimately has been
being lived (or died) bit by bit, as
each person (still) dies, even in
present times, of massive black
psychiatric incarceration.
this is a rhetorical, dramati-
cal, question. and as we move in
our flesh, free for now from the
last judgment, through the expo-
graphed, museological, perfectly
lit museum pieces, we walk a path
over the silence of its nonanswer.
if there is beauty in the ugliness
with which we over-look madness,
when can we call it art? maybe it
matters to say that the embroi-
derer died far, far away, from the
museum; locked inside huge walls,
deep inside the asylum. that even
before dying, pretty locked inside
there, he was already being sepa-
rated from his cloaks, his banners,
every cloth and vitrine he embroi-
dered, sewed, wove, for not being
an artist nor an atheist.
and bispo do rosário now is
the name of a museum! covered
in the invisible artist cloak he did
not wove.
tatiana nascimento
translated from Portuguese by
bruna barros and jess oliveira
aurora cursino dos santos how many stabs make up this sor-
row? and how many strokes does
it take to undo it? there are too
many eyes, in the paintings, almost
as many as there are – more, or
less readable – words. the eyes
seem to gaze from there, from
before, when they were painted,
in order to see if the present has
brought something new, less
stabbing, less bloodshed, less of
this sorrow.

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73
it’s a sorrow with many names:
sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, oppres-
sion, abuse, disrespect, dehuman-
ization… some of the pairs of eyes
translate some of these names, if you
pay attention, if you have the courage
to look back there, into them, into the
paintings, into the time that tried in so
many ways, so many times, to silence
Aurora (1896-1959).
prophecies, reveries, exorcisms,
predictions. a desire: to predict
Untitled, undated (front and back)
Oil on paper, 47,5 × 32 cm
herself happy future. the art of
escaping the destinies programmed
for the end. for subjection. for vio-
lence. for sorrow.
right before the turn of the cen-
tury, Aurora is born. categorization
through so-called biology was even
stricter then than it is now: and
Aurora was born a girl. a girl daughter
of a mother, and daughter of a father.
and once this girl comes of age,
father forces her to marry. but she
suffers from drapetomania! she
is given to flights, to drifts, to the
destinies reinscribed by desire’s
very designs.1
Aurora runs away, gets divorced,
tries everything in this life: includ-
ing the arts, in the old world, for
she dreams, and dreams get hungry
too. and such a hunger is probably
what led her to, as they say, the
world’s oldest profession, right? as
old as that sorrow? older? profes-
sions, subjections: wife, whore,
maid. flaws: mad.
but this old Aurora, as her paint-
ings tell us, was kind of predicting
the world anew, despite all that
debris, all the ruins of these so
archaic worlds, so hard to get past,
constantly trying to bury her:
maybe it is a reverie of mine,
maybe it is just my desire, but it
seems like, besides so many stabs,
the so many eyes she painted seek
a trace of this dream-world – where
women, no matter the profession
they have (or not), regardless of
how hard the walls of the missus’
house or the asylum cells’ try to
strangle, suffocate, silence… a
world where any woman, no matter
how indecent she may be consid-
ered, “amoral psychopath”, is able
to predict herself happy future.
& i dream along.
tatiana nascimento
translated from Portuguese by
jess oliveira and bruna barros
_
1/ The few and uncertain biographical data
about Aurora Cursino dos Santos are in her paint-
ings and drawings, almost always self-referential,
somewhere between memory and delusion. They
are also in medical and psychiatric documents
which, as in every archive of violence, exceed
in their partiality and demand a critical and
distrustful reading.[e.n.]
ayrson heráclito
and tiganá santana

74
75
Agô!
Permission is asked to enter the
sacred forest.
Populated by material lives, inan-
imate lives, or lives that have
become ancestral, within it dwell
various energies, which together
form a forest of infinities.
Under the ever alert protection
of caboclos, encantados, Oxóssi,
and Mutalambô, Ayrson Heráclito
Ayrson Heráclito and Tiganá Santana
and Tiganá Santana, eyes that
never sleep, fulfill a dream: a
tribute to the forest, an offering to
the forces of nature, praising the
energy stored among plants and
trees that make the existence of
humanity possible.
From the projections that reflect
multiple images, producing sounds
and sensations that emerge in a
cold and colorful forest, spring
rivers, birds, and crumpled leaves
on which we walk. Flowers, tree
frogs, insects, and other extinct
biomes coexist with native ances-
tors, caboclos, Chico Mendes,
Bruno and Dom, and mother Stella
de Oxóssi. When this forest cries
the pain of violence, colonialism,
and destruction, it is Oyá, now
guardian of all these Eguns, mother
of all that was once alive, who
invites you to dance joyfully and
celebrate life that is preserved and
renewed in nature.
The forest of infinities, installed
in the center of the largest city in
Latin America, is a feat of art, the
fruit of a hunter’s courage. It is an
impossible story materialized in
the name of a political project that
defends life and the preservation
of nature, and which proposes
a radical break with ignorance
and extermination.
Agô, it is time to leave the forest.
Let the forest return to its myste-
rious silence, with its encantados,
rivers, and infinite life forms. With
humans absent, bamboo trees sway
again, signaling the restoration of
balance. Invisible beings merge
into a single vital power and are
free again at dusk in the forests of
Oxóssi and Mutalambô. Regarding
the human visit, they ask them-
selves: will they learn that all life
is sacred?
Agô.
The blessing.
Olorum Modupé.
luciana brito
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
benvenuto chavajay

76
77
 I have been given the floor to speak
about Benvenuto to all of you, the
others. Here at the 35th Bienal de
São Paulo, he, like some others,
does not fit into the role of just an
artist: he is a ritualist who summons
worlds, underworlds, supra-worlds.
Other possible worlds.
As, in the West, the action of
someone hanging upside down is
commonly related to the image of
torture or execution, Chavajay’s
Camino/en la grieta a Xibalbá, 2023
Path/of the entrance of Xibalba. Video stills. 2 channel
videoinstallation; 6’, 7’
action disturbs us. However, in the
Mayan world, people who let them-
selves fall upside down dancing
have much more to do with fertility
and the celebration of dignified life.
Benvenuto stands on his head
with a rattle that calls souls: but he
is framed in a frame so that rituality,
to those of us on this side, “appears
as art.” Here, then, all the questions
arise about the limits between the
paradigms that make other exis-
tences invisible, turning humans,
animals and spirits into pure mer-
chandise (the concepts in which
we move daily, classifying reality
under parameters imposed by fire)
and that which resonates within us,
still... and in spite of 500 years.
Chavajay also presents himself
as the son of illiterate people; this
means, in reality, that he is heir
to a lineage of those who do not
know the symbolic logic of colonial
domination and extermination. A
territory, a community, a language
and a history of resistance dance
with him.
Benvenuto claims it as much as
the lost honor of stones, sacred
elements in many cultures on the
American continent. Therefore, his
performative actions are of great
generosity: he mobilizes forces not
as an empty spectacle, not as an
eccentricity, but as a small fire that
will dissolve the soul of stones.
natalia arcos salvo
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
bouchra ouizguen Choreography goes beyond the
composition of movement in space,
it involves working with time,
with the voice, with the affections
of those who watch, and with the
invisibles that flit between the
images in the form of words, mem-
ories or stealthy allusions. The
choreographic can occur on stage,
but also in a public space, or on a
video screen that shows the action
of a group of women in a desert.
78
79
The Corbeaux [Crows] choir is
constituted by women of different
ages and backgrounds, some of
whom have been part since the
beginning of Compagnie O. Fatna,
Kabboura, Fatéma and Halima
were already professionals before
meeting Bouchra: they had worked
as shikhat, dancers and singers
who liven up parties and popular
celebrations. If the function of the
shikhat can be considered in itself
subversive, due to their freedom to
address topics forbidden to women
in public spaces, in their collabo-
ration with Bouchra they shed the
spectacular costumes and masks
to expose their bodies, trained in
the aita and in popular dance, and
build situations of poetic sorority.
With a simple gesture, Bouchra
and Compagnie O produce a
displacement with respect to the
hegemonic modes of contemporary
Corbeaux, 2017
Crows. Video still . Video; 8’
dance, while avoiding the exoti-
cization and domestication of the
tradition which results of cultural
and entertainment tourism.
In this singular choreographic
proposal, classical Arabic poetry
constitutes a mobilizing element,
but it does not occupy a privi-
leged position with respect to
Berber singing, the creative force
or the daily experiences of these
actresses. That everyday life is what
is shown in Fatna, where Bouchra
materializes the idea of a dance
that can occur in any circumstance,
while reading, cooking or leading
the sheep. Its reverse is constituted
by the collective, ritualized action,
in an extended community that
deeply affect the audience in their
live performances, not only for
their repeated gestures and vocal
rhythms, but for the forcefulness
with which they create that collec-
tive that, in its imperfect simulta-
neity, coexists with the affirmation
of the uniqueness of each of the
participants. This piece, between
living sculpture and ritual at ground
level, arose, according to Bouchra,
from an impulse, affected by the
bustling beauty of the Marrakech
market. Flying into the desert, this
flock of crows [corbeaux] shows all
the beauty, at the same time sacred
and playful, of the bodies [corps
beaux] thanks to that camera that
flies with them and settles on the
detail as an incarnate vision.
josé antonio sánchez
cabello/carceller Since their emergence on the
contemporary art scene in the mid-
1990s, the work of Helena Cabello
and Ana Carceller has questioned
the devices and conventions of the
representation of sexualities and
identities outside the norm.
In Una voz para Erauso.
Un epílogo para un tiempo trans [A
Voice for Erauso. An Epilogue for a
Trans Time] (2021-2023), the artists
bring the complex biography of
80
81
Antonio de Erauso to the present.
Known as “The Nun Ensign,” he
was a character from the Spanish
colonial baroque famous for having
managed to circumvent the gender
binarism imposed on the bodies of
the Empire.
The work develops in a game of
distancing that weaves a queer and
almost hauntological1 temporality.
Four centuries later, three non-bi-
nary trans people question the
portrait of the ensign and, through
it, unfold a fundamental issue: the
right to be named. However, far
from creating a new queer hagiog-
raphy, the protagonists build up the
narrative and expose its dark areas:
Erauso’s confessed racism, his
participation in the Mapuche geno-
cide, the high levels of violence that
permeate his history.
Thus, Cabello/Carceller expose
a series of strategies that delve
into several key aspects. The first
is that every portrait is always
performative. The second, as Paul
B. Preciado explains, is that the
figure of Erauso is a discursive and
visual territory in dispute, a place
“where a multiplicity of conflict-
ing identities is constructed and
deconstructed”2.
In a historically dense queer
gesture, Cabello/Carceller out-
lines dissident counter-images on
A Voice for Erauso. An Epilogue for a Trans Time, 2021-2022
A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a trans time. Video stills. 4k video
transferred to HD, color, sound; 28’15’’
the margins. Whether at a glance
or through connotations, these
footnotes reveal elusive, discon-
tinuous, and bastard genealogies.
As another addition to van der
Hamen’s oil painting, as an Una voz
para Erauso. Un epílogo para un
tiempo trans, Cabello/Carceller’s
words and scenes challenge the
integrity of the hegemonic and
make art a tool to address the
ever-flickering horizon of subjectiv-
ities that lie ahead.
beatriz martínez hijazo
translated from Spanish by ana
laura borro
_
1/ In French hantologie, a concept created by
Jacques Derrida in his book Espectres de Marx
(1993), in which he unites the terms hanter [to
haunt] and ontologie [ontology], referring to the
persistent return to theories of the past. [e.n.]
2/ Paul B. Preciado, “Una voz para Erauso.
Epílogo para un tiempo trans”, in Cabello/
Carceller. Una voz para Erauso. Epílogo para un
tiempo trans. Exhibition catalog. Bilbao: Azkuna
Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao, 2022, p. 14. [e.n.]
carlos bunga When the subject of conversation
is the scale of Carlos Bunga’s work,
it will always be lively. Firstly, for an
obvious reason, because the theme
is common enough in the context of
site-specific art and installation. But
the real reason lies in the gravita-
tional singularity of the bodies in
question. For approximately two
decades, Bunga has been build-
ing and destroying a work whose
evanescent axes insist on mess-
82
83
ing up the notions of grandeur
and measurement in space-time.
The monumentality of color, for
example. To go beyond painting
and canvas, color will need a skin
(Superfície cutânea [Cutaneous
surface], 2015), and a poetics of
explosion-expansion through the
sensory continuum. Thus it is pos-
sible Habitar el color [Inhabit the
color] (2015-ongoing), a work that
spreads a huge area of paint on the
floor and invites the public to take
off their shoes and walk into it, to
see the color with their feet, to feel
the skin on their own skin. If color
was once eternal in the paintings
of the great masters, in this work
it is as splendidly able to rot as
our flesh.
Elsewhere, Bunga will be seen
working to erect grandiose struc-
tures using cardboard and tape as
support in his installations, which
sometimes become a stage for
dance performances (Occupy,
2020). He is interested in the shaky
structure that clearly announces
the choreography of its own ruin;
to place assembly and disassem-
bly in a feedback process. He is
interested in those interstitial zones
where measures escape Sumerian
and Indo-Arabic rationality – the
ten and the sixty, or even the eleven
dimensions of contemporary
physics/mysticism. What systems
will we have to resort to if we still
want to insist on the task of nar-
rating and retelling the Universe?
Bunga’s steps – his dance –
describe, if not answers, the cour-
age to keep moving in the face of
those three fundamental questions
of our everlasting big bang: Who?
From where? To where?
igor de albuquerque

translated from Portuguese by

philip somervell

Reflejo, 2015 this participation is supported by:

Reflexion. Installation view. Site-specific installation, Museo de República Portuguesa – Cultura /
Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (2015) Direção-Geral das Artes
carmézia emiliano The vibrant colors of Carmézia
Emiliano’s paintings bring to life the
daily existence of the Macuxi peo-
ples, their rites, myths, work, and
nature. Her stylistic vigor affirms
a unique culture that developed
in the region of Monte Roraima
and contrasts with the reality of its
surroundings, marked by conflicts
with mining and the explosion of
migration. Carmézia grew up in
the region of the Raposa Serra

Lenda do casal americano, 2023

The American Couple Legend. Oil on
canvas, 70 × 70 cm

84
85
do Sol Indigenous land. In the late
1980s, she moved to Boa Vista and
began her painting practice. Her
inspiration always comes from the
memory of life in the community,
continuously reinforcing her ties
with her ancestry. The affirmation
of her culture through her canvases
is also a form of elaboration of the
real and the imagined, in which she
develops a poetics of everyday life.
Indigenous women are the
Assando castanha de caju, 2023
Baking Cashew Nut. Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm
protagonists in most of Carmézia’s
work, which ultimately displays their
role and performance in all areas
of Macuxi life, whether weaving,
preparing beiju, harvesting, pro-
ducing pottery, bathing in the river,
or caring for children. Through her
work, the artist thus presents both a
commitment to indigenous struggle
as well as highlighting the gender
issue, stressing aspects that could
go unnoticed in public debate.
Buritizeiro no lavrado, 2023
Buriti Tree at the Cultivated Ground. Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm
When Carmézia paints scenes
that evoke the cosmology of her
people, she opens up space for
the complexification of everyday
life that she seeks to show. Good
examples are the legend about
Monte Roraima (which is said
to have come from Wazaká, the
Tree of Life) and the legend of
Caracaranã, which takes us to the
realm of the fantastic. The open-
ing to imagination that the artist’s
work provokes is a powerful politi-
cal manifestation transmitted with
subtlety, involving not only the
Macuxi, but all native peoples.
pérola mathias
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
castiel vitorino brasileiro What good is the insistence on
pursuing the bankruptcy of black-
ness? What guarantee of belonging
to humanity can be put to waste?
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s work
confronts the most well-established
of modern-colonial fictions, race,
tensing it as a tool that hierarchizes
life on Earth.
Questions about the condition
of de/humanity of racialized life, in
general, are elaborated according
A linguagem dos seres híbridos, 2023
The language of hybrid beings. Charcoal
on paper
86
87
to the repertoire of what the artist
defines as modernity’s mythology
about race. Studying the impli-
cations of the racial mechanism,
Brasileiro transmutes the meanings
of the presence of dark corporeities
based on the Bantu repertoire and
on religiosities of African origin.
I thus highlight the torsion
of the concept of freedom that,
released from the modern-colonial
conception of self-determination,
Untitled (Marrakesh), 2023
Digital photography
is experienced in the condition
of impermanence. In the book
Quando o Sol não mais aqui brilhar:
a falência da negritude [When the
Sun No Longer Shines Here: The
Bankruptcy of Blackness] (2023),
as well as in Montando a história
da vida – Museu fictício dos objetos
roubados pela polícia [Assembling
the Story of Life – Fictitious
Museum of Objects Stolen by
the Police] (2023), freedom also
emerges as a radical practice of
interspecific intimacy, grounded in
the indistinction of what we con-
sider biotic and abiotic.
The ethical interventions
demanded by Black and Indigenous
arts are activated by the summon-
ing of the memory and soul of the
elements that compose the installa-
tion space. There is also an archi-
tectural thrust, present in Quarto
de cura [Healing Room] (2018-22),
questioning the forms of inhabiting
the planet.
The ruined museum makes
apparent the connection between
biology and art history, and in the
name of the work Castiel reminds
us that the police is the one exe-
cuting the scene in which the
psychophysiological differences
attributed to dark bodies justify the
modern narrative of racial superi-
ority. The murders of these bodies
are performed as confirmation that
there are types of people – a lie
sustained by the privilege of the
anthropological gaze that grounds
the iconography of the arts and
fuels the imaginary about the
other-of-human, dictating who can
and should be annihilated. As such,
the work announces the end of the
racial mechanism as a possibility of
living infinitely.
cíntia guedes
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
ceija stojka

Untitled, 1995 Z6399, 1994 Untitled, 1993

Acrylic on cardboard, Acrylic on cardboard, Acrylic on cardboard,
69 × 99 cm 81 × 110,5 cm 50 × 65 cm

88
89
It was only forty years after her
deportation that Ceija Stojka
(1933-2013) was able to resurrect
from her hands the tragedy of her
plunge, at age eleven, into the hell
of genocide. Exhumed from the
limbo of her memory, Nazi perse-
cution and genocide were the raw
material of her work, composed
of drawings, paintings, and writ-
ings that are impressive for their
intensity and extraordinary poetics.
Untitled, 1993
Ink on paper, 29 × 41 cm
Paradoxically, as part of the Roma
people,1 Stojka is heir of an oral
tradition. A real memorial and
cultural handicap when it comes
to accounting for the “forgotten
genocide” her people were victims
of. Her choice to “enter” paint-
ing, drawing, and writing was an
act of radical rupture with her
tradition. Connected, the three
intersect and intertwine, without
merging completely.
Zum Krematorium, 2003
To the crematorium. Ink on
paper, 30 × 42 cm
Many of her drawings and paintings
are marked by words, signs, and
brief phrases. A graphic melopeia
unfolds in a work whose polychromy
imparts a tragic intensity to the
landscapes of disaster. Her works
associate hallucinations, visual
anticipations, and the signs of these
territories of death and their protag-
onists. In her landscapes, the gazes
of the pursuers and the killers flicker
like prefigurations of the unname-
able. Her drawings conjugate
the sharp outlines of anonymous
martyrs with the ghosts of those
absent, already dissolved in death.
Her work oscillates from the
lost paradise of life before the time
of the hunt, to the moment when
the cart gives way to the wagon
of the “train of catastrophe”, and
ends in this archipelago where “not
even the dead will be safe”.2 She
configures the tragic trajectory
of these bodies stripped of their
humanity and thrown into the hell
of genocide. There is something
of Dante’s Inferno. A great beauty
transcends its “no savoir-faire”
in quality.
philippe cyroulnik
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
1/ Ceija Stojka belonged to a Lovara Roma
family, a traditionally nomadic ethnic group
currently living in different regions of Europe
and speaking variations of the Romani lan-
guage. [e.n.]
2/ Walter Benjamin, “On the concept of history –
Thesis V” (1940).
this participation is supported by: Phileas –
The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art
and Federal Ministry Republic of Austria –
Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport.
citra sasmita Balinese artist Citra Sasmita uses
the Kamasan style – a centuries-old
type of painting – to produce art
that acknowledges the beauty of
traditions, but also critiques patri-
archy and colonialism in her coun-
try’s culture. The traditional style
was used by the older Indonesian
peoples – in the 15th to 18th centu-
ries – to represent calendars, and
especially the supposedly heroic
deeds of the traditional male elites,

The Age of Fire, 2020

Acrylic on Kamasan canvas, 70 × 90 cm.

90
91
such as in wars and other acts of
bravery. But in Sasmita’s artistic
version, this iconography takes on a
new meaning.
Through her hands and her
artistic and political eye, Kamasan
painting, also done on leather or
fabric, features new characters as
protagonists in her work. In her
project Timur Merah [Red East],
Indonesian women with long black
hair braid their existence with
each other and with elements of
nature. The red of blood and fire
pours from their heads and their
wombs; entire bodies are in flames
or form an enclosure that covers
them entirely.
With bodies that catch fire and
are mutilated in suffering, Sasmita
expresses the pain and oppression
suffered under the patriarchy by
these women, even though they are
at the center of everything. Heads
cut themselves and are cut off. Yet,
curiously, these women produce
life, for from their wombs sprout
trees, just as they also sprout
from the heads of these figures.
The branches, opening into green
leaves, grow toward the sky.
These goddess women who
constitute mythological female
figures generally do not appear
alone. Creating, procreating nature
or in suffering, they bring pain and
pleasure to each other; they are
together, in one body, or undergo
their experiences alongside each
other. Several female heads popu-
late the existence of one woman,
demonstrating that they are part of
a circular, collective experience.
Incomplete bodies and legs
encapsulate the desire to escape.
Rivers formed of women compose
a riverside circle on their banks,
reminding us of the mythology of
traditional society, remembered
through the artist’s feminist point
of view. Women are goddesses of
water and fire.
In Timur Merah, with the pro-
tagonism of mythological women,
muses, goddesses, creatures
part-human, part-beast, part-
tree, Sasmita finds possible forms
through which impossible perspec-
tives finally come to life. If this was
not possible in traditional Kamasan
art, centuries later the artist retells
the story through art.
luciana brito
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
colectivo ayllu

Residency at the Australian Print Whitenography I, 2018

Workshop, Melbourne (2019) After the image published in: Louis Dubroca, Vida de J. J.
Dessalines, gefe de los negros de Santo Domingo. Mexico: M. de
Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1806. Printed image on cardboard and wood
92
93
Colectivo Ayllu, whose practice
engages in collective modes of
creation and criticism, and in the
production of alternative episte-
mes to colonial modes of thought,
proposes a collaborative investiga-
tion around love. At the 35th Bienal,
on panels collectively created and
manufactured by artists who are
members of the collective – com-
posed of Alex Aguirre Sanchez,
Leticia/Kimy Rojas Miranda,
The Cannibal, 2019
Lithograph on paper, 101 × 68 cm
Francisco Godoy Vega, Lucrecia
Masson Córdoba and Iki Yos Piña
Narváez Funes – and collaborators
selected by an open call, they write
letters to past or future ancestors.
To do this, they use various mate-
rials and fabrics brought in by the
participants, in a form of writing
that provides the transmission of
a knowledge/feeling that occurs
between the physical and the
metaphysical. Beyond the political,
anthropocentric, and individualizing
debates about love, they weave
a portal of escape from everyday
life, saturated by the capitalistic
codification of relationships and the
brutality of civilizing choreopolitics.
If the colonial wound that
permeates and constitutes current
geopolitical systems is widened and
deepened through interpersonal
relationships, turning intimacy into
more of an access to violence than
a tool for community strengthening,
it is collective practice that makes
the exercise of a non-conciliatory
love possible. Unlike the aesthetic
function that generates subjects
who appreciate objects, unimplicit
in their transparency, in this work it
is the doing itself that constitutes
the mode of operation of what is
presented as a work and the kind
of thinking that is made possible
through this work. Thus, artists
and collaborators evoke modes of
existence that precede the subjecti-
fied (and racialized, and gendered)
body, aiming at the resumption of
a sensibility that does not distin-
guish body and surroundings, a
way of being and feeling that is,
at the same time, before and after
the invention/theft of the body by
colonial technologies.
miro spinelli
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
this participation is supported by: Acción
Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada
de España en Brasil.
cozinha ocupação
9 de julho – mstc

94
95
 Born from the dynamic of a building
occupied by almost five hundred
people of the Movimento dos Sem
Teto do Centro (MSTC) [Homeless
Movement of the (City) Center],
the Cozinha Ocupação 9 de
Julho [Kitchen of the 9 de Julho
Occupation] has been operating
since 2017 through a wide multidisci-
plinary network, with redistribution
policies, zero waste, and a deep
concern for food security. It is a
Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho – MSTC
space that goes beyond the prepa-
ration and consumption of meals. It
represents the strength of solidarity
and the power of collective work
around issues such as the right to the
full use of urban space. With regu-
larly held lunches that are open to
the public, the Kitchen has brought
greater visibility to the struggle for
housing in São Paulo. It promotes
forms of social use of spaces rel-
egated to real estate speculation
and also acts as protection against
eviction. The strategy of opening
the movement reinforces the work
of the Occupation and allows the
social technology developed to
be applied in other communities,
other peripheries.
“Occupying is caring,” a phrase
that is present in all the spaces
of the Kitchen, is both a guideline
for the MSTC’s relationships and
the preparation of meals. Empathy
and affection are the engines that
drive the work.
The Kitchen works in partnership
not only with other housing move-
ments and social organizations, but
also with the artistic class, becom-
ing an important cultural center
and an active meeting place for
activists, intellectuals, artists, and
political leaders. This new angle
strengthens the MSTC’s connec-
tions with the city and provides a
direct response to attacks by the
media and established powers keen
on criminalizing social struggle.
This way of choreographing
survival strategies in a megalopolis
like São Paulo is especially import-
ant for the 35th Bienal, which is
inspired by the Kitchen and its
always collective, horizontal form of
organization, dreaming the impos-
sible, creating bridges within the
framework of im/possibilities.
sylvia monasterios
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
 indigenous community,
a historic government project
gladys tzul tzul — instituto amaq’
communal politics / communal institutions
In this text, I propose to think about Indigenous communal
politics, considering the complex political amalgam that is
produced by communal institutions, such as Indigenous
mayors’ offices, water committees, improvement commit-
tees, brotherhoods, coordination bodies, victims’ commit-
tees, and organized women’s networks, among others.
These communal institutions are linked and dis-
tinguished from each other as autonomous segments that
constitute a whole and that, at different levels, have been
antagonistically related to the state government. This takes
place in such a way that the Indigenous community is a
historical project of government that today is recreated in
the daily life of our peoples.
In their daily operations, these communal institu-
tions produce social energy that prevents the totalization
of the State and the capital as the only paradigms of social
organization. The state response to this attempt at total-
ization will have two facets: Overt violence, that is state
policy organized for the repression and extermination of
Indigenous peoples. The second facet is the creation of
a prebendal system, which would consist of population
administration techniques by providing benefits that cause
the fragmentation of Indigenous communities.
These complex social processes of linking and dis-
tinguishing the institutions of communal politics, in antag-
onism with state bodies at different levels, enable me to
present a preliminary definition of Indigenous resistance.
For centuries, Indigenous resistance has created a
communal system of political architecture that defends,
recovers and governs their communal lands and common
goods.1 By Indigenous community, we are to understand a
political system that produces institutions and strategies of
care and renewal in their forms of communal government
in their territories and in the city; that sets a timeframe
for replacing the political leadership of their government
1/ Gladys Tzul Tzul, Gobierno comunal indígenas y estado guatemalteco:
Claves para comprender su tensa relación. Ciudad de Guatemala: Ediciones
Bizarras, 2018.
96
97
structures; that produces deliberative practices in assem-
blies to decide matters of the common good. The backbone
of this political system would be the extensive days of
communal work to take care of the water, forest, festivities,
mourning, and to lead, because leadership is also com-
munal work. Having these elements, we can understand
Indigenous communal politics.
community in territories and migration
Leadership change, deliberative assembly and commu-
nity work are a fundamental part of the Indigenous com-
munity architecture. These institutions have managed
to re-establish themselves beyond their territories, and
especially outside the country, particularly in the United
States, where hundreds of Indigenous communities have
been displaced.
The reasons for Indigenous displacement can be
understood in several historical layers. The first is the
displacement of Indigenous communities who had to leave
their territories because of the war. After the signing of the
Peace Accords, new forms of dispossession and repression
by the state were introduced. Most of the communities
have been evicted because of land grabbing for monocul-
tures, mining and hydroelectric plants. This structural con-
dition of Guatemala, a country with an extractive economy,
explains the high numbers of Indigenous people living in
the United States today.
Therefore, nowadays, when we say Indigenous com-
munity, we are not only referring to the communities in the
territories, but also to the hundreds of Indigenous peoples
that have established themselves in the United States.
In the territories, it can no longer be said that the
Kaqchikel live only in Sololá, in Guatemala. Today we
know that there are Kaqchikel communities in Texas and
Los Angeles, in the United States. Just like the K’iche’s
of San Francisco El Alto and Totonicapán in Los Angeles,
New York, Texas, and Boston. Or the Ixiles in Miami,
Washington, D.C., or New York, and this same dynamic is
found in Mayan, Garifuna and Xinka peoples, and extends
throughout Mesoamerica.
They are Indigenous people who work as a workforce in
construction, gardening, food, care, sewing, among other
services. Not only are they a workforce, but they developed
a political infrastructure to give communal form to their
lives. They are circuits of connection with their communi-
ties of origin. Virtual communication technology enables
the flow of information between family networks. The
workings of these dynamics have been documented by
Mixtec journalist Kau Sirenio.2
The migrants have restarted and created their own
communal political system in the United States, and it is
through this that they organize the repatriation of the bod-
ies of compatriots who have died in this country and who
will be buried in their towns of origin, as well as organizing
and collaborating in community festivities. However, they
also create organizational networks to support their com-
munities affected by hydroelectric and mining projects.
Institutions such as the Zoogochense Social Union,
the Franciscan Emergency Committee and the Chuj
Support Act3 are just three of the hundreds of commu-
nity institutions that populate cities in the United States.
These communities function with leaders in charge of
organizing and managing bereavements and festivals,
under guidelines of communal work situated to their living
conditions. These communities are made up of networks
of extended families, and under an ethic of obligatory work
and support, they have managed to weave communal life
in multiple ways.
Some institutions have been in existence for more
than 50 years, such as the Zoogochense Social Union, made
up of Zapotecs from the northern highlands, originally
2/ Kau Sirenio, Jornaleros migrantes: explotación transnacional. Mexico
City: SUDEMIR; UNAM, 2021.
3/ The Zoogochense Social Union is a Zapotec organization from the
northern highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico. The Franciscan Emergency Com-
mittee is one of multiple Mayan Q’iche’s institutions in San Francisco El
Alto, Totonicapán, and the Chuj Support Act is made up of Chuj communi-
ties in San Mateo Ixtatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala.
from the town of San Bartolomé Zoogocho,4 in Mexico. This
shows us multiple spheres of communal existence, created
in North American cities.
The existence of Indigenous communities in the
United States and their multiple forms of connection
with their communities of origin broaden our notions of
Indigenous politics and resistance. The capacity to govern,
to recover and to defend the communities in Guatemala
takes place in everyday life. In such a way that migrant
labour and effort support the processes of communal
reproduction; in fact, some trajectories of social develop-
ment, of health and education improvement have been
possible thanks to the remittance from community mem-
bers who have migrated.
communal politics in the archipelago
According to Nina Pacari,5 Indigenous communities have
been developed as a counter-power to the Latin American
state. However, this counter-power is not a dispersed and
formless force. They are communal political institutions,
which, insofar as they oppose the state, have the capacity
to deform it and shape it to Indigenous societies.
To analyze these antagonistic forms, we should keep
in mind the moments of social breakdown that over the
centuries have prevented the totalization of the Guatemalan
state and of the capital in Indigenous territories. That is, the
communal capacity for governance that Indigenous struc-
tures have had in managing the reconstruction of life after
the open moments of war and violence.
In order to understand the community/state antag-
onism, it is necessary to analyze at least two ways in which
these two systems oppose each other, which are: the pre-
4/ In my recent research, I have documented the existence of these
multiple institutions of communal politics in both California and New
York. See more in Tzul Tzul. G. (2022). Indigenous communal politics in Los
Angeles [Política comunal indígena en Los Ángeles]. Unpublished.
5/ Nina Pacari, “Reflexiones sobre el proyecto político de la CONAIE:
logros y vigencia,” in Así encendimos la mecha! Treinta años del levanta-
miento indígena en Ecuador: una historia permanente, ed. Simbaña, F and
Rodriguez, A. Quito: Abya Yala Editorial, 2018.
bend and the violence as the state’s tutelary relationship
with the communities.
Prebends have had the effect of disciplining collec-
tive subjectivity, although never fully, but they have tempo-
rarily divided and fragmented it. One effect of a prebendal
policy is clientelism, which modifies and refunctionalizes
community systems. On the other hand, open violence:
genocide, as a planned mechanism for the extermination of
peoples, has had the effect of displacing them from their ter-
ritories, persecuting their organizational structures, burning
crops and killing domestic animals. However, the communi-
ties have rebuilt and restarted their communal world.
Faced with these forms of antagonism, the commu-
nities and their political systems have developed a profound
degree of social fluidity to update themselves in the face of
threats or transformations that are necessary for the preser-
vation of life and have been able to deform the State.6
The antagonistic conditions mentioned above have
in many ways been responded to in rebellions, and uprisings
that linger in the memory of everyday life. About what was
previously mentioned, I present three distinctions in order
to understand the forms in which the structures of commu-
nal politics appear: a) Indigenous communal government
that controls and defends its lands, for example, the 48 can-
tons of Totonicapán, the Indigenous municipality of Solalá,
and others; b) Indigenous communal governments that
are reconstituted at the same time as they recover land, for
example, the Indigenous Mayor’s Office of Nebaj, Guatemala,
and several Q’eqchi’ communities; c) Indigenous communal
governments that are reestablishing themselves in the city,
such as the innumerable Indigenous communities with their
forms of organization in cities in the United States.
In light of the above classification, I propose the
metaphor of the archipelago7, in order to think about the
6/ Gladys Tzul Tzul, Una forma ética de existencia. Montevideo: Minerva
Ediciones, 2017.
7/ The idea of archipelago to think about the struggles in Indigenous
communal politics for their communal lands dialogues with and is
nourished by Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, who uses this notion to analyze
the power and strength of the struggles that women are developing in
contemporary times.
98
99
presence of communal government structures throughout
Guatemala and also in the United States. Thinking about the
existence of communities and their discontinuous political
system enables an understanding of why they have histori-
cally had the capacity to prevent the totalization of the State.
The notion of archipelago assumes the existence of
communal territories limited by private and state territories.
On the one hand, communal territories in their discontinu-
ous existence in the republic establish levels of social order
that can place the totality of the State and capital in crisis at
different levels. That is, societies organized in a communal
framework that seek to collectively manage life; they share
and produce water sources, take care of forests, repair roads,
zealously guard their landmarks. In other words, they do
not live as the sum of small individual landowners. On the
other hand, it is in the archipelago where the reactivation of
Indigenous communal politics in the city happens, with its
variants and different expressions that are taking on their
communal structures for the support and management of
festivities and mourning, the support of their families and
the struggles in which their communities are involved.
While archipelago is the geographical way of think-
ing about the singularity of communal existence in the
territory, the notion of networks of assemblies allows us to
think about spaces for deliberation and discussion, which
gradually become interlinked. These networks of commu-
nal assemblies have had the safeguarding of communal
lands at the centre of their interests, and from there, exten-
sive communication networks flow between them.
Thus, communication, agreement and articulation
of the communal governments are based on the logic of
self-regulation, for example, the principle “no authority
rules over another authority”, which means that no com-
munity rules over another community, thus showing the
calidad autonómica situada [locally situated quality] of the
processes of articulation and joint work.
Understanding communal politics and resistance
in the light of the archipelago/networks of assemblies shows
the vitality and strength of communal struggles that have
at their core to control communal lands, while at the same
time governing themselves according to their historical
process. In any case, they also show the architecture of the
struggle, the densities, the ways of articulation. The pro-
cess of resistance, then, is constituted from a communal
political system.
According to Rivera Cusicanqui,8 thinking about
resistance places us in multiple and unresolved layers of
the undigested past, which emerge as accumulated fury,
but also as baroque and subversive bricolage. My reading
suggests that to understand the existence of these political
systems, rather than thinking only that the state wants to
suppress these political instances, one should think that
the state in its local expressions has been deformed by
the strength and insurgent capacity of communities. The
archipelago figure of communal resistance would thus
illuminate the functioning of communal politics.
final remarks
Communal work, political deliberation and the rotation of
positions constitute the basis from which long-term polit-
ical projects are produced, those that Indigenous peoples
embody and live on a daily basis. However, it is an everyday
life that is constituted in singularity, which is why the meta-
phor of the communal archipelago is central to understand-
ing the continuity and discontinuity of their existence, but it
also makes it possible to show the strength of their exis-
tence, as well as the unequal rhythms in which they exist.
Under the influence of the archipelago communi-
ties, a rich iconographic and image universe for symbolic
realization has been produced. By this, I mean a part of the
great communal production of aesthetics, enjoyment and
pleasure in Indigenous societies, such as the festivals of
the patron saints of the communities where economic pro-
cesses and enjoyment are activated. It is not yet possible
to calculate the number of huipiles [hand-woven clothes
worn by Mayan women], fabrics and sashes that are bought
and sold for the celebrations of the festivities. It can also
be added the unclassifiable variety of foods in the festivi-
8/ Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo Ch’ixi es posible: Ensayos desde un
presente en crisis. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018.
ties, as well as the ordinary of the everyday, to those arts of
making collective life.
In the same way, for more than two decades,
commercialization circuits of fabrics, huipiles and other
garments have been introduced in the United States. These
expressions of communal culture that are reactivated in
a scattered time and geography, and in different celebra-
tory events, would be one of the many ways of communal
expression of aesthetics.
If communal politics also produces this symbolic
universe, which produces iconography, images, tastes and
sounds that are created collectively, and if the communal is
a historical project of government, then communal politics
also governs with images.
Totonicapán, 1 July 2023.
_
references
Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo. Racismo y desplazamiento: Situación
de la criminalización y violencia lingüística en Estados Unidos contra
migrantes indígenas, ed. Tzul Tzul, G. Partial report presented at a public
hearing at the 186th Period of Hearings of the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights. Los Angeles: 2023.
PACARI, Nina. “Reflexiones sobre el proyecto político de la CONAIE: logros
y vigencia.” In: Así encendimos la mecha! Treinta años del levantamiento
indígena en Ecuador: una historia permanente, ed. Simbaña, F and
Rodriguez, A. Quito: Abya Yala Editorial, 2018.
RIVERA CUSICANQUI, Silvia. Sociología de la Imagen. Miradas Ch’xi’ desde
la historia andina. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2015.
_________. Un mundo Ch’ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis.
Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2018.
SIRENIO, Kau. Jornaleros migrantes. Explotación transnacional. Mexico
City: SUDEMIR-UNAM, 2021.
TZUL TZUL, Gladys. Gobierno comunal indígenas y estado guatemalteco.
Claves para comprender su tensa relación. Ciudad de Guatemala: Ediciones
Bizarras, 2018.
TZUL TZUL, Gladys and RAMÓN, Simón Antonio. “Guatemala más allá de
las elecciones”. Ojalá Journal, 10 May 2023.
daniel lie On a visit to Daniel Lie’s studio in
2017, I sensed a strong aroma perme-
ating the environment. The result of
the decomposition of flowers, fruits,
and vegetables kept in his studio,
the odor was the manifestation of a
universe of hidden beings that would
give new directions to their artistic
practice. The ongoing investiga-
tion focused on the effects of time
and the action of microorganisms,
such as fungi and bacteria, in the

100
101
transmutation of organic matter.
Witnessing the changes in the mate-
riality of those elements, and follow-
ing diverse natural cycles, enabled
Lie to reflect on the complexities of
interspecific relationships and their
role in the generation and mainte-
nance of life.
Lie has broadened their notions
of temporality and has endeav-
ored to find forms of collaboration
that break the hierarchical notion
Non-Negotiable Condition, 2021
Installation view, Metabolic Rift, Berlin (2021)
that places the human species at
the top of the evolutionary scale.
Since then, they have been devel-
oping “installations-entities”: large
sculptures of organic materials, the
result of the process of degrada-
tion/transformation of the elements
that give them form. Although they
respond to the context and place in
which they are presented, in each
of them, Lie resorts to new meth-
ods to create harmonious ecosys-
tems, where relationships between
fungi, plants, animals, minerals, and
other-than-humans can break with
a binary reading of life and death.
For the 35th Bienal de São Paulo,
Lie presents Outres [Others] (2023)
and seeks to create a space where
silence, not words, leads to rela-
tionships between those present.
Outres is the result of the matura-
tion of the techniques and methods
of production developed over the
last few years of their research. The
immersive installation will consist
of terracotta vases, columns, and
arrangements of yellow and white
chrysanthemums, as well as cotton
fabrics dyed with turmeric. Added
to the composition of the work are
the effects of the passage of time
on the materials and the eventual
generation of new lives derived
from the relationships established
between the organic agents pres-
ent in the environment.
thiago de paula souza
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
daniel lind-ramos In one way, Daniel Lind-Ramos’
work is fiercely local. His large
assemblage sculptures stage an
encounter with his hometown
of Loíza, Puerto Rico, the area
from which the found items that
comprise the work are collected.
His neighbors have watched him
wander the streets and beaches
of the town, collecting and fitting
together pieces of their communal
lives over decades. Fellow Loízans,
102
103
familiar with his always-open stu-
dio, bring him items they find inter-
esting, from a nice-looking piece of
pipe to kitchenware inherited from
a beloved grandmother.
This geographic specificity is
not insignificant. The town of Loíza
is the celebrated center of Afro-
Puerto Rican life with the largest
black population on the island.
Founded in the 16th century by
Africans who escaped the then
Spanish colony’s plantations, the
town is the birthplace of the plena
and bomba musical styles. It is well-
known for its street food, known
locally as frituras, and its annual
carnival distinguished by the tradi-
tional vejigante masks made from
coconut shells. In this way, Lind-
Ramos’ practice is a kind of testa-
ment to the history and significance
of Loíza, a foregrounding of Puerto
Rico’s blackness. “To take care of
Con-Junto (The Ensemble), 2015
Assemblage, 289,6 x 304,8 x 121,9 cm
objects is to take care of memory,”
Lind-Ramos tells us. He preserves
the memory in these graters,
brooms, calabash gourds, and cym-
bals; memories of joyous creation,
of labor, of ancestry. Memories
that might otherwise fade away or
be erased.
That’s not the whole story
though. Lind-Ramos has said of his
work, “My intention was to find a
language, find a process, find mate-
rials that establish the link between
our collective experience…”
The collective he speaks of here
exceeds his hometown and state.
Speaking of Los Angeles based,
African American artists working in
the 1960s and 1970s, art historian
Kellie Jones has argued that “the
aesthetic of assemblage” is one of
“linkage and connection.”1 She fur-
ther argues for the form’s history in
African art, and its vernacular and
quotidian aesthetics, which provide
“a rationale for people of color to
lay claim to assemblage techniques
[…], and to the mundane strategies
of making beauty that were allowed
to people on society’s margins”.2
This could not be more true of
Lind-Ramos’ practice and it links
his art to a broader field of Afro-
diasporic strategy. His sculptures
connect across time and space,
much like the carnival procession
that Con-Junto (The Ensemble)
brings to mind. Carnival straddles
Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago,
Brazil, New Orleans and so many
other parts of the African Diaspora,
themselves linked by a history of
forced migration and violence,
but also persistence, creativity
and innovation. Both carnival and
assemblage, beautifully fused here,
are moments of a most exquisite
making something from that which
might have been condemned
as nothing.
nicole smythe-johnson
_
1/ Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American
Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, p. 69.
2/ Ibid., p. 71.
davi pontes and To speak of the output of Davi
wallace ferreira Pontes and Wallace Ferreira is, first
of all, to recognize their encounter
which, since 2018, has produced
a series of works based on the
identification and radical elabora-
tion of their common experiences
and research related to dance and
the experience of the Black dis-
sident body in the world. Among
the works produced, such as Mata
leão, morto vivo [Chokehold, Living

104
105
Dead] (2020), Delirar o racial
[Racial Delirium] (2021), and the
trilogy Repertório [Repertoire] (2018
– ongoing), the duo uses mimesis,
repetition, and the rhythmic mark-
ing of the counterpoint, carried out
with performers’ feet, as resources
to dilate the perception of time-
space. Starting from the question
“How can a dance of self-defense
be elaborated?”, Pontes and
Ferreira experiment with symbolic
Delirar o racial, 2021
Racial Delirium. Video, color, sound. Video still
deviations from the violence pro-
grammed by the State and by insti-
tutions that ensure order through
repression. With references to
martial arts and capoeira, with the
onto-epistemological critique of
modern philosophy and the his-
tory of dance, they take the act of
performative and visual creation
as a possibility for activating and
resignifying the collective mne-
monic archives about these corpo-
realities. If the Black body at rest
is suspicious and when in move-
ment a threat, Pontes and Ferreira
find within this choreographic act
possible strategies to re-elaborate
imaginaries, proposing changes in
the symbolic meanings of the Black
presence in a world that is not yet
able to grant these lives existence
and dignity. While modern dance
has instructed the viewing public
to expect impressive and grandi-
ose events, repetition reinforces
the expectation of the future and
uncertainty breaks with predict-
ability about dance. Upon making
contact with the performance in
progress, the audience finds itself
immersed in the imprecision about
beginning and end. It is possible
to say that Pontes and Ferreira
develop a countercolonial anti-cho-
reography, which, in the practice
of Black life can mean the recovery
and foundation of strategic ways
of moving towards self-defense in
everyday life, deviating from racial
violence, reworking the perception
of self and time-space towards
the end of the organization of the
current world.
maria luiza meneses
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
dayanita singh

Mona Montage, 2021

Gelatin silver and archival pigment print,
41,3 × 61,3 cm

106
107
The bringing together of photog-
raphy and dance, by virtue of an
ontological disparity between
these media, produces an initial
and immediate tension between
movement and stillness. As if
photography is always chasing the
movement of dance, without ever
being able to completely capture it.
Dayanita Singh’s practice emerges
from and feeds on precisely this
tension. Her interest in the mobility
of the photographic object when
exhibited, present in the structures/
collections she calls museums,
takes on even more complexity
and nuance in the works presented
at the 35th Bienal. In Museum of
Dance (Mother Loves to Dance), not
only are the photographic prints
mobile in the exhibition space, but
the subjects are also in movement,
dancing. Among them, Mona
Ahmed, Singh’s long-time friend
who also features in the other
works on display, is notable for
her recurrence.
According to Singh, in the Indian
context, Ahmed was identified as
a eunuch, or as a hijra. However,
at a certain point she distanced
herself from the eunuch commu-
nity and began to question the
expectation of femininity that was
placed on her. “You really do not
understand. I am the third sex, not
a man trying to be a woman. It is
your society’s problem that you
only recognize two sexes.”1 Thus it
is of little importance to “describe”
Ahmed with identitarian preci-
sion, but it does matter to think
about the endless movement that
exceeds the binary gender system
and that we can call transition.
Beyond a portrayal of transition as
an allegory of aesthetic-political
movements, as often occurs when
produced through a cisnormative
lens, the intimacy and the pact of
trust established in the collabora-
tion between Singh and Ahmed, by
bypassing ethnographic unidirec-
tionality (the “I” seeing/describing/
producing the “other”), allows
something formidable to happen:
the still image evokes and per-
forms the uncapturable movement
of transition.
miro spinelli
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Quote by Mona Ahmed extracted from the
text on Dayanita Singh’s website about the book
Myself Mona Ahmed. Zurich: Scalo Publishers,
2001. Available at: dayanitasingh.net/myself-mo-
na-ahmed/. Accessed on: May 26, 2023.
deborah anzinger I have always thought of Deborah
Anzinger’s work as essentially
about syntax. That is, the struc-
ture of language, both verbal and
visual. Her work asks us to think
about the relationships that pro-
duce language; the relationship
between subject and object, self
and other, masculine and feminine,
natural and artificial; binaries that
oppose and constitute each other.
These concepts, here identified
Deborah Anzinger: An Unlikely Birth
Exhibition view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2019)
108
109
by their verbal descriptors, are
grounded in material in Anzinger’s
work, and a rigorous materiality
might be considered the second
tenet around which her practice
is organized.
Anzinger’s paintings refuse
to stay on the wall, they will not
surrender to painting’s purported
two dimensionality. They insist on
protruding, reflecting, growing and
kinky-curling off the unstretched
canvases. In them we find hand-
painted lines and gradients so
perfectly rendered they look
digital, living plants growing from
death-dealing synthetic Styrofoam,
and mirrors that turn the viewer
into the viewed. In Anzinger’s
universe, line drawings and paint
strokes become sculpture, irises
become tongues. Where there
should be a hole we get an unfurl-
ing. Anzinger’s work is always
forcing opposites together, desta-
bilizing our binary thinking and
taxonomizing, instead demanding
the acknowledgement of a slippery,
playful, sensual third way.
In this particular body of work,
completed between 2016 and
2019, Anzinger’s focus is turned to
reproductive labor; its sensuality,
its fecundity, but also its violence.
The synthetic kinky-curly hair in An
Unlikely Birth (2018) is an unmis-
takable reference to Blackness, as
well as the black line drawings that
disrupt the abstracted landscape,
which seems to be in the process
of coming to being. As a Black
woman, born into and making from
the Caribbean, Anzinger is atten-
tive to the ways that Blackness is
often excised from, or suppressed
into subservience in representa-
tions of the region. The painting
disrupts the kind of palette we
associate with the Caribbean –
cheerful sky blues, the signature
blue-green of the Caribbean Sea,
and verdant greens – with scrawl-
like drawings of breasts, that ulti-
mate symbol of nourishment and
sexuality; and grasping hand-like
leaves, reminding us that nature
has her own subjectivity, an agency
that takes, as hurricanes do every
year in this region, as much as it
gives. And then, of course, that
lump of kinky-curly black hair. Not
quite in the painting, it is a sort of
excess wherein aloe vera plants,
celebrated for their healing qual-
ities, grow against all odds from
the hostile polystyrene that chokes
waterways and poisons fauna.
This, I would argue, is Anzinger’s
point, even in the most inhospita-
ble conditions healing things grow,
and even in places of awe-inspiring
beauty violence lurks.
nicole smythe-johnson
denilson baniwa The linear organization of time
as conceived by modern Europe,
driven by the notions of progress
and non-return, is incompatible
with the conceptions of time among
Amerindian cultures. Determined by
the interaction between the body
and nature, and organized through
empirical observation of the trans-
formations of the environment, the
experience of indigenous time is
generally based on mythical founda-
110
111
tions which are reinscribed in daily
life through rites. Among these rites
is the transmission of knowledge
and the sharing of affections, which
in the Western world we call edu-
cation. It is from an understanding
of education as a non-linear, proce-
dural, and collective process that
Denilson Baniwa has, in recent years,
been investigating ways of introduc-
ing indigenous temporalities into
non-indigenous artistic institutions.
One of the most prominent artists
of his generation, Denilson Baniwa’s
work proposes a reworking of the
idea of the archive as a pedagogical
tool for reflection and a factory of
history. From his early works, which
intervene in engravings produced
in the context of the colonization
of the Americas, to his most recent
works, which are installation-based
and participatory, Baniwa intrudes
upon the archive with the aim
Colheita maldita, 2022
Cursed Harvest. Digital photography
of stressing and weakening the
accelerated time of conquest and
colonization and bringing forth
the time of reflection, waiting, and
listening. In more recent works,
such as Nada que é dourado per-
manece, hilo, amáka, terra preta
de índio [Nothing that is golden
remains, hilo, amáka, Indigenous
dark earth] (2021), Ygapó – terra
firme [Ygapó – Dry land] (2022)
and Escola Panapaná [Panapaná
School] (2023), the artist commits
to stimulating relationship and con-
tact, rescuing the image of cultivat-
ing the fields and life in the forest
as a metric of time and a metaphor
for education.
In Kwema/Amanhecer [Kwema/
Dawn], Denilson Baniwa deepens
his research on the integration
between artwork and community,
complexifies the technical proce-
dures that allow the passage from
the field of representation to that of
experience, and reveals the possi-
bility of harvesting and eating as
the realization of the act of sharing
and the reworking of memory.
renato menezes
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
denise ferreira da silva A series of pyramids are scattered
around the Bienal Pavilion, occa-
sionally taking on new forms.
Each is a tetrahedron, a Platonic
solid representing fire and com-
posing Denise Ferreira da Silva’s
Metaphysics of the Elements −
The Studio (2023).
Fire renews the exercise through
which the artist aesthetically
pursues a question recurrent in her
artistic and philosophical work.
112
113
In its capacity for radical trans-
formation and in the resignifica-
tion of fire when combined with
other elements, this form-concept
represents the inauguration of a
here-now for the end of the world
as we know it. I see Metaphysics
of the Elements – The Studio as a
crack that intends to silently engulf
the pavilion, the park, and the city…
Not in some dramatic, apocalyptic
scene but as a space where col-
lectivities and imaginations can
emerge, vibrating at ethically simi-
lar frequencies.
The end reintroduces a dispute
and a need to abandon the tools
of modern thought, which works
towards an end goal of domination,
calling on thought processes that
constantly perform the end, because
they would never start from the
assumption that there is an ontolog-
ical separation between humankind
view of Poetical Readings/Intuiting the Political, an open conversation with Denise
Ferreira da Silva and Valentina Desideri on the 7th episode of Arika, We can’t live without
our lives. Tamway. Glasgow, April 18, 2015
and the other presences that inhabit
the world.
When the structures of insepa-
rability – the tetrahedrons – come
together and transform into tables,
benches, and grandstands, the
studio acts as a platform for the
emergence of meetings of Black,
feminist intellectuals, artists, and
social movements engaged in
dismantling the anti-Black struc-
tures in the world, and in ecological
demands for the right to life, land,
and territory.
The piece is a continuation of
a series of works through which
Denise Ferreira da Silva responds
to the project of dealing with the
world through elemental thinking,
encouraging a rapid and necessary
shift in decolonization projects that,
in the Brazilian context, are still
trapped in imagining the correction
of institutions, which has failed to
keep collapse from continuing to
shape this territory.
cíntia guedes
translated from Portuguese by
georgia fleury reynolds
diego araúja and “Quero me acabar no sumidô.”
laís machado [I want to end myself in the drain.]1
This popular saying can be traced
back to a verse of a vissungo2
recorded in 1929 in Minas Gerais,
and probably chanted throughout
the territory where there were
exploited Black people. To disap-
pear as an opportunity to embark
on a temporality in which the lambá
– the disgrace of enslaved labor
and its centuries-long enchaine-

114
115
ment – is not the only destiny of
Black life. Singing for a productive
disappearance relates life and
death not as oppositions, but as the
possibility of living life otherwise.
It is in the wake of this chant
that Sumidouro n. 2 – Diáspora
fantasma [Ghost Diaspora] refuses
to surrender itself to the gaze that
reveals everything. Betting on the
formal opacity of a monumental
architecture, the work connects
Studies for Sumidouro n. 1, 2022
Palha da costa and sisal curtains in aluminum rails controlled by Arduino
to the ethical call of the collabo-
rative work of Lais Machado and
Diego Araúja by emerging as a
platform and bringing together
Afro-Atlantic artists. To be
enchanted by Sumidouro n. 2 is the
opportunity to be in the presence
of works which, opposed to the
colonial forces of disappearance,
have never ceased to be realized in
experimentations and languages of
their own.
As in other visual art pieces
by Araúja and Machado, this work
retains scenic functions, this time
in its scale, and in the spectatorial
game played with straw, a mate-
rial of liturgical, architectural, and
handicraft purposes. Defined by
the artists as an installation-per-
former, the phantasmagoria that
is performed does not appear as a
surrealist bid to reveal the uncon-
scious, but rather as the possibility
of dancing with all that which has
been disappeared.
In movement, Sumidouro n. 2
promotes dis/appearances; what is
to come is revealed in fragments,
the housed works are offered to an
integral and rhythmic, but not total-
izing, apprehension. It is possible
to just contemplate it, but to be in
Sumidouro n. 2, a whole body with
the qualities of alarinjo presence is
required – which, in Yoruba, means
a body that sings and dances while
walking, implicated in the desire to
re/un/know.3 It is a sinuous plat-
form in which the collective pact,
the intentionality of the rite, and the
desire to intervene in the dynamics
of disappearance stand out.
cíntia guedes
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ “Ei ê lambá / quero me acabá no sumidô /
quero me acabá no sumidô / lamba de vinte
dia / ei lambá / quero me acabar no sumidô /
Ei ererê.” Vissungo documented in 1929 by the
philologist and linguist Aires da Mata Machado
Filho (1909-1985), in a study of the Bantu rep-
ertoire in Diamantina (MG), was re(en)chanted
by the singer and composer Geraldo Filme
(1927-1995) in the album O canto dos escravos,
by Geraldo, Clementina de Jesus and Tia Doca,
Eldorado Studio, 1982.
2/ Chant intoned by black slaves in the dia-
mond fields of Diamantina (MG) with words in
Portuguese and African languages. [E.N.]
3/ Alarinjo is also a term used by Lais Machado
to define her performing arts practice.
duane linklater Duane Linklater’s works play with
concepts of landscape. We know
that this term carries the weight
of a historical genre of painting, in
addition to the complex implica-
tions present in one of its facets:
the representations of dominated
spaces produced by artists com-
missioned by colonizers. In the
ever-present relationship between
art and society, in these portrayals
we can see, before our eyes, the
116
117
vast documentation of the pro-
cesses of domination together with
the symbolic and applied change
to the uses of territories. I am not
referring to every type of land-
scape, but to those that most gen-
uinely present themselves as a field
open to the reach of our vision, the
violent representation of what is
made possession.
Linklater proposes thinking of
landscape as a perceptual experi-
ence of the manifestation of natural
phenomena, as a physical and
spiritual state of beings crossed
by the forces of the world. But the
reference and the weight of official
history are important points to bear
in mind, as the artist’s works shatter
the often romanticized image,
steeped in nostalgia, by questioning
its original nature. They even seem
to inhabit that fissure. Linklater
appropriates elements of modern
they have piled the stone / as they promised / without syrup, 2023
Exhibition view, Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023)
and contemporary architecture and
assimilates them into his work.
For the 35th Bienal, the artist
presents a series of paintings that,
through the play between form and
matter, tension the nefarious leg-
acies of school systems1 for indig-
enous children – in operation in
Canada between 1880 and 1996. In
the compositions that Linklater has
been pursuing since 2015, when he
began this research, he takes up the
geometries of the Bishop Fauquier
chapel, built using the labor of chil-
dren who attended the Shingwauk
Indian Residential School (which
operated from 1873 to 1970). In
addition to being required to pro-
vide manual labor for the buildings,
these children performed Lenten
sacrifices related to Maple Syrup.
As the project presented by the
artist to the 35th Bienal reads, “The
Anishinabek communities devel-
oped a specific methodology of
maple syrup production with their
intimate knowledge of the seasons,
the land, and its processes. So not
only were the children asked to
forgo syrup consumption, but it
created a symbolic disconnect with
these community practices and
methodologies.” Divided into nine
parts, the geometries of the chapel
are treated with other designs
made from charcoal, cochineal, tea,
tobacco, and other colorings that
denote the work of the children
who built the construction.
The paintings titled they have
piled the stone / as they promised /
without syrup continue to resound
the artist’s questions: How can
we, as indigenous peoples, live,
make decisions, speak, dance, and
move in such impossible contexts
and places?
emanuel monteiro
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ The Residential School System in Canada
was a violent and prolonged system imposed
by the government and its attendant churches,
created specifically so that indigenous children
would be separated from their families, accul-
turated and colonized.
edgar calel

118
119
The jaguar is prominent in
Mesoamerican cultures and
appears in various kinds of rep-
resentations. In Mayan culture
and mythology, the jaguar has the
ability to transcend space and time
and to cross between the day and
the spirit world to facilitate commu-
nications and connections between
the ancestors and the living.
In Xar – Sueño de Obsidiana
(2020), produced with Brazilian
Sketches for Nimajay Guarani, 2023
The Big Guarani House. Graphite on paper,
50 x 50 cm (each)
filmmaker Fernando Pereira
dos Santos inside the Ciccillo
Matarazzo Pavilion of the Bienal de
São Paulo during the first wave of
the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil,
Mayan artist Edgar Calel wears the
skin of a jaguar as he walks around
the pavilion and seeks to see and
understand how the site was orig-
inally used by the indigenous peo-
ple who once inhabited that land.
This is at once a transmutation
between human and non-human
and a transcendence of space
and time; and it is also an act of
constructing solidarity or “practic-
ing community.” Throughout the
film Calel wears a blue sweatshirt
embroidered with the names of
the twenty-two Mayan languages
as his voice is heard reciting the
poem of the same name as the
film but in the Kaqchikel language,
written by Calel, and composed
of his dreams in Brazil during
the pandemic.
Sharing in community is a topic
fundamental to Calel’s artistic
production. Calel’s Guarani house
installation for the 35th Bienal de
Sao Paulo is a large immersive
drawing on canvas of a Guarani
house surrounded by embroidered
Yucca plants. The drawing is an
architectural image and simulta-
neously a representation of indig-
enous epistemology – a map of
“practicing community” around a
bonfire while sharing in storytell-
ing, rituals, music, and meditation.
The drawing reorients space from
horizontal to vertical and invites
the viewer to participate in the
communal imaginary of indigeneity.
The Guarani people are the largest
indigenous group in Brazil whose
surviving population is estimated at
51,000 people. Today, three Guarani
villages with a combined popula-
tion of approximately 700 people
live in the Jaraguá district on the
outskirts of São Paulo.
mario gooden
elda cerrato What are these strange shapes
that vibrate, approach, assemble?
Mutating mother cells? Fragments
of celestial bodies? Instants of
unknown life? Organic machines?
Domestic or stellar landscapes?
There seems to be no figuration or
abstraction in the series of paintings
that Elda Cerrato (1930-2023) created
after the birth of her son in 1964, and
which inspired the animated short
film RF: Segmentos_CPV: Okidanokh
(1964-2022) – made together with
Ramiro Larraín, Luis Zubillaga and
Luciano Zubillaga. In fact, there is a
rigorous invention of worlds. From
her earliest works, she wonders
about the mystery of life and the
transformation of energy into the
most unsuspected, unknown and
secret forms. To some extent, those
images function as explorations or
hypotheses, speculations or halluci-
nations, and esoteric projections.

Algunas experiencias relativas al Okidanokh, from

the series Producción de Energía, 1965
Some experiences related to the Okidanokh, from the
series Energy Production. Oil on canvas, 115 × 145 cm
120
121
What if we managed to link
together some clues that the artist
leaves within our reach to work
out her enigma? The titles provide
clues (mentions of the Beta Being,
the Laboratory of the Holy Source
of Energy, Okidanokh) by referring
to alternative worldviews such as
the philosophy of the Fourth Way,
founded by Georges Gurdjieff, of
which both Elda Cerrato and her
lifelong partner, the experimental
musician Luis Zubillaga, were active
practitioners since the 1950s.
In addition to a spiritual quest
materialized in images, we can note
a precise knowledge of biochemis-
try (she studied the whole career)
and a practice of observation under
the microscope.
One should also address many
of these images on an erotic note:
imminent insertions between
organs, encounters, fusion, assem-
bly, penetration, gestation. Flowing
blood. Organs that beat.
These images can be understood
as maps and diagrams of a stellar
journey until landing on Earth, more
precisely in a Latin America shaken
by the political radicalization that
ravaged the continent, where she
places the series of paintings and
heliographs she produced in the
1970s. From the Beta Being to the
multitude in the streets: this is the
transition that transfigures her gaze
from an inner search to the world
around her. The organicity of her
maps is that of a living body, which
changes without abandoning the
traces already traveled, but tak-
ing them up again. “Worldviews
as memories of other times”, says
Cerrato.1 An exercise in memory
and at the same time a projection
to the future.
Her tenacious desire to not
accept conventions and to learn by
her own means is perhaps the main
key to approaching a trajectory that
lights up from the boundaries, her
“being on the edges” concerning
institutions or hegemonic artistic
trends. It is this capacity to decen-
ter and interweave that encourages
us to continue searching for ways
to work out the enigma that she
bequeathed to us.
ana longoni
translated from Spanish by ana
laura borro
_
1/ Elda Cerrato, La memoria en los bordes: entrev-
ista, dibujos. Buenos Aires: Nobuko, 2011, p. 7.
elena asins

detail of Untitled (Offset Variations), 1975

Offset print on paper, 75 × 836 cm

122
123
In the late 1960s, Elena Asins (1940-
2015) began drawing structures
that unfold silently on a two-dimen-
sional surface; at times the Spanish
artist developed a modulated ele-
ment based on a specific sequence
and rhythm, requiring the viewer to
make a mental reconstruction that
stretched and expanded the limit
of the paper ad infinitum. The line –
the development of a point – dis-
covers its dimensional potential by
turning, by pivoting: does it dance,
does it sound? In fact, for Asins,
what is drawn is as relevant as what
is thought and not said, connected
as it is to Wittgenstein’s thought.
She herself pointed out the
crossover of her work with music
(beyond the literalness of titles that
evoke Mozart’s Prussian Quartets
or the structure of Bach’s canon).
According to Javier Maderuelo:
“Her art is musical not only because
her plastic forms have a relation-
ship of structural similarity with
certain compositional develop-
ments in music, but also because,
as music is immaterial, it is pure
mental process.”1
If, at least since classical Greece,
music has been written with signs
to be interpreted – notes that are
mute for the non-literate – literacy
is superfluous in Asins’ work, as its
signs lack a consensual code; its
disciplined structures, developed
with rigour, allow them to be trans-
lated into concept, thus expanding
the authorship towards the reader.
They are visual poems, or scores –
conceived in a performative, open
and sonorous sense that comes
from Fluxus – in which space and
time are made visible with very sim-
ple, almost slight linguistic signs,
inscribed in black and white in a
minimalist way: because nothing
more is needed. In fact, in 2023,
Cantos de Orfeo (1970), an unpub-
lished score dedicated to the artist
Eusebio Sempere, was performed
for the first time in Spain by the Trío
Poesía Acción H,GLAJERU;G and
the CoroDelantal. Signs embodied
in bodies that sound and move in
space and time.
isabel tejeda
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
_
1/ Javier Maderuelo, “Menhir dos”, in Elena
Asins: Menhir dos. Ayuntamiento de Madrid,
1995.
this participation is supported by: Acción
Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada
de España en Brasil.
ellen gallagher We are living in the Anthropocene
and edgar cleijne – commonly understood as a new
geological era overdetermined by
human action. But it is important
to reflect on this concept, which is
uncertain and does not designate
a single geological moment, nor
does it refer to the generic human
being. As such, it is essential to
recognize the structures of white
male supremacy as part of the
predatory and accelerated trans-
124
125
formations of the geobiosphere,
to contest its essence, which
keeps the figure of the human
at the center of the scene to the
detriment of interspecies relations.
It is therefore essential to experi-
ence the these artists works that,
in the midst of racial and environ-
mental violence, intersect fictions
and realities with swamps, oceans,
and racialized icons and symbols,
leading to the construction of other
political and poetic landscapes
for perceiving and narrating the
multi-species world.
For it is in water and sea
that these artists are anchored.
Gallagher was born in Rhode Island,
USA, and lives between Brooklyn,
New York, and Rotterdam, Holland
– cities with a significant role in the
transatlantic slave trade. She has
been collaborating with the Dutch
artist Cleijne since 2024. Together,
Highway Gothic, 2017-2019
Installation view. Cyanotype, 70mm film and textile
banners, cyanotype light boxes, 16mm film and
cyanotype film projections, sound
they created the multimedia instal-
lation Highway Gothic (2017-2019),
followed by Gallagher’s pictorial
works Watery Ecstatic (2007,
2017, and 2021), Morphia (2008
and 2012), and Ecstatic Draught
of Fishes (2019 and 2021). These
works tension questions such as
the legacy of colonialism, ecolog-
ical impact, black displacement,
and the paradigms of Eurocentric
art in a process that involves
Afrofabulation1 and Afrofuturism
combined with paintings, cyano-
types, film and sound installations
(the music is mnemonic and coun-
tercultural), and theoretical works
on the African diaspora, such as
The Black Atlantic by writer Paul
Gilroy.2 Through aquatic aesthet-
ics, Gallagher and Cleijne propose
an immersion into the depths of
the oceans in a dialogue with the
marine, biomorphic creatures,
histories/stories, and myths that
inhabit these depths. It is import-
ant to point out that, as a place of
forgetting, the sea carries with it
erasures that express expansionist
colonial narratives. Thus, in their
works, in becoming, the artists
imagine life after the death of
Atlantic traffic.
barbara copque
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ This is a term-concept used by authors such
as Saidiya Hartman and Tavia Nyong’o.
2/ Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press,
1993, reissue.
this participation is supported by:
Mondriaan Fund.
emanoel araujo

Emanoel Araujo at his studio at ladeira do

Desterro, Salvador, undated

126
127
Emanoel Araujo (1940-2022) was
a Brazilian artist and curator,
renowned for his numerous con-
tributions to the strengthening
of Afro-Brazilian history and art.
From a family of goldsmiths,
Araujo had a diversified educa-
tion, learning woodworking tech-
niques which led him to refine,
among other formal and aes-
thetic aspects, his practice as an
engraver and sculptor.
Emanoel Araujo’s São Paulo studio, with the work
Espaço expandido [Expanded Space], 2017
Araujo began his career in
Santo Amaro (in the state of Bahia)
as a typographer and developed
skills in engraving and sculp-
ture while exploring geometric
abstraction throughout his artistic
career. As a sculptor, Araujo paid
close attention to the selection of
materials, incorporating elements
from Amerindian, African, and
Afro-Brazilian cultures into his
works. His sculptures often allude
to ships, masks, and symbolic rep-
resentations of the cosmogony of
African and Afro-Brazilian religions.
In the work exhibited at the 35th
Bienal, a monumental relief, one
can see the way the artist builds
rhythm and movement, creating
pieces that convey a marked visual
dynamism and sense of fluidity.
Color also plays a fundamental role
in his work; Araujo’s use of vibrant
and contrasting colors conferred
vitality and impact upon his sculp-
tures – formal characteristics that
help define the aesthetics and
identity of his work.
Although the concept of the
Brazilian riscadura [trace] is
associated with the work of the
Bahian artist Rubem Valentim, one
can notice the reverberations of
this concept in Araujo’s work, as
acknowledged by the artist himself.
His sculptures frequently address
themes of Afro-Brazilian culture,
incorporating symbols and motifs
related to Afro-Brazilian traditions
and spirituality.
In addition to his artistic work,
Araujo played an important role
as a curator and cultural adminis-
trator. He ran exhibitions in Brazil
and abroad, showing works by
African and Afro-Brazilian artists,
in addition to directing the Museu
de Arte da Bahia, the Pinacoteca de
São Paulo, and founding the Museu
Afro Brasil. Araujo’s dedication to
promoting Afro-Brazilian art and
culture has had a significant impact
on the recognition and appreciation
of African heritage in the Brazilian
and international art scenes. His
influence helped shape the con-
temporary art scene in Brazil and
abroad, making him an inspiring
and influential figure to this day.
horrana de kássia santoz
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
eustáquio neves Eustáquio Neves’ tenacity in observ-
ing and researching the rites and
festivities of the remaining Black
communities makes him a remark-
able restorer of memories. The
series Arturos (1993-1994) and the
diptychs Encomendador de almas
[Comissioner of Souls] (2006-2007),
presented at the 35th Bienal, docu-
ment a comprehensive view of the
sacred, of hereditary education and
of the daily life of these communities.
128
129
Thanks to his knowledge of
chemical processes, acquired
through his technical training,
Neves manually interferes with
the negatives of photographs to
produce various effects. It is an
enigmatic, almost Lomographic
gesture that penetrates the
workings of the equipment and
exposes the indeterminable and
choreographic character of the
gaze that composes them.
Untitled, from the series Arturos, 1993-1995
Photography on paper, Fine Art print
In the early 1990s, Neves produced
the series Arturos, depicting a
family group reminiscing about
their oldest ancestor, Artur, in the
municipality of Contagem, Minas
Gerais. This group is characterized
by its sacred practices, based on
the intersection of Catholicism with
religions of African origin, during
the celebration of Our Lady of the
Rosary, protector of Black brother-
hoods in colonial Brazil. In the first
Untitled, from the series Crispim/Comendador, 2007-2008
Crispim/Commander. Photography on paper, Fine Art print
photo, there is a group of adults
with children in the center, all ele-
gantly dressed. The second photo
depicts a man of the guard, in an
upright and central position, and in
the third, “The King,” framed in a
bust, wears a crown and a cloak.
The second work presented is
from the series Encomendador de
almas and portrays the quilombola
community in Ausente or Córrego
do Ausente, located near the district
of Milho Verde, in the Vale do
Jequitinhonha region. The encomen-
dador de almas is a figure present
in the festivities of Our Lady of the
Rosary and is responsible for the
work songs called vissungos. In the
diptychs displayed at the Bienal,
one of them shows Mr. Crispim, a
very important person in the hierar-
chy of the catopê (the name given
to the Congadas in the region of
Minas Gerais), seated, wearing a
light blouse and a cloak covering
his shoulders, his hands joined
over his legs. Next to him is a photo
of a sword used to clear the way for
the procession of Our Lady of the
Rosary. In the second diptych, Mr.
Antonio appears next to his house.
Neves’ images defy the technical
limits of photography and perform
“a reality that cannot be named,” as
described by the authorial voice of
the 35th Bienal’s educational publi-
cation.1 The remaining peoples are
an extension of quilombismo and,
by reconstituting time periods and
characters in an apparently static
memory, Neves signals a recovery
of traditions and landscapes, as
well as the very incongruity of the
construction of memory.
horrana de kássia santoz
translated from Portuguese
by mariana nacif mendes
_
1/ Reference to the phrase “a reality that I can-
not name,” in “Correspondências entre vozes,
uma carta para abrir conversas”, in Aqui, numa
coreografia de retornos, dançar é inscrever no
tempo: educational publication of the 35th Bienal
de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible.
São Paulo: Bienal, 2023, p. 15.
flo6x8

130
131
Only a short time after the col-
lapse of Lehman Brothers, the
“activist-artistic-situationist-per-
formative-folkloric-nonviolent”
collective flo6x8 emerged in the
city of Seville, Spain, temporarily
occupying multiples bank branches
through dance and flamenco sing-
ing, tapping on the floor of those
who cause to take away the sleep
and the roof of the citizens, singing
to the banking system its responsi-
Bankia, pulmones y branquias. Bankia sale a bolsa 2, 2012
Bankia, lungs and gills. Bankia goes public 2. Video stills
bility for the impoverishment of the
population. The branches of fear
and violence were transformed,
at least for a while, into spaces of
political and artistic potential to
turn history upside down: “this isn’t
crisis, it’s called capitalism.”
The video of one of these
actions, called Flashmob Rumba
Rave “banquero” and released in
December 2010, spread across the
internet and was used to call the
demonstration against social cuts
that took place on 15 March 2011
– one of the many precedents for
the 15-M movement.1 flo6x8 antic-
ipated some of its political inno-
vations: spontaneity in occupying
space, radical transformation of
the crisis narrative, subversive and
inventive joy, contagious openness
and porosity.
flo6x8 manages to move in the
concatenation between art and
revolution, where what matters is
not so much what belongs to each
field but how its components are
choreographed in a localized way.
Its actions make use of singing
and dance to produce a smooth
disobedience. It does not use the
mechanisms of flamenco to be
experienced in a passive manner,
for this is the way to sustain a cry of
outrage long enough to transgress
the formal codes of political protest
and enter a new terrain of uncer-
tainty in which the public begins to
doubt, to pay attention, in which
the transgression penetrates much
deeper into the body, until it hurts.
kike españa
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
_
1/ 15-M is how the indignados [outraged]
movement in Spain came to be known. On May
15 they occupied a large number of Spanish
squares, protesting against the welfare cuts
caused by the 2007 economic crisis. [e.n.]
this participation is supported by: Acción
Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada
de España en Brasil.
francisco toledo Known for his works on paper,
especially prints and paintings,
Francisco Toledo (1940-2019)
explored different mediums, such
as collage, tapestry and ceramics,
while maintaining a single vision:
the construction of an artistic
practice implicated in the cultural,
traditional and political heritage of
his community (Oaxaca, Mexico).
In this extensive journey, Toledo,
who was also known as El Maestro
detail of Papalotes de los desaparecidos, 2014
Kites of the missing. Chinese paper and reed frame with photographs printed
on laser engraved wood, 43 pieces, 58,2 × 51 cm (each)
132
133
– the master and teacher – invested
intensively in the implementation
of projects dedicated to education
and the maintenance of cultural
practices in Mexico, such as the
Contemporary Art Museum and the
Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca.
Toledo’s work feeds on what the
artist experiences in travel books
and childhood memories, but
above all on what he observes in his
surroundings. The Zapotec cosmol-
ogies of Juchitán, the pre-Hispanic
cultural legacy and the dynamism
and updating of traditional customs
are some among many compasses
that guide the practice of an artist
who spent a significant part of his
life-work flying papalotes (kites) as
a form of political action.
A significant marker of his cre-
ative expression and social engage-
ment emerges with Papalotes de los
desaparecidos [Kites of the disap-
Papalotes de los desaparecidos, 2014
Kites of the missing. Exhibition view. Museo Universitario
Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2018)
peared] (2014) – a project exhibited
at the na 35th Bienal de São Paulo.
In this work, the kites created in
collaboration with participants of
the Art and Paper Workshop of
San Agustín Etla were meant to
contribute to the many protests
taking place in Mexico since 2014,
when a group of 43 mostly indig-
enous high school students from
the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos
School, in Ayotzinapa, were kid-
napped by the municipal police of
Iguala, Guerrero.
On the Day of the Dead, kites
are flown because souls are
believed to descend through
the string down to earth to
feed on the offerings; then, at
the end of the festival, they
fly again. As they had already
searched for the Ayotzinapa
students underground and, in
the water, we sent the kites off
to look for them in the sky.1
Since 2014, in addition to the many
voices that came together to expose
one of Mexico’s deepest wounds,
the faces of the normalistas have
continued to appear in various con-
texts, seeking to break the silence
established by government institu-
tions. To this day, the families of the
disappeared seek to build a sense of
justice, much like the slashes in the
wind produced by Toledo’s kites.
tarcisio almeida
translated from Portuguese by
mariana nacif mendes
_
1/ Statement by the artist published in several
news outlets covering the protest-actions
carried out by Francisco Toledo as of November
2014, when he initiated the work Papalotes de
los desaparecidos (2014).
frente 3 de fevereiro Brazil can be understood, from
the point of view of blackness, as
an anti-black project. on the other
hand, we can understand blackness
as the stubborn and tireless practice
of trying to live when you were not
supposed to have survived. Zumbi
dos Palmares, constantly taken up
again in the radical artistic work of
the Frente 3 de Fevereiro, especially
in Zumbi somos nós [We are Zumbi],
appears here, then, as the mystery

ONDE ESTÃO OS NEGROS?

Where are the Black People?
Campeonato Brasileiro, Corinthians x Ponte Preta, Moisés Lucarelli stadium, Campinas,
August 14th, 2005
134
135
that unites these two formulations,
putting the world that produced
them in check. these two formula-
tions intersect with the history of
the Frente, which emerges as a way
to avenge the death-life of Flávio
Ferreira Sant’Ana, a young black
dentist cruelly murdered by military
police officers in São Paulo in 2004.
through a practice that merges
direct action and aesthetics, mov-
ing between image, music, perfor-
ZUMBI SOMOS NÓS
Zumbi are we
Campeonato Brasileiro, Corinthians x Internacional, Pacaembu stadium, São Paulo,
November 20th, 2005
mance, literature, and an infinity
of forms, the Frente 3 de Fevereiro
develops radical artistic practices of
social intervention as a way to not
only denounce the brutal situation
faced by Black people in Brazil, but
to promote their unpredictable force
of creation and transmutation. For
the choreographies of the impossi-
ble, using voice cloning and deep
fake technologies against its own
ends, the collective creates a com-
plex sonic-imagetic environment,
reanimating the movements, ges-
tures and sounds of Dona Marinete
Lima (1942-2018), a member of the
collective and ancestral matriarch. in
addition to this animation, the video
installation includes sound files and
images of the collective, records of
its radical interventions that both
denounce the death plan as well as
machinate the combination of life.
the experience of this video
installation intersects past-present,
life-death, revolt-joy, like a techno-
logical spell to avenge black life in
its ungovernable performance of
infinite resurrection.
abigail campos leal
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
gabriel gentil tukano

136
137
 The finger of creation touches me
and pulsates. Such is the light of the
Yepá Mahsã, People of the Earth.
Between the worlds they draw the
mouth of time in seminal explosions
and primordial spirals. My heart
escapes and lives again. It stares at
the unverifiable, inhabits the invisi-
ble. Everything happens in the instant
now, half moving and in bursts. Body,
drive, friction, union. It is the cosmos
occurring fertile on earth’s health.
Desenho / n. 18, c. 1970
Drawing / n. 18. Graphite and ballpoint pen on paper, 21 × 29,7 cm
Here the body of the world is in
gestation, transmuting and updat-
ing itself in each and every gaze
that spies the presence, the writ-
ing, and the drawing of my kin
Gabriel Gentil Tukano. It is a nod
that happens. It is a warm breath.
The sweltering of the forest speaks.
Swirls draw the forewarning on the
ground: there is not a square meter
under our feet that is not the sacred
creation of ancestral territory. What
is created in lines is perpetual.
A body draws.
And the line is traced when the
light reveals it. A light that walks
between worlds creating other
worlds in the center of the begin-
nings of all times, of the risks and
the first rites. In the next light, my
eyes will reach the hands of my kin,
for the point is demarcated in both
worlds, and the risk of our love is
high, the stuff of strong medicine.
A body writes.
Letters are heaped drawings
that become senses and bodies,
but once organized on the basis of
old-world universalizing thought,
they operate an infertile, infantile,
worn-out, poisonous, and cadaver-
ous inhabitation.
Strong medicine will not cure a
body that is born dead.
Gabriel Mira. He draws the aim.
He aims and draws. He is the aim.
His body is the drawing and the
continuity of dreamed gestures here
and now, it is in sight, it is in the
very ancient visions and breaths.
He continues to draw and aim at the
connection of the ancestral bodies
that are in the future of the world.
Reverence
These are living works!
Gabriel Gentil is the drawing
taking place between worlds.
déba tacana
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
george herriman “[...] He is but a shadow himself,
caught in the web of this mortal
skein. We call him ‘Cat’, We call
him ‘Crazy’ [...] Forgive him,
for you will understand him no
better than we, who linger on
this side of the pale.”

Krazy Kat
Original drawing for newspaper full page, May 8, 1917
Ink on paper, 55,8 × 48,2 cm

138
139
In these words, George Herriman
(1880-1944) reflected on the inscru-
table condition of Krazy Kat. In
essence, the influential comic strip
narrates the misadventures of
Krazy, a gender-neutral cat – the
ambiguity of his gender has never
been clear – who is madly in love
with Ignatz the mouse. This love is
not reciprocated by Ignatz, whose
constant aggressions towards the
protagonist, throwing bricks at his
Krazy Kat
Original drawing for newspaper full page, May 2, 1922
Ink on paper, 54,6 × 48,2 cm
head, are misinterpreted by the
feline, who sees them as signs of
affection. In turn, Krazy has a secret
admirer, the police dog Offissa
Pupp, whose constant surveillance
of the mouse is aimed at preventing
such aggressions or imprisoning
him when he succeeds in commit-
ting them.
Everything in Krazy Kat seems
to want to overcome traditional
impositions: the inversion of roles
between its main trio of charac-
ters, the non-binary nature of its
protagonist, the continuous experi-
mentation in the composition of its
pages, the new forms of language
created by the author, etc. What
puts Herriman on either side of the
fence? The tension in the plot of
Krazy Kat has given rise to a multi-
tude of readings, one of them being
the author’s own biography through
his own racialization. Some want to
see in Krazy Kat a representation of
George Herriman’s struggles with
his own identity as a mixed-race
man in an all-white world under Jim
Crow’s segregationist laws.1 The
ambiguity, not just of the cat, but
of the whole comic series, could
reveal the duality between being
or not being a thing, which can be
extrapolated to issues not only of
race but also of gender and class.
Today, a reinterpretation of
these works gives us a glimpse of
Krazy Kat and George Herriman
hopping and moving from one side
of the fence to the other, breaking
down the boundaries of that fence,
and throwing Ignatz’s bricks like
missiles to disarm and deactivate
hierarchies and identities.
rafael garcía
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
_
1/ Segregationist laws that were in effect in
several southern states of the United States
between the years 1877 and 1965. [e.n.]
geraldine javier

140
141
Geraldine Javier lives and works
in the crucible of a climate crisis
that makes guilt and extinction go
hand in hand. In her work, the often
pessimistic and nostalgic reactions
to this necrospeculative economy
are openly confronted with instal-
lations and paintings that present
a self-mutating world of plants no
longer recognizable. In Oblivious
to Oblivion (2017), a large scale
installation which forms a massive
eco printing of leaves from native trees on
cotton fabric
suspended cloud, the threaded
pictures of unlikely vegetables hang
along mirrors. The fleeting reflec-
tions of spectators in the small
mirrors further insist on an undiffer-
entiated humanity, challenging its
deeply rooted antagonism with the
natural world.
The painterly effects resulting
in free floating compositions recall
cosmic arrangements that per-
fectly fit in the all-over composition
typical of modern painting. They
invite an immersive experience that
is consistent with the avoidance of
a straight political engagement. As
the titles of her more recent works
state, she positions herself in the
midst of uncertainty. Bouncing
back between hope and despair her
work still relies on a reparative hori-
zon. Even though she has defined
herself as an artist who does not
tackle political things, the overall
impression is that of an affirma-
tive practice that avoids mourning
and blaming.
Vis a vis processes of degrada-
tion, pollution and extinction, The
Creatures in Search of Their Species
(2012) assert themselves as an array
of transformative beings. Rather
than presenting a dead, fixed and
lost world, as it is often the case
of catastrophic and retrospective
thinking, they bring forth a gram-
mar for a regenerative future.
Against the fate of destruction she
opposes a politics of care that no
longer resembles past forms of pol-
itics. Whereas her paintings come
across as an individual practice,
her installations involve a commu-
nal activity that reveals uneven
sensibilities in the treatment of
materials, an expression of interde-
pendent life-forms and intergenera-
tional cooperation.
carles guerra
gloria anzaldúa The significance of Gloria
Anzaldúa’s work lies in the rad-
ical nature of her contributions
to critical thinking in decolonial,
feminist, and sexuality studies,
above all in including geogra-
phy as a category of social dif-
ference. A teacher, writer, and
activist, Anzaldúa condemns and
questions the violence inflicted
on people born in or inhabiting
border territories and cultures,
“Transparencies for Gigs”, drawing 13, undated
Ink on paper, 21,6 × 27,9 cm
142
143
especially women “of color”1 in the
third world. Anzaldúa addresses
the border that divides the United
States and Mexico, now the state
of Texas, a strip “bought” by the
United States in 1848 through the
Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty. Born in
this context, the author portrays
the border as a geographical space
in dispute and as a metaphor for
the societal experiences of the
people pressurized every day into
choosing a single identity, even
when their realities are built on a
meeting of cultures.
One of the drawings where
Anzaldúa explores her theory in
image form, exhibited in the 35th
Bienal de São Paulo, portrays a
purple, sinuous serpent with a
huge mouth biting into an apple.
Written in red beneath the draw-
ing is the phrase, “O proibido [The
Forbidden].” The scene immediately
“Transparencies for Gigs”, drawing 4, undated
Ink on paper, 21,6 × 27,9 cm
recalls the most famous serpent
scene in Western Christian his-
tory. However, here the forbidden
fruit does not evoke the symbol of
Christian repulsion and fear, but
rather the most important symbol
of pre-Columbian America – a
serpent that, to Anzaldúa, is “the
symbol of dark sexual impulse,
the cthonic (the underworld), the
feminine, the sinuous movement
of sexuality and creativity, and the
basis of all energy and life.”2 The
idea of putting thought into visual
has Mexica origins, the indigenous
culture of Anzaldúa’s ancestry, and
an epistemological reference that
“did not separate the artistic from
the functional, the sacred from the
secular, and art from daily life.”3
While writing this text, I saw the
news4 that United States immigra-
tion officers are told to toss immi-
grant babies and children found
at the border between Texas and
Mexico into the river. While poli-
cies of surveillance and genocide
either create or re-enact ways of
maintaining violence and terror,
Anzaldúa’s works remain evocative,
current, and in action, reminding us
that “[...] the war of independence
is a constant.”5
maria luiza meneses
translated from Portuguese by
georgia fleury reynolds
_
1/ See Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Alzandúa,
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color (1967), 4. ed. New York: State
University of New York Press, 2015.
2/ Gloria Alzandúa, Borderlands/La Frontera:
La nueva mestiza, translation by Carmen Valle
Simón. Madrid: Capitán Swing, 2016, p. 80.
3/ Ibid., p. 120.
4/ “Agentes da imigração dos eua são ori-
entados a empurrar crianças e bebês em rio
na fronteira como México”, O Globo, 20 jul.
2023. Available at: oglobo.globo.com/mun-
do/noticia/2023/07/20/agentes-da-imigra-
cao-dos-eua-sao-orientados-a- empurrar-crian-
cas-e-bebes-em-rio-na-fronteira-com-o-mexico.
ghtml. Accessed: 24 jul. 2023.
5/ Anzaldúa, 2016, op. cit., p. 55.
grupo de investigación en
arte y política (giap)
The Grupo de Investigación en Arte
y Política (GIAP) [Art and Politics
Research Group] was founded in
2013 in Mexico by Chilean theorist
and curator Natalia Arcos Salvo
and Italian sociologist Alessandro
Zagato. It produces publications,
exhibitions, and lectures on aes-
thetics and autonomy, and since
2017 it also organizes residen-
cies for artists and academics
in Chiapas.
The group’s focus of interest is the
poetics that arise from social move-
ments with indigenous roots. The
militant research has focused on
the devices that constitute the aes-
thetic deployment of the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation, the
EZLN, a corpus that is interpreted
as a central element not only of the
Zapatista ethics and political struc-
ture, but also of the autonomous
praxis of its communities.

natalia arcos salvo

La danza del trabajo colectivo del maíz. Bases de apoyo del Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, 2016
The dance of the collective work of corn. Support bases of the Zapatista Army
144 of National Liberation. Digital photography
145
The EZLN is an indigenous guer-
rilla movement with a high global
impact, and in deep consonance
with ancestral uses and customs it
defines communally the originality
that distinguishes it: spokesman-
ship, communiqués, clothing,
actions, words, and works of art
configure an imagery that works as
a weapon of mass seduction.
For the Zapatistas, aesthetics
and poetics play an organic role
La marcha del silencio. Acción masiva de Bases de Apoyo del
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, 2012
The march of silence. Massive action of the Support Bases of the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation. San Cristóbal de las Casas,
Mexico. Video still, edited by Rompeviento TV
within the revolutionary politics of
the movement. A fantastic exam-
ple of this fusion is the great mass
performance that took place on
December 21, 2012, in which the
Zapatistas mobilized 45,000 of
their members, occupying by sur-
prise and peacefully the same cities
in Chiapas that they had taken by
force in 1994. This staged event
marked the reappearance of the
EZLN in the media sphere,1 with the
Ejercicio del caracol encadenado. Milicianos del Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, 2017
Exercise of the Chained Snail. Militiamen of the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation. Digital photography
intention of showing us the broad
definition of their Autonomy. This
happened on the same day that was
proclaimed by the media as the day
of the “end of the world,” according
to the Mayan calendar. But with
this choreography, the Zapatistas
announced at that moment the
beginning of a new era for the
oppressed peoples.2
GIAP has also brought for the
first time, both to Brazil and South
America, other Zapatista arts that
narrate their processes of resis-
tance and disseminate the practice
of Autonomy, centered around the
Caracoles, the Good-Government
Councils, and the construction of
this other possible world: embroi-
dery, painting, dances, and mili-
tia actions. Because up there in
the mountains of the Mexican
Southeast, whales have been danc-
ing for a long time.3
natalia arcos salvo
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
_
1/ The Zapatistas had been in media silence
since 2008, away from cameras and micro-
phones, establishing the foundations of autono-
mous Good Government.
2/ The March of Silence had no speeches or
proclamations. Only the day after a communi-
qué was released, in the form of a poem: did
you hear it? / It is the sound of their world
crumbling. / It is the sound of our world resurg-
ing. / The day that was day, was actually night.
/ And night shall be the day that will be day. /
democracy! / freedom! / justice!
3/ Zapatista dance festival press release, Jan.
2017. Available at: enlacezapatista.ezln.org.
mx/2019/12/15/baila-una-ballena/.
guadalupe maravilla One of the narratives of Latin
America today is the problem of
migration. The most visible exam-
ple is undoubtedly that of Mexico
as a country of undocumented
migrants and the encounters and
misunderstandings when crossing
the border with the United States.
As a counterbalance, the artist
Guadalupe Maravilla averts our
gaze to a deeper and more unknown
south, the so-called Northern
146
147
Triangle of Central America, com-
prising Guatemala, Honduras and
his country of origin, El Salvador.
During the 1980s, when El Salvador
was at the height of the region’s
counterinsurgency wars, the forced
transit of people fleeing violence
and seeking refuge was particularly
extreme. Maravilla was one of the
many undocumented children who
made the journey to the border
unaccompanied. Today, the artist
revisits this experience to develop a
conceptual approach that alludes to
the somatizations – in the broadest
sense of the term – of what he saw
and experienced during the cross-
ing. Like an extraordinary sounding
board, Maravilla’s projects tell his
own story but also that of thousands
of individuals who have been marked
by this vast scar called the border.
As a result, his artistic proposals
are multitudinous performances
works in progress in
Guadalupe Maravilla’s studio
and collaborations, scenographies
overloaded with gestures, objects
and mechanisms that are installed
as altar pieces. In many of them, we
find traces of the traditional chil-
dren’s game known in El Salvador
as Tripa Chuca, which results
from connecting numbers to lines,
as well as drawings taken from
ancient codices and canvases with
pictographic stories that refer to
pre-Columbian communities, their
participation in the conquest, their
knowledge networks, commercial
traffic and resources. The whole is a
map of displacements, miscegena-
tion, syncretism, perseverance and
forms of historical survival.
At the center of this epic journey,
the artist places large-scale sculp-
tures entitled Disease Throwers
(2019-ongoing). Their strange and
organic shapes are assembled with
moldable materials and musical
instruments that, with a specific
vibration, generate therapeu-
tic spaces that invite resilience.
Maravilla’s “healing machines”
suggest the opening of portals to
ancestors and the performance of
a sound ceremony which, in this
edition of the Bienal, is the possibil-
ity of celebrating a collective ritual
to heal traumas and conditions of
the body.
rossina cazali
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
this participation is supported by:
Y.ES Contemporary.
 four theses on aesthetics
rizvana bradley
and denise ferreira da silva

Why rethink aesthetics now, when catastrophe A conversation can and usually is taken as an
has become the watchword of the day, and when encounter, a convergence, but one that might
all but the most restrictive pragmatism could just be — and the best conversations (which
easily be construed as little more than bourgeois are also another name for collaborations) are —
frivolity? Is this not, after all, the age of Antonio nothing more than that which takes place there,
Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms,” in which the in that moment, under those circumstances,
many heads of fascism are rearing across the towards those particular ends. This conver-
globe? Yet the fascism which liberal modernity sation, our convergence, is not so much an
and civil society have always required has never offering as it is an invitation to the reader to join
abided by this order’s mendacious separation of in and further it.
the political from the aesthetic. Genocide, now
as before, is an aesthetic project. The question, — denise ferreira da silva
then, should not be why rethink aesthetics now,
but rather how do we survive the aesthetic regime
that carves and encloses the very shape of our
question? “The quest(ion) of blackness,” to draw
my accomplice Denise Ferreira da Silva’s words
from my own mouth, can only be enunciated
through losing one’s voice, or rather through
yielding to the polyvocality that is always already
the condition of possibility of speech. Thus, in
writing together, Da Silva and I have not so much
pursued a theoretical synthesis as a reticulation,
a raveling of the threads of our thoughts, which
already twisted and frayed in one another’s tex-
t(ilic)s. Four theses, another declension from the
Hegelian triad. Our open proposition.

— rizvana bradley

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149
infinity

The world, as the totalizing onto-epistemology that is moder- cannot but recall, it cannot but refract and fracture the
nity’s genesis, limit, and horizon, is a thoroughly aesthetic transparent shoal (the threshold of transparency) that pro-
conceit. To toil within or rail against the field of represen- tects the Subject’s onto-epistemology across his scientific
tation is already to be enmeshed in the aesthetic, for it is by and aesthetic moments. The total exposure of blackness
way of the aesthetic that the ontological ground on which we both enables and extinguishes the force of the modern
are said to stand becomes experience. In this register, Man ethical program, insofar as the disruptive capacity of black-
— the transparent I, the universal subject who would make ness is a quest(ion) toward the end of the world.
the world, if not just as he pleases — appears, apropos Sylvia Blackness is a threat to sense, a radical question-
Wynter, as none other than homo aestheticus. ing of what comes to be brought under the (terms of the)
This is the ontological figure consolidated in “common.” If the ordered world secures meaning because it
post-Enlightenment European thought, whose presup- is supposed to be knowable, and only by Man, if that world
posed capacity for self-determination and self-develop- is all the common can comprehend, then blackness (re)
ment is both indistinguishable from the expropriative turns existence to the expanse: in the wreckage of spacetime,
displacement of ecological entanglement that animates corpus infinitum.
(bio)history, and, further, tantamount to the capacity for
aesthetic experience and judgement.
The Subject’s sensus communis, of course, only
emerges through the constitutive excommunication of the
Savage (the conquered), the Negro (the commodity),
the Primitive (the other), and the Traditional (the
underdeveloped) — figures who nevertheless come to
haunt Man as the bearers of an ontological dissonance, an
immanent declension, we might call blackness.
What else can be said about the conquered, the com-
modity, the other, and the underdeveloped, besides the fact
that they apply to all who do not fall within the spatiotem-
poral borders of the post-Enlightenment figure of Man, that
is, the transparent I? Not much, would be the appropriate
answer, if all that is taken into account is what is offered by
way of the constraints of dichotomist thinking. That is, if the
question were not raised about the conditions under which
the universal protective force held by the ethical would be
extended to some humans (whether that force is bequeathed
by the divine ruler or author, in their mastery of the tran-
scendental form that is reason). If the question were not
raised, that is, about why blackness is so “naturally” visited
by total and symbolic violence.
When the categorial force of blackness is con-
fronted with the total violence that its historical trajectory
re/de/composition

Thinking the artwork as poethical, as “a composition which emphasis. The poethical work deforms the teleological
is always already a recomposition and a decomposition of imperative of purposiveness, and the racial demarcation
prior and posterior compositions,” requires being poised for of the (in)capacity for aesthetic judgement this imperative
the advent of becoming as matter, and its immanent inter- necessarily (re)inscribes. The poethical work tends toward
rogation of the temporality of forms.1 In contradistinction the revelation that such an effort to reduce, discipline, and
to understandings of the artwork as an autonomous totality, contain the unwieldy materiality of the world is always
or those that would consign the artwork to some iteration already an exercise in futility.
of Kant’s forma finalis — that is, the reductive ascription of We might think both of seriality and deformation
a formal purposiveness to the object — a poethical reading not as formal deviations from the major paradigms of
stresses the provisional ground where questions of form, modernist art, but as aesthetic practices which enact the
formlessness, and abstraction collide. decomposition of the art historical canon, and of canon-
The artwork, a singular composite, need not simply icity as such. Such decomposition is achieved not by a
anticipate or reiterate questions which presume the formal method of subversion, but by the accumulation of surrep-
principles of external causation (causa efficalis), interior titious (re)turns, which gather ruinously beneath the sign
determination (causa finalis), or abstract perception (causa of the authoritative artwork. The serial proliferation of
formalis). For these senses, calcified as the only tools for returns exposes the autonomous artwork as itself nothing
comprehending nature (the realm of objectivity) and world more than a re/de/composition, a contaminated assem-
(the kingdom of subjectivity), have sustained the tautol- blage of citations and de/formations.
ogy of modern thinking precisely through being rendered
axiomatic. Once released from the anticipation of order
and the presumption of meaning, the artwork becomes
liberated from its representational obligations to nature
and world. As a poethical piece, the artwork extends the
question(ing)s of causa materialis, the undeterminable of
contemplation. (Re)turning in and as form(s), a poethical
descriptor for existence presumes neither linearity nor its
predicates, separability and determinacy. The reorienta-
tion poethical art invites expresses the infinite re/de/com-
positions that normative spacetime would foreclose.
The axial intensities of verticality and horizontal-
ity, the strict linearity, the primary coloring, that signal
abstraction’s formal legacy, do not so much indicate a
restrictive geometry or truncated chromaticity as an open
set, where, for instance, even the fidelity of a line or the
vertices of a square may be exacted with improvisatory

1/ Denise Ferreira da Silva, “In the Raw,” e-flux journal, no. 93, Sep. 2018.
Available at: www.e-flux.com/journ al/93/215795/in-the-raw/. Accessed
in: Sep. 2023.

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seriality
The perennial failure of homo aestheticus requires the
perpetual renewal of the aesthetic, an operation which,
irrespective of its beauties or horrors, cannot help but be
the renewal of catastrophe. But this history of aesthetic
revitalization is preceded and exceeded by another kind
of innovation, which we may call aesthetic, even as the
aesthetic can never account for it.
What, then, might open and be opened by an
inquiry into black practices of seriality? What takes form,
or is deformed, in “the diffusion of terror and the violence
perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism, and
property,” as Saidiya Hartman proffers?2 How to come to
terms with such serial self-fashioning without recourse to
an idea of the open in which boundlessness becomes only
another name for frontier, which is to say an enclosure, an
expropriation, a clearing?3 For the interminable historicity
and impossible history of blackness has always come before
the horizonality of Man’s freedom, as its effaced footing
and ineluctable limit. How do we regard the insistent and
ongoing re/de/composition of the (black) figure, in the midst
of contemporary art’s simultaneous exaltation and reduction
or relegation of the figural to the scene of racial represen-
tation? How do we comprehend such figurations as part of
a suite of interventions — an epigraphic seriality, as Fred
Moten might put it — which denotes not the refusal of serially
imposed violence as political end, but rather the reanimate
means through which any aesthetic inquiry into the social
life of form must pass?4 We insist that, even as such means
bear the terrible burden of diffusive terror and the terror of
diffusion, black seriality cannot be thought of as reducible to
separability, sequentiality, or the determinacy of individu-
2/ Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making
in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 4.
3/ Cf. Tiffany Jeannette (Lethabo) King, “In the Clearing: Black Female
Bodies, Space and Settler Colonial Landscapes.” PhD diss. University of
Maryland, College Park, 2013.
4/ Fred Moten, The Universal Machine. Durham: Duke University Press,
2018, p. 230.
ated forms and objects. In other words, our aesthetic think-
ing refuses to presume black seriality as wholly coterminous
and coextensive with the serial imposition of antiblack vio-
lence that constitutes the modern field of representation and
the history of form, as if the violent enumeration of black
bodies were truly a ledger of or accounting for injury.
Here, black art finds an anticipatory rapport with
avant-garde art movements and their respective perfor-
mances of refusal — the rejection of modernism’s gridded
dispossession, for instance, which is also a cartography of
disposability, disregard, abusive violation, cultural era-
sure, and social death. However, the very fact that these
performances are both denied to and refused by blackness
throws into sharp relief the radical disjuncture between
these respective modalities and traditions of artistic labor.
Black artistic labor, which takes the fabric and
substance of social existence as an alternative means of
production, refracts the conceptual legacies of the auton-
omous totality of the artwork, and wonders about the
image left on the retina. Rather than thinking blackness as
difference notwithstanding worldly violence, we regard the
serial recomposition and decomposition of blackness as
incitation to an utterly divergent gestic imagination. Our
critical attentiveness to these incitements remains attuned
to a gestural difference that is irreducible, both to the serial
violence of the racial regime of representation and to the
so-called “politics” that clamors for recognition within it.5
5/ David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
generativity

If the poethical artwork is no longer preoccupied with the critical tools of contemporary philosophy a set of concepts,
perils of departing from the onto-epistemology of moder- formulations, and questions that bypass, without ignoring,
nity, and its rendering of existence through the certainties what would have otherwise remained the latter’s undis-
of being, then how might aesthetic considerations start turbed Eurocentric core. Black Aesthetics — that is, that
from and stay with the “object” — which is at the same which fosters, facilitates, and modulates “black enuncia-
time “thing” as well as “commodity” and “other” — without tion” — signals an other site for the analysis of artistic cre-
returning to Man or the Subject, the Human or Humanity, ation, collective existence, and political practice. As such,
the Ego or Subjectivity. it provides the basis for a project that militates against and
If our aesthetic thought begins with the “other” as serially undermines the modern liberal political architec-
commodity, as Hortense Spillers recalls, does it unavoid- ture, in its violent post-Enlightenment configuration and
ably (re)confront the violence that is modernity’s condition operations, as well as the fascistic doubles that liberalism
of possibility, devastating any solace that might be found at once requires, solicits, and half-heartedly decries. Black
through the figurations of the colonial, racial, and cis-het- Aesthetics is an utterance that, in its immanent derange-
eropatriarchal matrix?6 Does such a thought inevitably ment of modernity’s grammar, marks and is marked by the
reinscribe subjugation as origin and horizon? Or does the art of passage without coordinates or arrival, the art of life
aesthetic, as thematized in and as black existence, as a in departure.
radically disruptive ethical orientation, stage a devastat-
ing confrontation with modern philosophy that ultimately
targets its aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical ground? What
happens when blackness guides considerations of the aes-
thetic, the ethical, and the theoretical?
Here are two propositions: (a) Black Study recalls
the sonic and mobilizes it against the discursive closure of
blackness in pathology, and (b) in doing so, disarranges the
post-Enlightenment onto-epistemological field. Blackness
(as object) unsettles the (aesthetic) ground upon which the
transparent I emerges. For this reason, the analysis and
poiesis of Black Existence challenges the tenets of Social
Theory and Aesthetic Theory alike precisely because, as
a referent to total violence, it breaks through the enclo-
sure that is discourse and exposes the limitations of both
post-Enlightenment versions of modern ontology, the
philosophical and the sociological.
Black Study reorients the conversation in the con-
temporary international art scene, as it introduces to the

6/ Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American

Grammar Book,” Diacritics, v. 17, no. 2, Culture and Countermemory:
The “American” Connection, pp. 64-81, Summer 1987.

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153
ibrahim mahama The work of the alchemist has often
been labeled “black work” referring
to nigredo (“darkness” or “blackness”
in Latin), the first step of the alchem-
ical process, which means putrefac-
tion or decomposition. Hence, the
terms black work and blackness take
on nihilistic implications. However,
the alchemical processes of Ibrahim
Mahama’s black work and blackness
are about possibilism and the trans-
mutation of coloniality.
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155
Whether the colonial plantation,
parliament hall, the railway, or other
legacies of colonialism, the enclo-
sures of coloniality are as systematic
and interconnected. Mahama’s work
sees possibilities in the material con-
ditions of such enclosures and their
abilities to tell stories and to connect
moments in time along the extended
arc from colonialism to globalization.
These moments intersect with ques-
tions of labor, extraction, production,
exploitation, and justice. The materi-
als of his practice are the unextraor-
dinary evidentiary objects that reveal
systems of crisis or failure; yet, the
artist’s transmutations yield poetic
conditions of assemblage, assembly,
and collectivity.
In his 2017 installation Non-
Orientable Nkansa II, Mahama
together with several collaborators
produced hundreds of wooden
“shoe-maker boxes” from scrap
Parliament of Ghosts, 2019
Red Clay Studio, Tamale (2019)
materials found in Kumasi and
Accra, Ghana, and used for polishing
and repairing shoes. These boxes
contained the tools of “shoeshine
boys,” often impoverished youth
who daily navigate the city to polish
or clean shoes for money. Mahama
gathers together and stacks these
hundreds of boxes into a monumen-
tally scaled wall where each box
seems precarious yet impossibly
held in place.
Parliament of Ghosts (2019) is an
assemblage of discarded and lost
objects brought together to form
the setting for a parliamentary hall
and to recall the history of Ghana
Railway company. The objects
included in the work are found ele-
ments related to the history of pro-
duction and the crisis of industri-
alization in colonial territories. The
objects include abandoned train
seats and railway sleepers, gov-
ernment documents, objects from
a locomotive workshop, journals,
maps, books, and archival furniture.
In his latest work, Mahama
creates a space of assembly that
is in dialogue with his previous
Parliament of Ghosts, yet trans-
muted to become a location for
collective black work, cultural pro-
duction, and discourse during the
35th Bienal de São Paulo. The space
reproduces the red brick bleachers
in the hall of his RED CLAY studio
in Tamale, Ghana. The installation
also includes a set of vases from
Ghana, and railroad tracks which
reference the geography of the
north of Ghana where the studio
is located.
mario gooden
igshaan adams The artistic output of Igshaan
Adams consists in producing
beauty from materials considered
to be of little value, but which are
deeply connected to the every-
day life of the non-white working
classes who still live in the so-called
South African townships.1 His works
materialize experimentations by
working women and men, based on
their tensioning agency of everyday
life marked by racial segregation,

Kicking Dust, 2022

Installation view, Kunsthalle Zürich, (2022)

156
157
inequality, and poverty. Sharply
demarcated urban lines weaken,
bend, become sinuous, and defy
straight, rigid lines imposed by the
Apartheid regime and its reminis-
cences in contemporary times.
Bonteheuwel, founded in 1960,
is the birthplace and setting of the
artist’s childhood memories, who
lived in a Muslim and Christian home
influenced by multiple traditions.
The lines that rigidly divide the two
Igshaan Adams in collaboration with Kyle Morland
Stoflike oorskot, 2016
Dusty Residue. Woven nylon rope, string, and mild steel,
300 × 120 × 240 cm
sides of the city inspire Desire Lines
(2022), a work that represents the
shortcuts created by underprivi-
leged workers who defy the harsh-
ness of urban layouts. Tapestry, a
traditional South African craft, is the
art through which Adams material-
izes these alternative paths, rivers,
structures through which the city is
(un)organized.
This tapestry is composed of
ordinary objects, colored beads,
Desire Lines, 2022
Installation view, The Art Institute of Chicago (2022)
shells, whelks, wire, and colored
fabrics tightly woven together,
producing immense multicolored
carpets. As well as tapestry, other
works by Adams also show the
efforts of working classes to adorn
their daily lives, and, paradoxically,
reaffirm and remind them of their
social place, of joy or pain, of pov-
erty and hope for better days.
It is in this somewhat dreamlike
beauty, which reveals meanings
both material and aesthetic, that
the artist foregrounds the agency
of the working classes. From these
impoverished materials – regarded
as worthless, commonplace, which,
if they carried traces of the lives
of the elites would be considered
relics, museum pieces – Adams
composes flowers, dust in the air
resulting from people dancing who
dress in ecumenical fabrics inspired
by sacred objects. The domestic
takes on sensitive and intimate
meaning, surpassing reality and
taking on unthought, almost impos-
sible forms.
luciana brito
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Areas created during Apartheid to confine
black and mixed-race people.
ilze wolff

158
159
A “practice of care” is a practice
of refusal that engenders regard,
generosity, and conviviality within
and among conditions that would
otherwise be represented as abject.
Ilze Wolff’s practice of care begins
with the recognition of spatial rela-
tionships followed by a process of
revealing the unexpected and the
uncanny among the residue, detri-
tus, depleted conditions, exhausted
resources, and overlooked details
sounding the Steinkopf Community Centre with
drummer Fernando Damon and Heinrich Wolff, 2020
and existences of daily life. This
kind of care is a reclamation of
history, self, epistemologies, and
liberty that are a priori to European
colonization and enlightenment. It
is a cultural production of the pre-
viously unimaginable yet previously
known that produces a poetry that
is not romanticized, fetishized, or
made sentimental.
In the late 1970s, the design
and construction of the Steinkopf
Community Center was commis-
sioned by the Anglo American com-
pany which mines platinum, cop-
per, diamonds, thermal coal, and
iron ore in South Africa. Steinkopf
was founded as a religious mission
in 1817 by the London Missionary
Society among the San indigenous
people of northwest South Africa.
The population of the town at the
time of the construction of the cen-
ter was approximately 6,000 peo-
ple most of whom were women and
children; for most of the men lived
and worked in the mining camps in
the Western Cape. “The intention
was to provide an inviting building,
accommodating all the needs of
the people and which also opens
up more environmental options for
the community. It is designed to
serve the community and not the
reverse.”1 The irony of this state-
ment and the architectural design
is not lost in Ilze Wolff’s Hophuis,
an Afrikaans word that translates
to “hop house”. Yet, using personal
narrative; music and sound; pho-
tographic history, architectural
representations, and elements of
the area’s natural ecology, Wolff’s
installation reveals a “choreogra-
phy of care and conviviality” that
survives the entanglements of
religious suppression, systemic
racism, and economic exploitation
and extraction. Wolff uncovers
how the building bears witness to
the local indigenous knowledge,
memories, stories of joy, liberation,
mutual support, and solidarity of
those people who used the center
as a gathering space and a site
of resistance.
mario gooden
_
1/ Architecture SA, Spring 1980, p. 13.
inaicyra falcão The historical and artistic being of
Inaicyra Falcão could constitute the
transgression of concepts – such
as erudite, lyrical – or of what is
accepted as possible. Her ancestral-
ity, as motor and inspiration, and
the choreographies of her world
– broad, transnational, and dias-
poric – break with the rigidity of
academia and art. From her poetic
voice, other sounds could emerge,
but what blooms is an ancestral
Dance group at the Universidade Federal Ebó Iyê, c. 1989
da Bahia (UFBA), undated
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161
song. Loose and liberated, her
body exhales memories of ancient
and refined movements, repeated
millennia ago in human daily life,
and of sacred divinities, which can
still be observed today, when they
are on Earth.
As Inaicyra’s art shows, the
impossible happens when the power
of the body, of the physical explo-
sion provoked by the need for move-
ment, is present, even in sacred
deities. Therefore, for the artist, all
bodies are endowed with memories,
ancestral inscriptions, which reveal
themselves in the body conscious-
ness forged in tradition. This move-
ment is cultural, collective memory,
but, above all, it results from our
personal histories and from cross-
ings that inhabit the bodies of black
people of the diaspora. Personal
freedom, therefore, depends on this
body being in movement.
Ayán – Símbolo do Fogo, undated
Symbol of Fire
From this perspective, education
would be another path to auton-
omy, but, at this point, through
dance. The recognition of each indi-
vidual story, the embracing of con-
scious or dormant memories, would
be part of this learning, which runs
counter to the knowledge of repeti-
tions, of what is considered harmo-
nious or erudite. This was the path
found by Inaicyra to bring African
heritage into the curricula.
Far from meaning being stuck in a
sealed past, her perception of the
world and of art reveals change,
dynamism, and constant transfor-
mation of ancestral movements
and songs. Thus, Inaicyra Falcão
defines herself as an “articulator
of universes,” of multidimensional
worlds, which she connects to the
body and voice.
luciana brito
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
januário jano

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163
In the photographic installation
Baptism (2019), we observe a set
of twenty photographs showing
Januário Jano taking off white
clothes. The exuberance of the
image of the whole draws attention.
However, in the research of the
materials, any disinterested con-
templation is dissolved: the white
clothes are memories of the civiliz-
ing impositions of the Portuguese
colonizers on Angolans. The fabric,
Baptism, 2019
Edition 1/3 + 2 AP. Inkjet on 100% cotton fine art paper rag.
50 × 44 × 2 cm (20 pieces)
100% cotton, refers to the fields
of Baixa do Cassange, where the
massacre that ignited the struggle
for Angola’s liberation took place
in 1961. This dimension of violence
– especially the response to it –
emerges from a craftsmanship that
understands research not as a stage
to reach a product, but as the living
matter to which the gaze must
constantly return when it is willing
to propose other worlds.
Video, sculpture, painting, pho-
tography, installation, sewing, or
interdisciplinary art, if you will. The
repertoire of languages that Jano
uses to put his ideas into practice
is vast, as is vast and unsettling the
range of forces that underlie all
artistic making as a consequence
of history and culture. There are
many media, layers, and themes
that are in friction when consider-
ing the complexities of the field of
cultural identities, a terrain in which
he operates to instigate debate.
From Luanda, in Portuguese, but
also from the land of the Ambundu,
in Kimbundu – Bantu language – or
in English from London, where he
trained and settled. The artist’s own
biographical transits highlight the
marks of colonization, a central
theme in his work; also for this rea-
son, it is before himself – the mirror,
his history – that Jano finds the raw
material that occasionally escapes
his own life and ends up echoing
in the words of a fellow country-
woman of his: “surviving our history
is akin to surviving in an unforgiv-
ing city” – said Djaimilia Pereira
de Almeida, as he might have said
himself.1
igor de albuquerque
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, "Morrer de
Nostalgia" in Revista Quatro cinco um, São Paulo,
jun. 2023, p. 8.
jesús ruiz durand Between 1969-1974, Jesús Ruiz
Durand produced a series of post-
ers to publicize the Agrarian Reform
initiated by the government of
General Velasco Alvarado in Peru.
Under the notion of pop achorado
– an expression that means “rebel-
lious, insolent, indignant, bellig-
erent, vulgar, choleric, insurgent,
insubordinate” – this graphic style
took the pulse of an indigenous
population that broke up with the
slavish submission that, for centu-
ries, had made the Peruvian planta-
tion and the relationship between
the pongos and the gamonales1 a
hotbed of cruelty.
Through his work for the Land
Reform Promotion and Diffusion
Direction, Ruiz Durand travelled
around the country, photographing
and talking to Quechua-speaking
peasants who were recovering lands.
He developed a technique that
consisted of fragmenting the image
through a process of solarization
(or sabattier effect), distributing flat
colours by areas, reframing them like
comic strips and printing them in off-
set in CMYK process. Experimenting
with dots and patterns, he invested
an outline of phosphorescence,
vitality and optimism to the indige-
nous bodies that seemed to set foot
outside the waiting room of history,
incinerating the symbolic and mate-
rial bases of servitude and dispos-
session in Peru.
Styling an old illustration from
school books of the face of Tupac
Amaru II, Ruiz Durand designed
the logo of the Agrarian Reform,
which was the central figure in two
posters, one yellow and the other
blue. Eclipsing the silhouette from
the front and in profile, inserting
it into geometric compositions
and optical and chromatic rever-
berations, Ruiz Durand made the
face of one of the leaders of the
fiercest Andean insurgency of the
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165
eighteenth century against the
Spanish invasion more dynamic,
giving it a vibrant physiognomy that
could mutate, multiply and light
up, through superimpositions and
lighting effects. Through a kinetic
formal synthesis, he synchronized
the anti-colonial messianism of
Tupac Amaru II with the revolution
in progress.
But in the undulating and yellow-
ish contours that envelop the peas-
ant bodies holding tools or working
the land, it is also possible to see the
light of the eclipses, under which the
inhabitants of the altiplano “walk full
of foreboding,” as Arguedas writes.
The Agrarian Reform, as a contin-
uation of the anti-colonial war by
other means, was and is an instant of
danger. This flickering light antici-
pated, in its shadows, the murmur
of violence that would come just a
few years later, with the internal war
between the Shining Path (Sendero
Luminoso) and the Peruvian state.
It retains the endless rage of the
pongo, “that rage that burns in the
seed of his heart, like a fire that will
not go out.”2
fernanda carvajal
translated from Spanish by ana
laura borro
_
1/ Pongos were the peasants and indigenous
people who worked as servants on the plan-
tations in Peru and gamonales were mainly
landowners from the highlands, who exploited
the labour power of the pongos in a regime of
serfdom, very similar to the feudal form [NT].
2/ José María Arguedas, “Carta a Hugo Blan-
co-1969”, in Hugo Blanco (ed.), La verdadera
historia de la Reforma Agraria. Lima: Ediciones
Lucha Indígena, 2009.
from the series Reforma Agraria Peruana – Grandes cosas están pasando, 1970
Peruvian Agrarian Reform – Great Things Are Happening. Offset print on paper, 100 × 70 cm
jorge ribalta Faute d’argent [Lack of Money]
(2016-2020) is the third and final
episode of an artistic and historical
investigation by Jorge Ribalta on
the final period of Charles V (1500-
1558), King of Spain and Holy Roman
Emperor. Under his reign, the shaping
of an idea of nationhood ran parallel
to the conquest and colonization
of the West Indies, inherited as the
grandson of the Catholic Monarchs.
The approach is twofold: the man-
Seville, Emporium of the Indies (detail),
from the series Faute d’argent (Eight Short Pieces), 2016-2020
Lack of Money. Gelatin silver prints
166
167
ifestation of Charles V as a key to
interpreting the Western world in the
era of the great economic recession
that began in 2007; and an exercise in
reviewing and mourning the Spanish/
imperial colonial past, resulting in a
critical choreography of return.
The series is based on the “docu-
mentary idea”, which runs through all
of Ribalta’s work, whether as a pho-
tographer, theoretician-researcher or
curator, as he argues that photogra-
phy contributes to explaining social
complexity – class relations and their
conflicts, as well as the relationship
of subjectivities with history – and not
just representing it. In Faute d’argent,
Ribalta questions both the history of
the Spanish nation and the imperi-
al-financial logic of capitalism since
the early Modern Age in Europe,
which spills over into a coloniality of
power. Its title sums up the dialectical
relationship between the Emperor in
decline and his bankers, the Fugger
saga, that is, between necessity and
the indebtedness that guaranteed
imperial status in the 16th century, to
the detriment of the nation (Castile)
and the Indies, turned into mere
instruments of an extractivist colonial
policy. Having no metaphors, the
episode is a tragicomedy made up of
76 photographs – rhythmized by the
notes and quotations in the margins
– that traces the names and geogra-
phy on which the Habsburg empire
and the Spanish nation were built in
order to subject them to a critique
against the grain from the inherited
discomforts. Thus, photography acts
as a counter-discourse in revising
one of the founding myths of the
Spanish Empire and is an instrument
from which to question European
modernity from the perspective of
coloniality in America. In this sense,
the series searches for the spectre of
those bankers today in the geograph-
ical axis Augsburg – Seville – Mexico,
in its streets, chapels and churches,
museums, libraries, mines and
workshops, which are a transcript of
the gold, silver and chocolate trans-
formed into coins, ingots and grains.
rocío robles tardío
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
this participation is supported by: Acción
Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada de
España en Brasil, and held in partnership
with Institut Ramon Llull.
josé guadalupe posada

Calavera oaxaqueña, calaveras rotas y garbanceras, undated

Oaxacan Skeleton, broken Skeletons and Garbanceras Skeletons.
Zincography, 14,6 × 25,5 cm

168
169
Playing with death, be it tag, hide-
and-seek or, for the more cerebral,
a game of chess. Just to kill time,
our gravedigger. But not forgetting
the materials needed to eternal-
ize the encounter: stone, paper,
scissors, pencils, inks, chisel... In
the case of José Guadalupe Posada
(1852-1913), lithography was cho-
sen, because only then could his
engravings become viral in prints,
reprints, and reappropriations that
Calavera de muchachos papeleros, undated
Newspaper Boys Skeletons. Zincography,
15,1 × 23,1 cm
are repeated before the eyes of the
living. A choral memento mori –
works echoing in Latin the litany of
“remember that you too will die”.
Posada belongs to that small
group of artists whose works are
automatically recognizable, even
if you don’t know who they were
authored by. His celebrated cala-
veras [skeletons] draw energy
from the cheap pages for which
they were intended and are part
El jarabe de ultratumba, undated
Jarabe Dance after the Grave. Zincography,
28 × 43 cm
of Mexico’s living-dead history.
The Gran calavera eléctrica (1907),
La calavera oaxaqueña (1900), La
calavera revolucionaria (c. 1910)
and, above all, La calavera Catrina
(1910/1913) are memento mori
memes that predate the World
Wide Web. At once a joke and a
philosophical reflection, a celebra-
tion of death and cultural resis-
tance to colonization. Interested in
producing in the tradition of what
has come to be called popular art
– a questionable and ambiguous
category – Posada’s reach extended
to the illiterate (the majority of
the population at the time) and
increased throughout the 20th cen-
tury in the context of an apprecia-
tion for indigenous, pre-Columbian,
and contemporary cultures.
He produced caricatures and
illustrations for several newspapers
in circulation during the tumultuous
late 19th century until 1913, when he
died in anonymity. He was pub-
lished in many pro working class
newspapers, but his affiliation with
revolutionary ideals is not set-
tled. However, there remains one
undeniable constant in his satirical
verve: ridiculing the bourgeoisie
that feeds off the exploitation of the
people. This fact is present in the
lines that go from the costumbrista
phase to his late production, culmi-
nating in the hat on the skeleton of
the socialite Catrina.
igor de albuquerque
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
juan van der hamen y león

170
171
Between 1625 and 1628, after being
absolved by the Pope and shortly
before embarking on his return
journey to the so-called New Spain,
Antonio de Erauso was immortal-
ized by Juan van der Hamen y León
(Madrid, 1596-1631) in the Retrato de
Doña Catalina de Erauso. La monja
alferez [Portrait of Doña Catalina de
Erauso. The Nun Ensign].
Erauso, also known as “the lieu-
tenant nun”, was born as a woman
Retrato de Doña Catalina de Erauso. La Monja Alferez, c. 1625
Portrait of Doña Catalina de Erauso. The Nun Ensign. Oil on canvas, 57 × 46 cm
in 1592 and defied gender norms in
the 17th century. Until not so long
ago, many scholars, probably influ-
enced by the reading of Erauso’s
biography, considered the painting
to be part of the Baroque tendency
to represent “the monstrous”. This
trend, which gave rise to a whole
genre in itself, formed an amalgam
that included bodies outside the
norm and identities without a pre-
fixed definition.
However, although such images
were particularly abundant in the
Spanish context in the first half
of the 17th century, the Portrait of
Doña Catalina de Erauso seems to
question them on the basis of its
own exceptionality. The particular-
ity of the work makes even more
sense when one considers that
the writing that frames it – which
establishes a clear dissonance
between image and text, the reason
why this anomaly was explained –
was a later addition.
By reproducing the conventions
of representation of “the mascu-
line” of his time, Van Der Hamen’s
composition of the character
unwittingly contravenes the paint-
ing’s posthumous title. Dressed in
military garb and holding a steady
gaze, the image of the lieutenant
unambiguously adheres to the
dominant regime of visuality of the
colonial era, with all its dictates
around gender, sexuality, race,
and class.
This constellation of interpre-
tations, of visual and discursive
appendices, has been recovered by
Cabello/Carceller. In the exhibition
Una voz para Erauso. Epílogo para
un tiempo trans [A Voice for Erauso.
Epilogue for a Trans Time], the work
once again displays its mutable and
exceptional character and, between
past and present, confirms the
performativity inherent in every
portrait, every story, and every
construction of identity.
beatriz martínez hijazo
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
judith scott

172
173
Judith Scott (1943-2005) made her
first sculptures in 1988. Although
their forms became more complex
over time, they all shared a similar
principle: a nuclear structure of
found objects wrapped in lattices
of wool, fabric and other every-
day items.
Sometimes, her colorful com-
positions are open structures,
which reveal the myriad of material
extensions that underlie its interior.
Untitled, 1993
Fabric and found objects,
91,4 × 50,8 × 25,4 cm
At other times, their threads are
entangled in compact and labyrin-
thine frameworks, whose entrails
can only be revealed through radio-
graphic processes.
In more than a decade and a
half of tireless production, the
artist never titled her pieces. Nor
did she indicate how they were to
be exhibited or leave records of
her thoughts about them. In the
absence of a narrative, when Scott
began to attract critical attention,
a number of labels and attempts
at interpretation appeared around
her work. Many of these argu-
ments sought support outside the
artistic element, in recourse to
her elliptical biography or in the
reduction of her practice to precon-
ceived classifications.
However, precisely because
they are inscrutable, her works –
between the magical and the every-
day, the real and the veiled – resist
being classified. They are inscribed
in the enigma, in those impossible
choreographies that escape the
rigidity of the univocal and remind
us that the meaning of an artistic
object always remains unfinished
and incomplete: irreducible to a
given discourse, imagination or
system of mediation.
beatriz martínez hijazo
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
julien creuzet Martinican thinker Edouard
Glissant’s Poetics of Relation begins
with “The Open Boat,” a short but
weighty text that I have returned to
again and again since I encountered
it fifteen or so years ago. The essay
closes with the following sentences:
“…there is still something we now
share: this murmur, cloud or rain or
peaceful smoke. We know ourselves
as part and as crowd, in an unknown
that does not terrify. We cry our cry
174
175
of poetry. Our boats are open, and
we sail them for everyone.”1 Julien
Creuzet’s artwork is, for me, that
yawning, confounding, exciting open
boat. To walk into one of Creuzet’s
installations is to be overwhelmed
by color and texture and line – fuzzy
yarn, neon plastics, fishermen’s nets,
shimmering metals, unidentified
coloured liquids in water bottles
suspended just so, and on and on.
It is an assault, frightening in its
indecipherability, and scintillating
in its sensuality. More a poem than
an essay, we don’t have solid fig-
ures, only the outlines of things.
Where objects are decipherable, as
in his videos, they come together in
unusual combinations, bouncing off
each other, their meanings shifting,
associations emerging and recalling
Benitez-Rojo’s “soup of signs.”2
All of this is deliberate, of
course. Creuzet is committed to an
ZUMBI ZUMBI ETERNO, 2023
Eternal Zumbi. Video stills. Video, color, sound
endless chain of reference that con-
jures the “part and crowd” of Pan-
Africanist thought and experience.
His work reminds us that much
is shared across the African dias-
pora, but much is not. Negritude
is related to, but not the same as
Black Power. Is the Mami Wata of
Haiti, the Mami Wata of Louisiana?
Is Mami Wata Cuba’s Yemayá?
Brazil’s Iemanjá? Is she Jamaica’s
River Mumma? These recurring
water femmes with their fish tails,
themselves a kind of syncretism,
cluster like “cloud or rain or peace-
ful smoke,” droplets hanging in air,
linked by some invisible, elusive but
undeniably perceivable something.
Creuzet would have it no other
way. The demand for transparency
is too often violent, why not revel
in the opacity of the other, of the
self? After all, if you could walk
into Creuzet’s installation and know
exactly what it was, consuming and
digesting without event, would it
be as good? Would you feel it as
deeply? I think not. Better to linger,
wander, let your thoughts double
back on themselves, free associ-
ate, argue with a friend. Pleasures
beyond what you can name await.
nicole smythe-johnson
_
1/ Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Trans-
lated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1997.
2/ See Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating
Island: the Caribbean and the Postmodern Per-
spective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
this participation is supported by:
Institut français.
kamal aljafari

176
177
Kamal Aljafari’s work proceeds
from a belief in and exploration of
cinema’s power to bear witness.
For a Palestinian artist working in
the wake of the Nakba,1 this may
sound like a paradoxical state-
ment. In Israeli hands, cinema has
consistently served as a tool of
colonization, removing Palestinians
from representations of their own
landscapes and urban spaces. In
that sense, as Aljafari observes,
A Fidai Film, 2023
Video stills
Palestinian people have been dou-
bly uprooted – in reality as well as
in cinema.
But no dispossession is ever
total. Like people, pixels also resist.
In Recollection (2015), Aljafari
engaged in a painstaking and bril-
liant effort to undo what he calls
“cinematic occupation.” He mined
three decades of Israeli fiction
films shot in Jaffa, his hometown,
for what their frames unwittingly
preserve: the image of the city’s
architecture as it once was, and
the images of many Palestinians,
including his family members, who
accidentally appear in the back-
ground because they happened to
walk by when a scene was being
shot. Armed with a trust in low
resolution imagery, he uses mon-
tage and image manipulation as
cine-choreographic tools to bring
these silent ghosts back to the
foreground, to make spectral rep-
resentation emerge out of its own
impossibility.
In other projects, like Port of
Memory (2010), Aljafari focuses on
familiar and familial spaces where,
in a sort of suspended time, the
repetition of daily rituals appears
as a way to stave off looming
catastrophe. In The Camera of the
Dispossessed (2023), his project for
the Bienal de São Paulo, he experi-
ments with the installation format,
using juxtaposition, montage and
visual effects to critically re-ap-
propriate historical footage looted
from the Palestinian Research
Center in Beirut by the Israeli army
in 1982.
omar berrada
_
1/ The Arabic term Nakba means “catastrophe”
or “disaster” in English, and refers to the Pales-
tinian exodus of 1948, when more than 700,000
Palestinian Arabs, according to data from the
United Nations (UN), fled or were expelled from
their homes due to the civil war of 1947-1948
and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Source:
Houaiss/Wikipedia. [e.n.]
kapwani kiwanga complex and sensitive, Kapwani
Kiwanga’s work constantly affects
us through feelings of confusion.
this affecting is not so much a
method, but a path. through videos,
sounds, performances, and instal-
lations, as well as through deep
study, her art firstly confounds the
rigid foundations of the modern-co-
lonial world, especially its perverse
binary logic. by shaking the binary
rigidity of these structures, such as
178
179
truth/fiction, for example, Kiwanga
activates not only a fertile work
of destitution as decolonization,
but, above all, invites us to imag-
ine ways that are radically other
of conceiving and involving our-
selves – to recall Denise Ferreira
da Silva – with the World we are.
a world of intermingling, crossing
and confusion.
For the 35th Bienal, Kiwanga
presents pink-blue (2017), born out
of her research into total institu-
tions – such as prisons and psychi-
atric institutions – and the impact
of punitive design and architec-
ture, and constant vigilance, on
our carcasses. The installation
brings to light the mechanisms that
silently shape, regulate and pre-
dict modes of sociability. The color
pink, especially Baker-Miller Pink,
is used to calm aggressive instincts
(rehabilitation or policy of control?),
pink-blue, 2017
Baker-Miller pink paint, white paint, white fluorescent lights,
blue fluorescent lights. Installation view, Yuz Museum, Shanghai,
China (2018)
while blue (neon) makes it difficult
to find veins, inhibiting intravenous
drug users (damage prevention or
increasing risks?).
In this work and its outcomes,
we can also walk this path of confu-
sion, imagination, and implication,
through the battle against colonial
time that exists in it, characterized
by a rigid linearity between past,
present, and future, and giving
way to a technical complexity that
is no longer Eurocentric, through
arranging colors (blue-pink, white)
and shapes (entrance-exit, rec-
tilinear-diagonal) in a direction
opposite to that used to contain
and repress. Perhaps there, when
we move towards escape routes,
we can invent a new dance of time.
If we let ourselves become lost in
the pink-blue passage, confused
between entrance and exit, we can
still think of this installation as a
huge, strange magnifying glass –
geometric, diagonal, and colorful
– through which we can glimpse
(and be a part of ) a non-linear time,
entering and inventing spaces no
longer commanded by the logic of
colonial captivity.
abigail campos leal
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell and
georgia fleury reynolds
katherine dunham Katherine Dunham’s (1909-2006)
unique career as an anthropolo-
gist and dancer made it possible
to imbue the black body with
other meanings, to fissure colo-
nial clichés and imaginaries about
dances, bodies, and contexts of
African origin, and to respond to
the contingencies of her broader
historical moment.
By furthering the conversation
between anthropology and dance
in both unsuspected and ground-
breaking ways, ethnographizing
dances from the Caribbean and
South America with vigorous and
pioneering body play, she brought
about the emergence of dance
anthropology as a discipline, and
subsequently built a dance tech-
nique and training school that are
now key legacies.
Rigorous in her creations and
ideas, she linked elements of

Katherine Dunham shows, filmed in 1947 and 1956

Shango, Charm Dance from “L’Ag’Ya”, Ag’Ya Fight from “L’Ag’Ya” and Washerwoman
Film stills

180
181
European classical ballet and
Caribbean ritual dances, building
a technique with lines, isolations,
and undulations, as well as vari-
eties of tempos and rhythms that
were broader than the concert
dance forms of the first half of the
20th century. By pointing to sim-
ilarities, she also allowed differ-
ences to emerge, without fearing
the inevitable contradictions of
this movement, causing surprise
to Eurocentric eyes, all too con-
vinced of the limitation of the body
of Others.
Her performances sparked
diasporic narratives illustrating rit-
uals, dramatizations, spiritualities,
and modes of daily life that were
catalysts of community experience.
Her foray into Caribbean realities
became a way of establishing links
with African memory and ancestry
and of retrieving archives to recre-
ate them in the light of a perception
that questioned colonial ways of
seeing the Black world.
Her articulation of the Black
diaspora in practical and concep-
tual terms was of such relevance
that it may have anticipated the
very idea of the Black Atlantic.
Dunham envisioned the notion of
the African diaspora in its intercul-
tural and geographical dimension,
further showing how Black dance
modernism contributed to the
expanded field of dance.
The choreographer’s work
showed how dance could relate to
issues that permeated social life.
In 1950, during a tour of Brazil, she
suffered a racial slur at the Alvorada
Hotel in São Paulo, which triggered
heated discussions in the field of
race relations, culminating in the
enactment of the Afonso Arinos
Law (Law n. 1.390/1951), which
considered racist practices to be a
criminal offense. It is worth men-
tioning that at this same time the
choreographer established contact
with the Brazilian dancer Mercedes
Baptista, who would later join her
company in New York.
Dunham, through her choreog-
raphies and movements around the
world, has imagined and circulated
representations of what the Afro-
diasporic body can be, and thereby
disseminated knowledge of her
own and of an entire community.
Her humanistic vision and activism
have contributed in a multidimen-
sional way to the fields of arts, edu-
cation, and the anti-racist struggle,
intertwining artistic and academic
spheres in a pertinent and neces-
sary way.
luciane ramos silva
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
kidlat tahimik

Indio Genius Brazil Remix, 2023

Digital collage

182
183
Better known as an independent
filmmaker, Kidlat Tahimik is the
author of massive installations too.
His complex and gigantic scenogra-
phies unfold an indigenous story-
telling confronting imperialism and
colonial narratives. Mostly con-
cerned about the extermination and
destruction of genuine mythologi-
cal figures, he recreates the cultural
clashes with an epic overtone.
The multiple stories and the many
Rain Forest Manugal Jar, 2023
Digital collage
scenes that will be shaped through
wooden sculptures seem to come
out of the mind of a Hollywood
scriptwriter. In the final represen-
tation, real historical names often
mingle with fiction characters by
collapsing time, well established
periods and distant geographies.
For the 35th Bienal de São Paulo
installation, Kidlat Tahimik pro-
poses an unlikely frieze that bings
together Igpupiara and Syoykoy,
ancestral mythological figures of
indigenous people in Brazil and
Philippines respectively. This is but
one chapter of the Magellans (1480-
1521) circumnavigation journey in
which the invasion triggers a nec-
ropolitics that extends well beyond
humans. First monstrified and
then exterminated, the Igpupiara
and Syoykoy figures embody
the killing of tribal imaginaries, a
pervasive and relentless cultural
genocide that amplifies its tragedy
with racial-ecocidal capitalism.
Helicopters, chainsaws and mis-
siles fight an uneven battle against
creatures half human half animal,
altogether scenes that echo a
cross-cultural theme park somehow
inspired in the logic of the ninen-
teenth century exhibitions held by
the colonial enterprise.
By messing up with the chro-
notopes inherited from modern
discourses, the same ones that
made plunder and extractivism
legitimate forms of planetary gov-
ernment, the artist foregrounds yet
another shade of violence. Undoing
the imperial narratives through the
degenerative logic of stories told
once and again brings forth quite a
strong counterimage of progress. In
a postcolonial world the inventive
capacities rely on twisting, blend-
ing and mixing the past regardless
of the categories that kept apart
forms of life, common imaginary
constructions and knowledge.
So much that approaching Kidlat
Tahimik’s installations it’s like enter-
ing the junkyard left behind by all
imperial regimes.
carles guerra
leilah weinraub In SHAKEDOWN (2018), time is a
habitat, as stated by director Leilah
Weinraub. For over ten years,
between 2002 and 2014, Weinraub
brought together an archive of inter-
views and videos of the Shakedown
striptease club, by and for Black
lesbians, in Los Angeles – by that
time at the brink of gentrification
and plagued by police brutality.
Disrupting the linear and consecu-
tive Western conception by evok-
SHAKEDOWN, 2018
Film still; 60’22”
184
185
ing temporalities and spatialities
that intertwine past, present, and
future, Weinraub presents a 72-min-
utes-long research-work disas-
sembled in more than 400 hours of
footage, flyers, and numerous pho-
tographs produced when the artist
worked as a photographer and video-
lady at the club that lends the film its
title. The result is an intimate, bold,
and celebratory experience-film of
African American lesbianity.
In 2020, SHAKEDOWN became the
first non-pornographic film released
on Pornhub. The film, which turns
the stories of Ronnie-Ron and the
Shakedown Angels − Egypt, Ms
Mahogany, and Jazmyne − into a
montage of new sensibilities, visuali-
ties, and temporalities, is a document
in which many layers intersect, such
as the indagations about what is
work? and its connection to the indi-
vidual as well as to privacy, money,
power, erotism, arousal, affection,
intimacy, performative personas,
illegality, fluid sexualities, families,
the concepts of cinema and image,
time, and the club as a haven and a
possibility of being. To the unsus-
pecting, SHAKEDOWN could be
understood as a documentary about
the resistance of the underground
scene in Los Angeles, a capital and
a queer haven in the United States,
but Weinraub resists the idea of
calling the film a documentary and
defines it as being “its own capsule”,
captured in a specific moment as a
space for curiosity and fantasy. But,
beyond all that, what Weinraub made
in SHAKEDOWN was a visceral work
of art.
barbara copque
translated from Portuguese by
bruna barros and jess oliveira
luana vitra The transmission of oral stories is
one of the subjects of Luana Vitra’s
research. Originally from Minas
Gerais, she grew up listening to
accounts from relatives involving
everything from Afro-diasporic
celebrations, knowledge, and
technologies, to the traumas of
the slave-owning past of the Ouro
Preto region, where her family lives.
A constant theme is the stories that
involve the legacy of centuries of
186
187
extractive economies that still pro-
mote the degradation of local eco-
systems. Vitra remembers hearing
about enslaved people who used
to take canaries with them to work
in gold mines. This bird, with its
incessant singing and accelerated
metabolism, was used as a sentinel.
Its lungs reacted in an instant to the
presence of toxic gasses emanating
from mineral extraction, and its
silence was the warning for miners
to open paths to escape the galler-
ies, avoiding the dangers of lethal
intoxication. The survival of those
people meant the death of the
birds, evincing how the regime of
slavery not only devastated human
lives, but extended its terror over
other species.
The above narrative is the
starting point of Luana Vitra’s work
for the 35th Bienal de São Paulo.
The installation’s main element is a
series of arrow-amulets intended
for unblocking paths. Made of iron,
a paradigmatic material and of
recurrent use in her works, they act
as conductors, pointing to places of
prosperity where “possibility pre-
vails.” At the center of the installa-
tion, one notices that some of them
are grouped and positioned diago-
nally towards each other. For Vitra,
this composition creates a path
that spatializes the meanings and
possibilities that each grouping car-
ries. Added to the composition of
the work are copper gourds, birds
bathed in silver and copper, metals
of a highly conductive nature, and
indigo powder, a substance often
used for energy cleansing.
thiago de paula souza
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell

Production documentation of the work commissioned by

Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 35th Bienal
luiz de abreu

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Luiz de Abreu’s research on dance
and performance presents the
black body in a state of denunci-
ation. The videos that comprise
the 35th Bienal are documents
of Brazil from the mid-1990s to
the mid-2000s. In them, the art-
ist confronts the experience of a
racism that resisted collective and
institutional elaboration, but with
poignant effects of racial subjuga-
tion on economic, sociopolitical,
Samba do crioulo doido, 2004
Performance documentation
and subjective levels. The cho-
reographies presumed for Black
people in the context of the myth
of racial democracy are explored in
the artist’s work, who employs his
body to respond to the stereotypes
that arise and confine the expected
symbolic repertoire for black arts.
The country is the presence that
sustains and shapes the scenes,
whether as the backdrop for the
set in Black Fashion (2006), as the
flag that adorns the stage and the
artist in Samba do crioulo doido
(2004), or through classic themes
of Brazilianness that form the
soundtrack of the works. But, after
all, how does a Black body dance?
And what effects and affects can
(or can’t) a question elaborated in
these terms generate? Although
the artist states that he does not
create on the basis of genres,1 the
audience’s white, cisgendered, and
perverse laughter affirms comedy,
as it is provoked in scenes that
could cause deep discomfort if the
audience were able to recognize
the tragedy experienced by Black
people. The performer’s laughter,
on the other hand, enters and exits
the scene showing choreographic
marking; it is a joy that reveals its
artificiality, because it is decom-
posed as gesture, just as all the
qualities and movements attributed
to the black body are. In Autópsia
[Autopsy] (1997), the room for
laughter has closed. In the unbear-
able reproduction of the horror of
the reports of violence narrated
off-screen, he opens a gregarious
space for solidarity and for ritual,
returning, perhaps, to the memory
of a liturgical dimension that his
dance, undoubtedly contempo-
rary, has apprehended since the
Umbanda terreiros.
cíntia guedes
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ According to an interview given to Rádio
França Internacional Brasil, on the pro-
gram RFI Convida Luiz de Abreu, on March
13th, 2020. Available at: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=g0ALs1cTW0Q&ab_channel=RFIBra-
sil. Accessed on: May 18th, 2023.
m’barek bouhchichi

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The question of race is surprisingly
absent from North African art
production. For the last ten years,
M’barek Bouhchichi has been
elaborating forms and methods
for tackling it. His point is not so
much to confront the brutal reality
of anti-Blackness racism. Rather,
it is to reclaim the substance and
rhythms of Black life which, for
him, are primarily those of artis-
anal labor, most particularly in the
project for Nous sommes ce qui vous ne voulez pas voir, 2023
We Are the Ones That You Don’t Want to See. Ink, pencil and
watercolor on paper
Moroccan South-East: the textures
of what Black hands make, the
texture of time spent with families
of craftspeople, listening to their
words, watching their ritual reit-
erations of ancient gestures and
their ethics of patience in the face
of discrimination.
For Bouhchichi, these potters
and blacksmiths are poets (in the
Greek sense of the verb poiein,
meaning “to make”). They cre-
atively shape matter and breathe
life into it. With their tactile mode
of bearing witness to a history of
racialization, they play a similar
role as the Amazigh oral poets who,
generation after generation, have
consigned the lives of their com-
munities in songs and recitations.
Poetry is important to Bouhchichi’s
practice. He has paid particular
attention to M’barek Ben Zida, a
Black poet-peasant who revolted
against his status as a sharecropper
in Southern Morocco. Bouhchichi
has been collecting Ben Zida’s
largely forgotten words and engrav-
ing them into sculptures.
For the Bienal de São Paulo,
Bouhchichi brings poetry and
pottery together while bridging
geographical gaps that keep the
African diaspora scattered. Inspired
by the work of US-enslaved potter
David Drake (c. 1800-1870), he
makes a series of vessels inscribed
with verses by Black North African,
Afro-Brazilian, and African
American poets – like a score for
an alternative dance of emancipa-
tion that does away with national
boundaries as it stages conver-
sations between Black hands on
both sides of the Atlantic. With this
work, the artist pursues his unlearn-
ing of Western art hierarchies while
gesturing toward a world struc-
tured not by reaction to oppression,
but by an active, poetic weaving
of relations across languages
and geographies.
omar berrada
mahku

acelino sales tuin

Nahene Wakame, 2022
Acrylic on canvas, 163,5 × 260 cm

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Since it was founded in 2013 by
Isaías Sales (Ibã), Txaná of the Huni
Meka chants, and his sons Acelino,
Bane, and Maná, the Movimento
dos Artistas Huni Kuin [Huni Kuin
Artist Movement] has been estab-
lishing a unique iconography whose
formal solutions can be swiftly
identified. Characterized by the
presence of human and non-hu-
man figures which are integrated
by a complex graphic plot that
reflects the structure of body
paintings while reserving small
areas of intense colors, MAHKU
painting dispenses with Western
codifications: it renounces mimesis,
perspective, the rules of propor-
tion, and canonical technique, to
commit itself solely to the forces of
miração, the visionary experiences
stimulated by the ingestion of aya-
huasca during nixi pae rituals. The
paintings may also present trans-
lations of mythical narratives and
ancestral stories, described in the
ritual chants, whose shared aspect
is the living presence of the enti-
ties of nature and the relationship
of continuity between them. The
result of these procedures is a com-
bination of forms and colors, which
rekindles the problem of movement
in painting, shifting it from the
terrain of illustration to that of inner
experience (which Ibã calls ‘spiri-
tual art’), and seeks to account for
the different rhythms of narration
of the myths in the chants.
In Huni Kuin iconography, the
area of imprecision between dream
and myth is often indicated by a
frame that adapts to the worked sur-
face, granting the story autonomy
and assuring its free manifestation.
In the perimeter of miração, there
are no hierarchies between the rep-
resented entities, and the fracture
between abstraction and figuration
loses all meaning. What we find is
the result of an image-process, made
by many hands, from the dialog and
learning between those involved,
whose ultimate goal is healing, both
for those who made it and for the
observer who accesses it, transform-
ing it into a spiritual experience.
renato menezes
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
malinche

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between the years 1500 and 1529,
lived Malinche, a Nahua who was
probably born on what we now call
the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Malinche is maybe the distorted
form of Malintzin picked up by the
Spanish ear, which is just another of
the many names attributed to her,
whose birth name is unknown.
in official historical records,
Malinche is known for supposedly
having acted as translator and
Lienzo de Tlaxcala, 1552
Tlaxcala's Fabric. Polychrome drawing on bark paper, 65 × 26,5 cm
advisor to Hernán Cortés in the
invasion and destruction of the
Aztec Empire (1519-1521).
in Lienzo de Tlaxcala1 we come
across the recreation of a historical
moment whose poetic violence
we can only envision: the brutal
encounter between Tlaxcallans
and Castillians. before this mys-
terious image, we are summoned
to witness the unnameable: the
deafening noise of muskets, chil-
dren crying before the corpse of
their bloodied parents, huts set on
fire, young women being raped
by Spaniards, looting, destruc-
tion, Spanish soldiers murdered
without even knowing where the
arrow came from. but we can also
ask ourselves: what stories do
these strange spots hold? or what
unpredictable events announce
these slits?
Malintzin was known for being a
collaborator of the Iberian invasion.
however, we can ask ourselves: was
she merely trying to survive the
extermination that was coming?
instead, was her silent work an
internal attack, by means of sabo-
tage and contagion? in any case,
her remarkable linguistic abilities
can serve us as a way to go beyond
History, eroding its language. could
it be that in Lienzo de Tlaxcala
some clue is encrypted? perhaps
there are elements contained
therein for us to imagine another
type of prophetic re-reading of
the past. thus, this map does
not indicate the coordinates for
a geographical country, but for
places long forgotten and yet to
be imagined.
abigail campos leal
translated from Portuguese
by mariana nacif mendes
_
1/ The Lienzo de Tlaxcala is a colonial codice
painted around 1550. It tells the history of the
conquest of Mexico from the perspective of the
Tlaxcallans, a long-time enemy of the Aztec.
Available at: nmdigital.unm.edu/digital/collec-
tion/achl/id/1609/. Accessed July 2023.
manuel chavajay Lake Atitlán laps the shores of
several villages in Sololá depart-
ment, Guatemala. Protected by
three gigantic volcanoes, it was
formed by an eruption 84,000 years
ago, and its shores are inhabited
by descendants of the Cakchiquel
and Tzutuhil communities. Manuel
Chavajay, from San Pedro la
Laguna, is one of them.
As an extension of this surpris-
ing place, his work explores it as a

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sacred place, where his existence
takes place and is intertwined with
the knowledge of his ancestors.
From a local perspective, Atitlán
is an epicenter of tourism and a
place that has nourished the idea of
what constitutes national heritage.
However, for Manuel Chavajay, the
binding forces that arise from the
experience of belonging to this
place are greater than any cli-
ché. We notice this in Oq Ximtali
Oq Ximtali, (2017/2023)
Digital photography, 91 × 61 cm
(2017/2023), Manuel Chavajay’s
video performance. This project
is a record of community action.
It arose from the artist’s concern
with this location and from the
invitation to a group of fishermen
to tie up their traditional boats –
known as cayucos – while they
rowed in the translucent waters
of the lake. The image, recorded
by a drone, is an almost perfect
circle of the twenty boats carrying
various resources and symbolic
objects. Boats flow with the water
currents or exert opposing forces.
At the end of the action, the artist
suggested to the participants that
they could untie themselves, move
according to their will or coordinate
to return together to the shore,
which led to a moment of confu-
sion. Oq Ximtali, in Tzutuhil, means
“they have us tied up” or “we are
tied up”. This action explores or
recovers the community dynam-
ics that are crumbling and fading
away due to the interference of
opposing cultures. In Chavajay’s
work, we always find reflections
of an intense sense of historical
pain that alternates with a sense of
hope; a certain fear that emerges
alongside resilience; the strength
of labor on land and water merges
with a great sense of vulnerability.
In exceptional poetics, Oq Ximtali
suggests this recurring feeling of
impossibility that has become a
prominent feature of the present
and that threatens the balance of
communities, human and interspe-
cies relationships.
rossina cazali
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
marilyn boror bor

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For the Bienal de São Paulo, the
Maya-Caqchiquel artist Marilyn
Boror Bor presents two projects
that explore her commitment to
the counter-ethnographic gaze
and the disarticulation of forms of
coloniality. Following the models
of the European monument and
ethnographic museography, Bor’s
objects and actions modify hege-
monic perceptions and the view
of a public conditioned by stereo-
Monumento vivo, 2021
Living Monument. Performance documentation, Bienal Sur,
Ciudad de Guatemala
types and prejudices. Monumento
vivo [Live Monument] (2023) is an
action in which the artist’s own
body, dressed in her own Mayan
costume, is placed on a base where
her legs have been momentarily
trapped in cement. Nos quitaron la
montaña, nos devolvieron cemento
[They Took the Mountain From Us,
They Gave Us Back Cement] (2022),
consists of a series of traditional
objects made with cement. Like
small fictions, Marilyn replaces the
corn of the food with cement and
the clay of the pots with the weight
of this material through which the
original soul (cux, in Caqchiquel
language) and symbolic value
are lost. Both works of art are a
response to the debates about the
model of economic development
in Guatemala and the ferocious
extractivism that affects so many
people on the continent and, in par-
ticular, in San Juan Sacatepéquez,
where the artist was born. Both the
monument and the objects are an
act of enunciation of the conflicts
generated by the implementation of
an industry that is literally covering
fertile fields, water sources and all
living resources of the region with
concrete dust.
There is no such word as art
amongst native people. The use of
these western elements associated
with the art world is a strategy to
reveal a plight but also to rescue
the presence and reverberation
of the original referents. Marilyn
Boror Bor’s intention is to take
advantage of certain features of
these totalizing, institutionalized
and academic languages in order to
dismantle the common clichés that
multiculturalism has provided. Her
desire as a contemporary indige-
nous artist is to rescue cosmogo-
nies that have been invisibilized and
fragmented over the centuries.
rossina cazali
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
marlon riggs

Tongues Untied, 1989

Film stills

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Since being reappraised by
researchers, curators, and distribu-
tors,1 Marlon Riggs’ films have been
frequently revered for their content
and the potential for identification
they generate. I propose, however,
that we highlight his work as inte-
gral to a history of forms in the arts,
particularly in film.
Riggs engages with an anti-si-
lencing filmmaking practice,
attributing to self-expression such
a value hitherto seen. Voice and
rhythm are the main formal strat-
egies of his work. It is no accident
that poetry, with its infinite possibil-
ities of sonic and elliptical arrange-
ments, constitutes an unmistakable
feature of his films.
Tongues Untied (1989) inaugu-
rates the most inventive phase of
Riggs’s career and combines the
stylistic traits we usually associate
with his work. Like many of his sub-
sequent films, Tongues Untied tran-
sitions from the radically personal
– thus verging on the confessional –
to the undoubtedly collective – thus
espousing polyphony.
When speaking of Riggs one
must recognize that the concept
of the auteur theory – that is, to
attribute what emanates from the
mise-en-scène almost exclusively
to the director – poses limitations.
To better understand him, it would
be useful to observe him as a cre-
ator in dialogue with a number of
artistically brilliant and intellectu-
ally rigorous individuals: Black-gay
activists, Black feminist scholars,
and poets, such as Essex Hemphill.
Riggs’ films strove to make Black
gay men both part of the Black expe-
rience and part of Americanness.
Invested with a reconciliation of
identities, his films sought a settling
of scores toward a possible redemp-
tion with three structuring identities:
Black, American, and gay.
In Tongues Untied, Riggs posits
this assertive reconciliation as an
aesthetic and political project.
heitor augusto
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Among them are Bruno F. Duarte, Cornelius
Moore, Louis Massiah, and Rhea L. Combs, in ad-
dition to my own work as a curator and professor.
maya deren Maya Deren’s main contribution to
choreography is to conceive the
camera itself as an integral part of
the dynamic reality of dance. The
camera is not only an instrument
for registering a stage event in front
of which it is placed, instead, it
dances in a holistic structure. And
with the camera, the one who holds
it. Maya is interested in dance for
its affinity with poetry and for its
non-literal production of meaning;
202
203
the elusive fluidity of the move-
ment is consistent with the idea of
cinema as an art of time, and not
of representation. Art is for her the
formal production of an autono-
mous reality and experience. In her
own performances, Maya immerses
herself in a reality which is not
given, but built through technical
resources with which she never
stops experimenting: invisible mon-
tage, slow motion, frozen frames,
the use of different lenses, back-
wards movement, dissociation of
image and sound. And that double
experience, of acting and regis-
tering, being inside and outside,
both in the technical work and in
the poetic creation, in the material
world and in the transcendental, is
revealed in Meditation on Violence.
This film is the reverse of the pos-
session rituals that so fascinated
her (and that she herself practiced)
Meditation on Violence, 1948
Film stills. HD digital black and white film, sound (from original 16mm); 12’25’’
in Haiti. In contrast to these, the
dance shown here is an exercise in
self-control, shared by the camera,
which assumes the dancer’s own
gravity, that apparent weightless-
ness that is only achieved thanks to
training and corporeal intelligence.
The result is a film that can be con-
sidered perfect in its formal con-
struction. Perfect in its precarious-
ness: a set of photographic paper
and a skillful handling of editing
allow it to transcend Maya’s plan
and the singularity of Chao-Li Chi
to produce a circular and infinite
movement, the perfect form that
contains all forms. The deperson-
alization of the dancer and the cam-
era is close to the abandon typical
of possession rituals, but here the
violence is restrained, even muted,
not to deny it, but precisely to show
it in the distance, in its contiguity
with beauty and with life. The dis-
tanced look brings us closer to the
divine in a way almost contrary to
that of the body in trance: here this
is achieved thanks to the work with
matter (body, paper, architecture,
flute, drums) and form (movement,
speed, framing, image and sound
edition) as own means of the dance
and the cinema.
josé antonio sánchez
melchor maría mercado Although it was first shown almost
a century later in 1991, the Álbum de
paisajes, tipos humanos y costum-
bres [Album of landscapes, human
types and costumes] was produced
between 1841 and 1869, in the early
days of the Republic of Bolivia.
Going against the grain of tradi-
tional historiography and the pre-
vailing neoclassical taste, Melchor
María Mercado created other ways
of “narrating the nation.”
The hundreds of watercolours that
constitute the work trace a gene-
alogy of their own through the
different human groups, customs
and regions of the country, in which
the indigenous populations and the
cholas play an undeniable leading
role. However, at the same time as
he captures Bolivian culture, archi-
tecture and nature, the artist also
points out the fragility of political
power (which he experienced first-

Untitled (Los pecados capitales), 19th century

The Capital Sins. Watercolor on paper, 20,5 × 33 cm

204
205
hand) and satirizes the corruption
of the colonial elites.
In this way, in addition to an early
attempt to unfold an Andean mem-
ory and episteme, the fractures and
ambivalences that marked the period
are also discernible: the marginal-
ization of certain identities or social
classes and a persistent colonial dom-
ination which was revealed as the
other side of the celebrated triumph
of the market and democracy.
There is a particular way of
approaching space and time in
Álbum. Against the single, linear
vision of written history, a sequential
and dialogical format is proposed,
where each picture is – in itself
and in relation to others – a discur-
sive sparkle.
The sociologist Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui, who studied the prac-
tice of her compatriot in detail,
spoke of the homeland as a hand-
ful of beloved and contradictory
images. Thus, far from prefiguring
what would later be instituted as
a map, Melchor María Mercado’s
work suggests zones of encounter
and conflict in an allegory between
the lived and the signified.
beatriz martínez hijazo
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro

República Boliviana. Paz. Danzantes, 19th century

Bolivian Republic. Peace. Dancing. Watercolor on paper,
20,5 × 33 cm
min tanaka A person dressed in rags walks
and françois pain with difficulty. The modest clothing
could in some way relate to The
Madwoman of Chaillot.1 The clumsy
figure looks almost as though it is
learning to walk, although what it is
learning is not at all functional, and
its way of relating to the world is
nothing ordinary. But that difficulty
results in a beauty of movement
that transforms into something
more beautiful than a simple

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sequence of steps: it is a dance. The
different parts of the body act and
interact with each other, though not
in a way one would expect. Feet,
legs, and arms move implausibly,
creating unexpected correlations
and reciprocities with everything
that surrounds it, whether human
or not. This performance was
realized by dancer and actor (as he
describes himself) Min Tanaka at
the French clinic La Borde, where
Min Tanaka à La Borde, 1986
Min Tanaka in La Borde. Video stills.
Video, color, sound; 24’
Félix Guattari spent some time
working with Jean Oury, the clinic’s
founder. Both psychoanalysts, Félix
and Jean sought to create a space
that would not reproduce hierarchi-
cal power relationships, a place of
exchange between assistants and
patients, between general staff and
doctors. His way of relating to the
La Borde patients evokes support,
affection, and mutual learning. That
is the choreographic element of
the impossible that permeates the
work. Tanaka is a Japanese dancer
who works against the grain of
traditional dance. Since 1974, he
has been developing a very specific
performance model that breaks
away from established disciplines
and which he calls hiperdança,
emphasizing the psychosocial unit
of one body without organs or pre-
determined functions. Throughout
his career, Tanaka has developed a
practice that is impossible to clas-
sify. In his words: a dance with no
name. He once said that together
we incorporate a unique body that
belongs to no one: a body of the
earth. Min Tanaka à La Borde (1986)
was directed by François Pain, a
French filmmaker who worked
with Félix Guattari at La Borde, and
whose work focuses on issues of
schizoanalysis and anti-psychiatry,
understanding cinema as a machine
for generating spaces of care.
sylvia monasterios and
tarcisio almeida
translated from Portuguese by
georgia fleury reynolds
_
1/ Directed by Bryan Forbes, The Madwoman of
Chaillot (1969) is a British-American dramatic
comed based on the play La Folle de Chaillot, by
Jean Giraudoux.
morzaniel ɨramari

Mãri Hi, 2023

The Dream Tree. Video, color, sound; 17’. Video still

208
209
We are in front of Watorikɨ – the
house of the spirits – a rocky pres-
ence that non-indigenous people try
to translate into the words mountain
of the wind. But from now on, we
will listen to the Yanomami lan-
guage, along paths traced among
the sounds of the forests. Paths
that Morzaniel Ɨramari decides to
follow, modulating perspectives
based on his cosmosophy. Mãri Hi
[The Dream Tree] (2023) and Urihi
Haromatimapë [Healers of the Forest
Land] researches the reality of the
dreams of the Yanomami, for whom
the dimensions of the physical,
oneiric, and spiritual worlds are inti-
mately connected to each element
of life in the forest. Or rather, the
forest-land – as they usually call it –
because they need to remind us that
the forest is the same planet shared
by all of us.
In this journey into the dream,
the guiding voice is breathed by
Davi Kopenawa’s body. The dis-
course, then, infiltrates the gaps
in the images and materializes
zones of creation whose existence
would be impossible in literal or
ethnographic records. We see
figures amidst the foliage, the lens
does not focus on the obvious;
an excessive brightness suddenly
flickers; the sensation of Yãkoana
dust. What do the Yanomami see in
the dream? “Other things than you
white people,” says Kopenawa.
If the logical smoke of coloni-
zation threatens the Yanomami
– illegal mining, disease, and
deforestation - it also turns against
non-indigenous people, colonizing
every inch of their lives, even the
recondite regions of their dreams,
quantifying and algorithmizing
them in order to domesticate them
in cities. Ɨramari’s filmography pro-
poses visions of this same-other-
world that the rest of us earthlings
insist on ignoring, like someone
who shirks responsibility. At the
end of Mãri Hi, the translatory
efforts close off the escape routes
with the following dream-speech
by Kopenawa, who appears on
the screen with notebook in hand:
“these words have been translated
into other languages of whites and
now they are able to understand
them. Let us share this thought so
that together we become wiser.”
igor de albuquerque
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
mounira al solh

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211
The ongoing wars in Lebanon and
Syria in recent decades loom large
over the work of Mounira Al Solh. In
contact with migrants and displaced
people she responds with a frantic
conversational practice that recon-
nects all those individuals who have
acquired a diasporic status away
from their homeland. Through those
encounters, a demotic language
that bears the traces of biograph-
ical experiences emerges as raw
Sama’/Ma’as – (‫توت‬-‫( – )توت‬Berry/Horn), 2014
Double-sided patchwork textile curtain, 273 × 278 cm
material for the artist. So that the
previously unified political body that
might have represented the Arabic
language breaks down into endless
stories told by people scattered all
over the world.
An undeclared pathology of
exile exhales through every piece
of this artist. Videos, patchworks
and performances stitch together
fragments collected during the
interviews and through her own
nomadic experience. An emblematic
example is Lackadaisical Sunset to
Sunset (2022), a portable carpet that
the artist dragged over time and in
the different places she lived, gath-
ering bits and remnants of a daily
existence. Like in most of her works,
the result is utterly therapeutic and
insists on the pathological dimension
and the condition of those represen-
tatives of a global citizenship marked
by exclusion and precarious life.
In series of patchworks like Sama’
/ Ma’as (2014-2017) she introduces
a radical arbitrariness that makes
words function as polysemic signs
by unsettling fixed meanings. The
works from this series emphasize the
phonetic – and thus performative
and iterative –, as if a precarious
life were a life to be experienced
throughout mutating and hetero-
geneous identities. The longing for
the collective and a Feminist agency
often redeems the dramatic conse-
quences brought by wars and exiles.
carles guerra
 philosophical thought, language
and body-person in performance: cosmogram,
vibrations and “vee”
tiganá santana
The sentence in proverbial language, which holds a special
place in the communication process, is the depuration of
knowledge of the exchange of waves and radiations (minika
ye minienie, in the African Kikongo language) in the act of
uttering certain words (with past and present resonances
of the ancestors for various circumstances). There is an
energy (ngolo) that does not come from the sounding of
words or signifiers, but one that evokes a particular way of
referring to existence, an inherent cosmology and cosmo-
gram (Dikenga dia Kongo) and, above all, the belief in an
effective power of realization.1
There is also the awareness that this is a systemic
principle, (de)codified only by those who share a certain
way of experiencing language and being/living culturally,
as underlined by the Congolese thinker Bunseki Fu-Kiau:
A systematic understanding therefore is possi-
ble only if one can taste and feel the radiation
beauty [n’niènzi a minienie] of the language that
generates that culture.2
In his book Self-Healing Power and Therapy: Old Teachings
from Africa, the author states even more assertively:
“Waves and radiations can change to forms and images
that can speak.”3 Sentences in proverbial language, there-
fore, as a synthesis and header of existential narratives,
are receivers (tambudi), with antennae (mièkese), so that
waves and radiations can present ancestral contents and
symbols. It is important to emphasize that, according to
our interpretation of the Bantu-Kongo culture, based on
what Bunseki Fu-Kiau states in his work, ancestry is not
1/ This text is part of Tiganá Santana’s essay, “Cosmologie en perfor-
mance: sentences proverbiales africaines bantu,” originally published in
Agnès Levécot and Ilda Mendes dos Santos (orgs.), Littératures Africaines
d’Expression Portugaise, n. 21, Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 93-
127, 2021.
2/ Kimbwandende kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, African Cosmology of the Ban-
tu-Kongo: Principles of Life and Living. 2. ed. New York: Athelia Henrietta
Press, 2001a, p. 11. Cf. id., ibid.
3/ Id., Self-Healing Power and Therapy: Old Teachings from Africa. Clifton:
African Tree Press, 2001b, p. 97.
212
213
something terminated, enclosed in a past within a definite
time frame. It is constantly updated by an idea of origin,
to which a Kongo (Mukongo) person must refer, once the
(necessarily collective) meaning of his or her life is con-
ferred. The ku mpemba, or unfathomable spiritual world, is
a space-time from which derives the references to all that
is experienced and imaginable, but it is, with each becom-
ing, the proximity to the last future experienced in the ku
nseke, or physical world. In the ku mpemba, the ancestral
locus par excellence, one finds, as illustrated in the Dikenga
dia Kongo (Kongo cosmogram),4 necessarily the Musoni and
Luvemba stages of any existing being, that is, the invisible
beginning and the visible end, of everything that exists and
can be captured by the Kongo, or human experience. Thus,
we come to what Jarbas Siqueira Ramos says regarding his
research on performative action in the Congado:
Thus, the body-voice in performative action
[...] does not limit itself to repeating a habit;
as Martins (2003) suggests, but periodically
institutes, interprets, revises, and re-actualizes
the performative act itself, writing, recording,
transmitting, and modifying memory as the
action takes place.5
By analyzing aspects of the African Dogon epistemology (in
the sense of “epistemology — and philosophy — of ances-
try” coined by him), in dialogue with French anthropolo-
gists Marcel Griaule (1898-1956) and Germaine Dieterlen
(1903-1999) — notable scholars of the Dogon cosmology,
from Mali — the philosopher Eduardo Oliveira leads us to
reflect on the concept (and experience) of vibration. This
vibration animates existence, unfolding and radiating from
4/ Let’s remember, at this point, that the cosmogram, as we have stated
in previous works, is an inscribed interpretation of the world that reads
its logic from the perspective of events that are divided (and intersect)
between stages (Musoni, Kala, Tukula and Luvemba) representing, respec-
tively, the unseen, the emerging, the apex — ontological — and the dying.
5/ Jarbas Siqueira Ramos, “O corpo-encruzilhada como experiência per-
formativa no ritual congadeiro.” Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença,
Porto Alegre, v. 7, n. 2, pp. 296-315, maio/ago. 2017, p. 308.
the seminal human, as advocated by Fu-Kiau, in a similar
understanding, in the context of the Bakongo. Oliveira
states the following:
A tiny seed is at once the smallest part of the
Universe and the entire Universe, given that
it spreads all over the planet, germinating it.
Unlike metaphysics, which sees the Being as a
Monad, whether static or dialectical, the Dogon
understand that what animates existence is
a vibration.6 The Bantu, on the other hand —
cf. Pe. Altuna — understand vital force as the
energy that animates the world. If this is true in
Southern Africa, it is also true in Northern Africa
(for example, among the Dogon). Existence is
thought of as starting from a vibration, from
energy and emanation. The source of this
metaphysics that is more of an infra-physics will
allow us to list another fundamental princi-
ple of the African Cultural Form, namely: The
Emanation Principle.7
At this point, we would not put as contrastive the “vital
force,” recovered by Oliveira from the author Raul Ruiz
Altuna’s statement, and the “vibration” of the Dogon. The
Bantu waves and radiations, from the ba-kongo, constitute
such a force. The movement, the transmutations, what
remains, what is unknown, what is experienced, what is
virtualized, everything, substantiating and being substan-
tiated by this force, happens in a vibratory way. Human
beings (muntu) are the synthesis of this dynamic, because
they experience-think it and emanate from it, as Oliveira
notes in the Dogon example:
6/ The emphasis in this excerpt is by its author.
7/ Eduardo Oliveira, “Epistemologia da ancestralidade”, pp. 5-6. Available
on: filosofia- africana.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/1/13213792/eduar-
do_oliveira_—_epistemologia_da_ancestralidade.pdf. Last access: 23 Jun.
2023.
Man is the synthesis of the germination pro-
cess of the seed; the universe, a synthesis of
human germination, and everything is a process
initiated and conveyed by the vibration that
animates both the small seed and the immensity
of the universe. Each is a process in itself and
a synthesis of the other. This whole dynamic is
relational, processual, and its dynamic artic-
ulates the singularity of the existence territo-
rialized as the cosmovision of the structuring
culture. At the same time, each is entirely what
is! What’s more, each is at the same time thing
and symbol, sign and object, spark and dark-
ness. At the same time, and enclosed in the
same instant, each is process and event, event
and past, event and future. Each is realization
and possibility, deconstruction and construc-
tion, creativity and conservation.8
For the existing to fulfill its vocation for transmutation
(nsoba) it must vibrate (tatala). Existing is part of the
human, but it must expand into the extra-human, which
often constitutes the generative anteriority of the human.
A whole thread of memory can thus come before, even if
through humans, to report to the “analytical category”9
of ancestry. Memory thrives in the present time — this is
where the ancestor lives — like ntima, the same term in
Kikongo for heart. In fact, just like in the Latin etymological
drawings, in which cognoscere per cor is to know by heart.
Vibratory memory is embodied by what pulsates in time,
bleeds, expands, compresses, cannot stop, forming part of
the most individualized interiorities and the same thing or
principle in any person.
If we attempt a conceptual transposition (which
does not seem odd to us), the thread of memory says of
the planet we humanely inhabit, pointing us to the Solar
System, which, derived from the Milky Way, leads us to
8/ Id., ibid., p. 7.
9/ Ibid.
perceive an unfolded ancestry, arriving at the unfathom-
able. The greatest of all ancestors is the unfathomable,
what is unknown. Nzambi (or Kalunga) is, as far as we can
get for the moment, a (verbal) be-ing existing from itself
and from which derive all other things that are. All of this
memorial communication resonates and resounds. Among
the Bantu Zulu, to ratify this line of thought, the Swedish
historian Bengt Sundkler (1909-1995), in his work Bantu
Prophets in South Africa,10 reminds us that the Supreme
Being, uNkulunkulu, designates the ancient. Thus, in a
context in which ancestry is the originary cavity, mystery
is always the amorphous central body (re)fecundating
what is.
Congolese writer-thinker Zamenga Batukezanga
(1933-2000) stated:
[…] the entire body is both transmitter and
receiver. What we are, our gestures, our vibra-
tion, influence our environment and operate
like waves in the water, in the ocean. The shocks
of our vibrations, i.e. our gestures and words,
are transmitted over long distances, all the more
so as they are charged with energetic power.
Modern techniques and energies only serve to
increase the natural energy in our bodies.11
Tangible bodies vibrate as much as the immaterial.
Everything, as we see it, vibrates the previous, the present,
and what is becoming. Everything is vibrating memory — a
line of force that brings together all possible temporalities.
10/ Bengt G. M. Sundkler (1948), Bantu Prophets in South Africa. 2. ed.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
11/ Zamenga Batukezanga, Kindoki: source des philosophies et des
religions africaines. Kinshasa: Zabat, 1996, p. 19. In the original French:
“[...] le corps tout entier est à la fois émetteur et récepteur. Ce que nous
sommes, nos gestes, notre vibration influent sur notre environnement
et opèrent commes des vagues dans l’eau, dans l’océan. Les chocs de
nos vibrations, c’est-à-dire, nos gestes, nos paroles se transmettent à de
longues distances d’autant plus qu’ils sont chargés par une puissance
énergétique. Les techniques et les énergies modernes ne nous servent
qu’à augmenter celles naturelles disposées dans notre corps”.
214
215
The sentences in proverbial language are, by their vibra-
tion and uninterrupted memory, what the Angolan
researcher Óscar Ribas (1909-2004) called “the spiritual
heritage of a people — the wealth of tradition accumulated
since the primitiveness of its consciousness;” or, as he later
stated, “proverbs constitute the pinnacle of its wisdom. In
the depth of the syntheses, as crystallizations of thought,
lay the essence of life’s teachings.”12
Professor and researcher Maria Antonieta
Antonacci, in turn, when revisiting Marcel Griaule and the
encounters of this anthropologist “with the African sage
Ogotemmêli,”13 recalls that he
had already emphasized, in relation to the
Dogon, the degree of social cohesion achieved in
traditional African societies, where the notion of
person, inextricably linked to the word, connects
to that of society, worldview, and divinity.14
According to our reflection, also among the Ba-kongo, the
idea and experience that delineate the person (muntu) are
linked to the word as experience. More specifically, with
regard to the word incorporated in the proverbial sentence,
Antonacci, now in dialogue with the French linguist Jean
Cauvin, cites him saying that:
Dispelling prejudiced ideas toward African oral
communities, Jean Cauvin, who spent eight
years with the Minyanka (Mali), on the subject
of proverbial living noted that: “The mynianka
man ‘explains’ and ‘creates’ society through
proverbs,” drawing attention to injunctions,
imagery, and proverbial reality [Cauvin, 1977,
p. 39]. According to this linguist, on the Ivory
Coast not all “people speak via proverbs, but
all are able to understand them. Proverbs form
12/ Óscar Ribas, Missosso I. Luanda: Ministério da Cultura, 1958, p. 154.
13/ Maria Antonieta Antonacci, Memórias ancoradas em corpos negros. 2.
ed. São Paulo: EDUC, 2015, p. 354-55.
14/ Id., ibid. (Our emphasis.)
 the armor and the fine basis of a broader type
of communication: the language of images.”
[Cauvin, 1981, p. 3].15
As an unfolding of what we are dealing with, regarding the
word and its vectors of imagetic-material realization we
must remember that, according to the Swiss thinker Paul
Zumthor (1915-1995), in the first essay of his book Escritura
e nomadismo [Writing and Nomadism], vocality — not only
orality — is what can bring a “performant presentification”
linked to reception. The “investment of bodily energy” that
interferes with or even mediates the contact with a (poetic)
text defines, according to Zumthor, what poetry is.16
Therefore, assuming the Zumthorian understanding,
the sentences in proverbial language constitute a poetic real-
ization; they require performance, in their original disposi-
tion (in the sense of what the scholar classified as a “com-
plete performance”), just as they may require “performance
that is at once truncated and interiorized” in the act of
“visual and solitary reading.”17 Thus, Zumthor, in contrasting
text and work, generates the following idea of performance:
• the text is the linguistic sequence that consti-
tutes the message, and whose global meaning
(we know) cannot be reduced to the sum of the
particular effects of meaning produced by its
successive components;
• the work is that which is poetically commu-
nicated, here and now: text, sounds, rhythms,
visual and situational elements — the term
encompasses the totality of factors in the
performance, factors that together produce a
global meaning, which is also not reducible to
the sum of individual meanings. In this sense,
the work is by nature theatrical; theater is its
15/ Id., ibid., p. 355.
16/ Paul Zumthor, Escritura e nomadismo, trad. Jerusa Pires Ferreira e
Sônia Queiroz. Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2005.
17/ Ibid.
finished form, but every performance sustains it
in some way.
• From the text, the voice that performs18 extracts
the work. It submits itself to this end, by func-
tionalizing all the elements that are apt to sus-
tain it, to amplify it, to declare its authority, its
action, its persuasive intention. It uses the very
silence that it motivates and makes significant.19
There is a “voice that performs” that reads-enunciates-dis-
locates-translates, or tradiz [“transays”] (as conceived by
Alexandre Nodari at the entrance to the book Algo infiel:
corpo performance tradução [Something unfaithful: body
performance translation]).20 The performer is not only the
one who presents the work, the poiesis, to the world on the
basis of being the original enunciator of a text. Whoever
receives the work, and interprets it, generating new poet-
ics, can vocalize it (considering the pauses and silences)
and offer work to the world as well. It is their work deriving
from others. Among the first essays in the aforementioned
book, Guilherme Flores and Rodrigo Gonçalves state that:
In the gift of poetry there is something that is
always exchanged, something that in its mate-
riality refuses the parting of things, the easy
merchandising of things; the exchange of poetry,
an impossible exchange on some level, is based
on commerce (Hermes, Mercury — god of the
market, of thieves, of language, of hermeneutics,
of trickery) and yet breaks it. The exchange of
poetry could be an exchange of a promise: the
poet, the aedo, the bard, the shaman, the èṣù,
the performer delivers the work and in the work
the promise of a world; in that promise the game
18/ Author’s emphasis.
19/ Paul Zumthor, op. cit., p. 142.
20/ Guilherme Gontijo Flores and Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves. Photographs
Rafael Dabul. Algo infiel: corpo performance tradução. São Paulo: n-1
edições, 2017.
 enacts casting worlds into the world, opening
fissures in the given world; leaving it up to the
reader, the listener, the body that plays, to make
an endless counter promise: to interpret, in both
senses of an interpretation, to play the game
of hermeneutics, to found meaning in world
promises, yes, to analyze, to describe, to think
the world-work and its world-effect; but more,
to incorporate the work into their own world,
to give a body to the work, to give oneself to the
work, to give one’s body to the work, in short,
to assume the place of the poet, bard, shaman,
as an interpreter (or inter-pres, inter-pretium21 —
mediation, trade, message) of the music. This
is the deepest potential of the world-promises
at play in poetry: one performance demands
another performance, because the gift is per-
formative. “I give you this,” says the poet; and
for the listener there is no easy answer, like “I
do not want it”; the poet replies “I have already
given it to you,” something has happened,
performance has taken place in the moment of
giving. “It has been given.”22
The orisha Èṣù [spelt Exu in Brazilian Portuguese], evoked
by the authors, the spherical force of all mediations,
according to the Yoruba African cosmology, in a syn-
cretic-translational way, in Brazil, is associated with the
image of the crossroads. This configuration is very dear
to the Bantu-Kongo people. In fact, much like the yowa
that synthesizes the cosmogram mentioned earlier in
this essay. The crossroads (especially the four-way), thus
speaks of things unseen, of things that ontically emerge, of
things that reach the apex of achievement and things that
disintegrate, like the sun at sunset.
In Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices, Èṣù — a force
of communication, of movement and of syntheses — is also,
21/ All emphasis are by the authors of the excerpt.
22/ Guilherme Gontijo Flores and Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves, op. cit., pp.
23-24.
216
217
in another understanding and tradition, Nzila, meaning
path. The path full of frequencies and intertemporal coex-
istences that are established between the performer-poet
of a proverbial sentence and the active body-listener that
performs and completes the poetic work of enunciation-act
is the manifestation of this orisha or nkisi — based on the
Bantu-Kongo traditions — in what we can coin as a Black
ethics of speaking. Jarbas Siqueira Ramos, based on the
idea of a crossroads culture, pointed out by Leda Maria
Martins, presents us with the concept of a crossroads body:
“Generally speaking, I understand the crossroads body as a
metaphor that allows locating, in a performative body, the
nodal point of intersections.”23
In conversation with Jarbas Siqueira Ramos, we
can think that the body that performs the enunciation-act
of sentences in proverbial language, at the same time that
it establishes the mediation between distinct temporal
universes (considering the existence of ancestral time and
circumstantial space-time, which, in the present, indicates
an abysmal becoming), delivers to others new possibilities
of filling the relevant place occupied by sentences that
come from afar and traverse time.
Similarly, we could mention at this point, the
(entirely corporal) saying of an oriki (Yoruba sacred poem)
or the action of public chanting in terreiros (sacred spaces)
of Candomblé, Umbanda, Quimbanda, Xambá, Xangô,
Tambor de Mina, Batuque, among many others, as a poet-
ics of realization based on corporal presences and on what
is unseen/tangent. Note that the categorical bifurcation
between artistic performances and cultural performances
does not encompass what we bring in this essay. There
are identified poetics (in the Greek sense of a set of feats)
that can be interpreted as art-culture-philosophy-science
all at once. The “unfinishedness” of Afro-diasporic artistic
achievements, as discussed by the British thinker Paul
Gilroy,24 a term we might replace in our analysis by open-
ness, does not allow us to bring such performative events
23/ Jarbas Siqueira Ramos, op. cit., p. 310.
24/ Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
into closed epistemologies; rather, into comprehensive and
intersecting epistemologies, and, to follow a Bantu-Kongo
image-concept brought by Bunseki Fu-Kiau in his work,25
that open in the shape of “V”.
Tukula
Luvemba Kala
Musoni
The Kongo cosmogram (Dikenga dia Kongo) can contribute
to broadening the understanding of what concerns the
utterance-act of sentences in proverbial language. Further
following the logic of what Fu-Kiau explains,26 there is a
first stage of being, Musoni (to guard the radical sona:27 to
register, record, have the memory of), which is not seen
in the physical world (ku nseke). Musoni is, broadly speak-
ing, not yet being physical, tangible. Kala, which literally
25/ Kimbwandende kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, 2001a, op. cit.
26/ Id., ibid.
27/ Cf. Wyatt Macgaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: the Bakongo of
Lower Zaire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. MacGaffey, regard-
ingthe kongo − week divided into four days: nkandu, konzo, nkenge, nsona,
notes that: “Nsona and nkandu were days of the ancestors and of resurrec-
tion, suitable for emerging from ritual seclusion (sona, ‘to make ritual mark-
ings on the body’)” (Id., ibid., p. 51.) In the original in English: “Nsona and
nkandu were days of the ancestors and of resurrection, suitable for emerging
from ritual seclusion (sona, ‘to make ritual markings on the body’)”.
means being (in its primarily verbal sense),28 embodies the
stage at which this being as action becomes a visible entity.
In a third stage we find Tukula (from the verb kula — to
grow, mature, develop) with things and situations in their
zenith state, of most active fruitfulness, of action itself.
Finally, Luvemba29 configures the stage of physical disin-
tegration, the dying, the end-beginning, the great trans-
mutations of things that are; in other words, the disinte-
gration of the tangible dimension and the movement to an
unfathomable plane.
According to the cosmogram, we have four “Vs”
graphically demarcated by the spaces between Musoni-Kala,
Kala-Tukula, Tukula-Luvemba, Luvemba-Musoni. As previ-
ously stated, we thus emphasize, according to Fu-Kiau,30 one
of the main Bantu-Kongo concepts, the Vee, disseminated to
the world of readers for the first time by the thinker:
It is at the feet of some of these underground
masters that I learned not only about the “V”
(the basis of all realities), but the foundation
of the Bântu people system of thought as well,
their cosmologies. No one can truly understand
the “Vee” without any basic knowledge upon
Bântu world view, or their cosmologies. Our own
work, as would later write two American schol-
ars, is the first on the subject…31
Still on the subject of Vee, Bunseki Fu-Kiau pointed out:
The “Vee” is the basis of all inspirational real-
ities such as great ideas, images, illustrations,
28/ In Kikongo, “being”, as a noun, is often called kadi or be, in the sense of
Bunseki Fu-Kiau. According to the Novo dicionário português-kikongo (compi-
lation by Francisco Narciso Cobe. Luanda: Mayamba, 2010,) we also find, for
“being,” in its substantive form, the terms vangwa, ma, kima, zingu e nkala.
29/ Metaphorically, based on what Bunseki Fu-Kiau explains, MacGaffey
(op. cit., p. 43), in the perspective of human life, reminds us that this
stage, a “sunset,” is the one that “[…] signifies man’s death and its rising
his rebirth, or the continuity of his life.”
30/ Kimbwandende kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, 2001a, op. cit.
31/ Id., ibid. p. 129.
 inventions of all orders (including works of art),
wars and conceptions, both biological and ideo-
logical as well. It is the process [dingo-dingo] of
all changes, social and institutional; natural and
unnatural; seen and unseen.
To talk about the “Vee” is to talk about realities,
whether they are biological, inspirational or
ideological, material or immaterial. They all pop
into our minds in forms of the Vee (beam span
of the Vee) inside us at the Musoni zone of the
Kôngo cosmology. We seek for ideas and images
through ‘the open beam of the Vee’ inside our
mind and on the contrary we focus details under
reverse beam of the “Vee.”32
Each stage that demarcates the Kongo cosmogram has its
Vee, that is, its disposition to expand and retract, with
specific denominations and meanings. The V of concep-
tion, emanated by Musoni, is called Vangama. The sec-
ond V emerges at the ontological stage Kala and is called
Vaika. The advent of Tukula makes itself known by the
name Vanga, which, according to Bunseki Fu-Kiau, is a
denomination “derived from the archaic word ‘ghânga’ — to
perform, to do,”33 representing the crucial V of human life
in the physical world. Vunda — to rest, extinguish; think,
too, that the verb vonda means to kill — it is the Vee found
in Luvemba, the last stage, whose “function is completed
under the fwa,34 die action.”35
Grounded in the “beams of the Vee” (present in the
cosmogram), the body that enunciates kingana (proverbial
sentence) presupposes stages of expansion and concen-
tration, as suggested by the very shape of the V. Before
a sentence in the Bantu-Kongo proverbial language, we
32/ Ibid., p. 130-31.
33/ Ibid. In the original: “[…] derived from the archaic word ‘ghânga’ to
perform, to do.”
34/ Our emphasis.
35/ Kimbwandende kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, 2001a, op. cit., p. 141. In the
original: “function is completed under the fwa, die action.”
218
219
encounter a concentration of waves and radiations (minika
ye minienie) of culture, thought, language, of narratives that
rely on the ancestor (bakulu), that is, on the invisible world,
ku mpemba. This entire concentrated record takes us back
to the stage, in the process of enunciation and realization,
of Musoni, as well as to the figuration of a sentence in pro-
verbial language (kingana) that symbolizes the narrowing
of an earlier, ancestral beam of expansion; or, if we like, of
accumulated narratives about the world and a new start-
ing point for expansions or displacements to come. This
dynamic between what is concentrated in order to expand
again, in a never-ending process of hermeneutic expe-
riences and creation of the kongo (mukongo) person, we
could call dingo-dingo — the process, in constant motion,
of each thing, in order to become, necessarily, another
thing, moving to another ontic state. There is a need, out of
principle, to give due philosophical relevance to undoing.
The body that utters-acts, in accordance with the prover-
bial sentences, reconciles constructions and disintegra-
tions in the face of its presence and of other presences. It
is life-death, kala-zima (turn on and off), emerging at once
in a Black performative event, which, as we know, did not
remain solely in the African continent.
The following are examples of sentences in prover-
bial language, even in the absence of the bodies enunciating
them and the act of realizations-presence. The texts of other
multidimensional realities are not enclosed between the
walls of this essay fulfilling certain academic rites. They are:
Kutombi didi dia (ngolo za) zunga ko kwidi zungwa.
Do not seek the regional center of driving forces; they
are confining.
Nga nzenza muntu katunga fu kia bwala?
Does an outsider make a system of their non-village?
Wampana nsengo, kunkambi kwe ngatu bwe isadila yo ko.
Give me a hoe, and I will know how to use it.
Kanda diasala nsang’a n’kento ka ditumbukanga ko.
Community, by woman, is not extinguished.
Mbungi a kanda va kati kwa nsi ye yulu.
The originating span of the community, at the center,
between earth and sky.

Kanda kandu: ka kiloswa; ka kisambu.

Community is taboo: you do not leave it; you do not
worship it.

Kolo diakanga nganga, kutula nganga.

Kolo done and undone by nganga: every knot has
its master.

Translated from Portuguese by Mariana Nacif Mendes

nadal walcot

Jamaica, 1986
Silkscreen print on paper, 54,5 × 36 cm

220
221
In the act of repetition lies the
power of variation. In this theater of
memory’s shadows, images come
and go, but they are never the
same, because, in detail, everything
is something else. The grip that tilts
the machete when cutting the mil-
lionth sugar cane, the hip spiraling
in street dances, year after year,
the hand bending to the imperious
will of a drawing that demands
more physical effort and more ink
David & Goliath, 2010
Ink on paper, 53,3 × 44,5 cm
on paper. Nobody does the same
thing twice: that’s everyday life.
In the cane fields, in the cities,
or in the studios. The Dominican
artist Nadal Walcot (1945-2021)
was actively aware of this state
of affairs – without concealing his
debt to M.C. Escher. Walcot, who
had learned many languages in his
youthful trade as an interpreter,
ended up operating another kind of
translation: from everyday scenes
into the language of drawing. The
smoking locomotives, the exploita-
tion of labor in the sugar mills, the
plotting and transactions of trade
in the ports. The landscapes are
always human, even if we only see
the figure of a train. As a child,
Walcot used to sneak into a wagon
and spend days away from home,
only to be flogged by his grand-
mother on his return.
In dance, too, the intelligence
of his line is displayed, including
when he incorporates and recreates
the expressions of cocolo music
and dances (a term used in the
Dominican Republic to designate
Spanish-speaking immigrants from
various ethnic groups of African
descent in the Caribbean). In these
works, the lines of human figures
are charged with the same ener-
getic matrix of the cultures that
make up the choreographies of
personal and collective memory.
Thus, from subjects – as well as
form – emerge the strength of the
contradictions underlying a histori-
cal reality, witnessed and modified
by an artist who interprets colonial
violence but also the euphoria of
people at parties; who sees the
advance of industrialization reach-
ing only the powerful.
igor de albuquerque
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
nadir bouhmouch Every project by Soumeya Ait
and soumeya ait ahmed Ahmed and Nadir Bouhmouch
is an attempt to carve collective
spaces for making and sharing
“from below.” In their view, art must
stay connected to popular forms
of culture and learn from ancestral
modes of relation. They do not aim
to represent a “national” culture,
nor do they strive for “universal-
ity.” For them, such categories
only serve to homogenize cultural

Fadma Boutalaa, Zahra Hicham and Aicha Amoum in

a song recording session in the apple orchards, 2022

222
223
production. On the contrary, they
foreground specific, local tra-
ditions and strive to make them
exist on a larger scale via forms
of solidarity that extend beyond
national borders.
This mode of thinking was
obvious at Documenta 15, in the
hospitality space offered by Le 18,
a Marrakech collective of which
Bouhmouch and Ait Ahmed are
key members. It is also an essential
A picnic with Fadma by one of her fields, this time with the presence
of Nabil Himich, visual artist and illustrator for the covers of the
Against Monoculture publication series, 2023
engine of their Awal project, which
investigates ways of documenting
traditional oral arts and decoloniz-
ing contemporary practices in the
Atlas and Southeastern regions
of Morocco.
Amussu (2019), a feature-length
film directed by Bouhmouch, por-
trays a rural community’s resistance
against the largest silver mine in
Africa, which has appropriated and
polluted their water, destroying
oases and almond groves. The film
foregrounds the everyday lives and
gestures of the villagers and their
indigenous, creative modes of polit-
ical organizing and memory-making
(multigenerational speaking circles,
oral poetry, etc.). The filmmaking
process took a cue from these
very modes: Bouhmouch actively
collaborated with the commu-
nity of villagers, who became the
film’s producers.
Bouhmouch and Ait Ahmed’s
project for the Bienal de São Paulo
brings together the various formats
of their work (video, publications,
performances, gatherings) around
one challenge: the exhibition space
must aspire to be an assays, that
is to say, a village square in the
Amazigh tradition, an assembly
space; as they declare in their
proposal to the exhibition: “a tech-
nology in which orality produces
horizontal mechanisms for popular
decision-making, conflict resolu-
tion, artistic creation, knowledge
exchange and agricultural produc-
tion – all at once.”1
omar berrada
_
1/ Nadir Bouhmouch & Soumeya Ait Ahmed,
from the proposal submitted to the 35th Bienal.
nikau hindin

Nikau Hindin applying the final wai tohu

(embossed texture) to the aute fibre

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225
 Nikau Hindin recovers the traditional
Maori practice – disappeared for
more than a century – of making
aute: a fabric obtained from a lengthy
processing of mulberry bark. Hindin’s
operations unfold in the transmis-
sion of this practice into collective
actions, so that the entire knowledge
system and worldview involved can
be reborn and re-established today as
a work of reconnection of those who
are here with their ancestors.
Nikau Hindin beating the bark cloth at her marae,
Ngai Tūpoto ki Motukaraka in the far North of
Aotearoa, New Zealand
From the creation and use of typical
tools to produce incisions in the
mulberry bark and open it up for
utensils to beat and open the weave
of the tree skin, soaked in water,
dried again, and then soaked again,
the raw material of this process
is made of time, and it is in it and
through it that the magical transfor-
mation of the material quality of the
bark into fabric takes place.
Both the bark and the mate-
rial derived from plant fiber are
a wrapping, a kind of skin. Poets
know that house and body share
the same nature. That the tree
when standing makes us dream
of the heights of heaven and that
its roots take us to the depths of
being. When lying down, reverie
can easily turn it into a canoe. The
images are rich in protection and
potential movement.
The graphic system elaborated
with earth-based pigments in
Hindin’s paintings refers to star
maps, the ancient Maori method
of observing the shifts of the stars
in the sky, as a form of navigation
and life orientation in space and
time. Lines and arrows produce
dynamism in up and down move-
ments, representing the oscillation
of the stars, taking the horizon as
a point of reference. His research
encompasses a value system and
calls us to carry out a genealogy of
processes, a genealogy of mem-
ory, and to exercise respect for the
cycles and patterns of nature, in a
balance between water and time.
emanuel monteiro
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
niño de elche El Niño de Elche, who identifies
himself as “ex-flamenco”, shares
with the “cinemista” (film-alchemist)
Val del Omar a transcendental aim
and an experimental disposition. His
transcendental aim encourages him
to take risks, in the edges of social
and political reality, as an engaged
singer, or in an experienced reality,
deep in the flesh and the spirit. This
second search, which for centuries
has been the sphere of religion, can
come into conflict with the first,
and produce ideological conflicts
and personal tears. El Niño de Elche
does not avoid them, the same as
Val del Omar, who could not escape
his context, in the darkest years of
the Franco dictatorship, under the
Falangist-inspired National-Catholic
ideology. However, his poetic and
technical practice does not respond
to a political motivation, but to a
visionary one. His was a quest for the

exhibition view: Auto Sacramental Invisible. Una representación sonora a

partir de Val del Omar. Invisible Sacramental Play. A Sound Representation
Based on Val del Omar. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2020)

226
227
absolute, and this purpose mobilized
him towards the production of a total
cinema, which he called “mecamis-
tics,” through a series of technical
inventions that he patented and that
led him to conceive an expansion
of cinema through the apanoramic
overflow, Diaphony, TactilVisión
and others, in which he worked until
his death in the PLAT Laboratory.
The Auto Sacramental Invisible. Una
representación sonora a partir de
Val del Omar [Invisible Sacramental
Play. A Sound Representation Based
on Val del Omar] (2021) is a project
that reveals Val del Omar’s devotion
to acoustic experimentation. In its
title and structure, it refers to the
eucharistic plays, stage pieces with
allegorical content, which he rein-
terpreted to capture his own obses-
sions: the water from the fountains,
original sin, the atomic bomb, the
experience of time without history,
Granada as a melting pot of cul-
tures, among others. In its projected
realization this Auto had the form of
a sound installation; the “invisible”
refers to the idea of a penumbra
that favors listening in a space
illuminated only by votive lamps.
“Active listening” is Niño de Elche’s
departing point: carefully reading
the multiple versions of the script (its
variations or differences) and stage
instructions, and spending weeks lis-
tening the complete sound archive,
made up of hundreds of magnetic
tapes. The cinemista’s recordings
pass through the ex-flamenco’s body
in a kind of possession ritual. Vocal
technique is at the service of this
poetic and transcendental experi-
ence, which does not need to get rid
of the material to reach the invisible.
The flesh is also clay, the voice is also
water, but its medium can be elec-
tronics. The song is transferred to
the magnetic support (now digital),
it becomes concrete, making real
Manuel de Falla’s dream (who had
speculated on mechanical music and
recorded sound as means that make
possible a music without performer).
And the theatrical community disap-
pears from the stage, but it mani-
fests itself in the multitude of voices
that make up the script-palimpsest,
and the multitude of eyes and hands
that have intervened over the years
to make this installation possible.
The theatrical is also realized in
the invitation to the spectator to
participate in that other non-spec-
tacular choreography: the one that
he composes with his movements in
the active listening of a sound that is
spatialized, always fleeting, like the
lamps and the images that contrib-
ute to the invisibility.
josé antonio sánchez
this participation is supported by: Acción
Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada
de España en Brasil.
nontsikelelo mutiti Throughout the Black diaspora we
can marvel at the capacity of
African peoples to affirm the
strength of their traditions, their
imagination, and their creative
capacity. It is so striking, as well
as intense and plastic, that African
production has spread through
various territories, resulting in a
new and ancestral culture. In the
diaspora, the beauty of perma-
nences and rereadings gave birth to

228
229
an Afro-American culture, attract-
ing new symbols and meanings,
especially aesthetic and political
ones, the fruit of daily elements and
experiences that constantly acquire
new meanings.
The artistic production
of Nontsikelo Mutiti, born in
Zimbabwe, takes a plunge into the
meanings of braids and hair as one
of the elements of the African dias-
pora that carry not only political
T(H)READ postcard, 2023
Digital print
and aesthetic but also subjective
meanings, which say a lot about the
daily life, experiences, and history
of Black people in the diaspora.
The ability to produce a technique
and a visual culture that manifests
itself in a certain type of braiding,
whose repetitions, as a whole,
produce a singular pattern, is con-
sidered by the artist a technique
loaded with cultural meanings of
intense political power.
The weave of braids that adorn
the Oris of black people, espe-
cially women, in addition to being
directly linked to the desire to
manifest beauty, has since the
1970s also been linked to the desire
to affirm African ancestry. The body
as a political instrument, which
leaves messages wherever it goes,
was skillfully used as a tool to
demonstrate the beauty of and con-
nection with the African continent,
whether in the streets of Brazil, the
United States, England, France,
Colombia, Cuba, or throughout the
African continent. Thus, an appro-
priation occurred that transformed
into artistic-political-cultural
that which before, perhaps, was
artistic-cultural-ancestral.
To dive into this universe of
appropriations in the diaspora,
Mutiti explored the space of Beauty
Supply Stores, identifying aesthetic
and visual elements that are recur-
rent and that demonstrate a longing
for beauty and humanity, which
manifest themselves through a
particular grammar of the desires
of Black people in the diaspora:
African Pride, Africa’s Best, Dark
and Lovely, Africare, Black Thang,
expressions that before appearing
on the packaging of beauty prod-
ucts were part of a political vocab-
ulary. As fluid as the threads that
cross the space between the teeth
of the comb, for Mutiti, are the
African and Afro-diasporic imagina-
tion and creative capacity.
luciana brito
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
patricia gómez 1. our artists’ projects and inter-
and maría jesús gonzález ventions start from conflicting and
residual spaces: gentrified neigh-
borhoods, deactivated prisons,
disused psychiatric hospitals or,
as in À tous les clandestins [For all
the clandestine] (2019), abandoned
detention centers for immigrants.
2. these peripheries of meaning
articulate discourses of stress and
semantic saturation which, alluding
to the marginal, write the centrality
of what we do not see because we
do not wish to see it.

above, from left to right

Celda 3-3. Centro de Retención de Migrantes de Nouadhibou, Mauritania, 2015
Please don’t paint the wall. CHARLIE-I. 1-d. CIE El Matorral, Fuerteventura, 2014
Please don’t paint the wall. CHA-D-1i-8689. CIE El Matorral, Fuerteventura, 2014
230 Mural print on canvas
231
3. reading in the oblivion of these
margins – in the degradation of
these social residues – implies writ-
ing, from the ruins of silence, the
core of a memory that is a superpo-
sition of texts.
two images below, from left to right
Le Centre, 2015-2023
The Center. Video stills. Video HD, color;
4. the Nouadhibou migrant deten-
tion center in Mauritania, cre-
ated to control the movement of
migrants by sea from Africa to
the Canary Islands, responds to a
physical reality and, therefore, to a
simultaneous moral reality.
third image below
Le processus, 2015-2023
The Process. Video still. Video
HD, color
5. the proposal of María Jesús
González and Patricia Gómez is basi-
cally in line with this physical reality.
In fact, in this and other projects,
they follow traditional artistic-tech-
nical guidelines: printmaking,
engraving, removing murals, pho-
tography, and video. In addition, the
exhibition of the works produced is
also traditional. However, beyond
the aesthetic, what is proposed does
not place us in front of an object, but
in front of a subject: an active sub-
ject that activates us and challenges
us ethically.
6. the subject of this would seem to
be narratively concerned with mem-
ory as all the interventions of these
artists have an archaeological sense
based on the systematic recovery
of differentiated strata of signs.
Despite this, such an archaeology is
based neither on a restoration of the
lived experience nor on its documen-
tary rescue, but on making us experi-
ence a recuperation that escapes
from the nostalgia of memory and its
late-romantic drifts.
7. if this is so, the work shown is not
a result, but the traces of a process:
that of our experience as ethi-
cal subjects.
david pérez
translated from spanish by
ana laura borro
this participation is supported by: Acción
Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada
de España en Brasil.
pauline boudry / Walls, floors, fabrics, blinds, and
renate lorenz glass. Light and smoke. Dark and
opaque, matte, shiny, transparent or
semi-reflective surfaces. Black boxes
cropped by the frame of the cam-
era’s glass eye, which also dances.
Chains and wigs in unlikely places,
colorful shoes, inverted, facing two
directions at once. The front is the
back is the front is the back. The
editing comes and goes, sneakily,
mirroring the timeline without ever
(No) Time, 2020 Les Gayrillères, 2022
Video installation with HD and 3 2 channel video installation (projection
blinds; 20’ and LED); 18’
232
233
revealing its turning points. The end
is the beginning is the end is the
beginning. So is the choreographic
displacement of these pieces: mul-
tidirectional. Exercises to throw off
the gaze that, conditioned to linear-
ity, expects to find progressive time
and spatial continuity. Rehearsals
for guerrilla warfare and escape on
the portable dance floor that are
the bodies. To remain in shadow
by choice, to disappear. To turn the
focus of light outward, to dazzle the
eye of the beholder.
The video-installations pre-
sented by Pauline Boudry and
Renate Lorenz experiment with
space-temporalities not measur-
able by Newtonian physics. The
progressive, hierarchical linearity
(something is always behind, or
below, or in the past) that governs
the modern view on matter col-
lapses. Both the movement of the
performers and the visual and filmic
elements of the works are governed
by paradoxes that are founda-
tional in the lives of minorities: the
congruence between hypervisibil-
ity and opacity, transparency and
reflexivity. Here it is possible to
move in more than one direction
simultaneously. Filmic bodies and
dancing bodies deconfigure the
pre-established political-cultural
conditionings and become similar
to the subatomic dynamics that
also constitute them. We enter the
quantum sphere, where everything
exists in inexhaustible dimensions
moving in infinite directions; where
everything is essentially non-lo-
catable and, therefore, uncaptur-
able; where one can, finally freed
from the bonds of time, imagine
other worlds.
miro spinelli

translated from Portuguese by

philip somervell

Moving Backwards, 2019 this participation is supported by: The

Video installation with HD; 23’ Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

On the set of Moving Backwards, Swiss Pavilion,

Venice, 2019.
philip rizk Terrible Sounds (2022) is made up
of a triptych video installed as a two
channel projection accompanied by
a series of prints.
Three conceptual elements
inform the work.
The first takes us to 1922, the
year the British alleged to give Egypt
its independence. It was the same
year that archaeologist Howard
Carter (1874-1939) discovered the
tomb of Tutankhamun, which would
234
235
spark a worldwide movement of
Egyptomania. Following disagree-
ments with local elites the British
expedition is forced to abandon
the site. The tomb, like all Egyptian
antiquities, had served the British’s
claim to greatness. Following the
tomb’s closing, it was officially
reopened in 1924 at the behest
of King Fuad I as a symbol of the
African state’s glorious past and its
claim to national independence.
The second conceptual element is
music, both as a liberating power,
as well as its ties to colonialism and
neocolonialism. In 1932, as part of
a general move by elites anxious
to earn recognition of Egypt as a
participant in Western modernity,
the Conference of Arab Music
was organized with the intention
of Westernizing it. In an accompa-
nying text for Terrible Sounds Rizk
asks some key questions, “How
Terrible Sounds, 2022
Film stills
would I move to the sounds of
colonialism? How would I move to
the sounds of neo-colonialism? But
most important of all, how would
I move to the sounds of neither?”
The answer to the last question is
suggested by the story of Hartmut
Geerken (1939-2021), a German
musician who, fascinated by
Afro-American composer Sun Ra’s
(1914-1993) Afrofuturism, settled in
Cairo in 1967 where he co-founded
Egypt’s first Free Jazz ensemble.
The second projection in the exhi-
bition features a musical record-
ing from 2021 in which Geerken
along with Egyptian and Lebanese
musicians counter the conference’s
agenda of Westernizing Arab music
into a European form, with a ses-
sion of free musical improvisation.
The third conceptual element,
which appears in the two films as
well as in the exhibited prints, are
allusions to peasant revolts that
led the British to announce Egypt’s
nominal independence in 1922.
In Terrible Sounds one can
recognize some typical features of
Rizk’s work, which masterfully uses
archival materials, breaking chrono-
logical and spatial linearity, reorga-
nizing a hegemonic narrative from a
decolonial perspective.
marco baravalle
quilombo cafundó On November 20th, 2009, President
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva decreed
the recognition of the Quilombo
Cafundó community as an area of
social interest, although its history
goes back much further, to at least
1887, when Joaquim and Ricarda
Congo inherited their master’s land
after obtaining their freedom. To this
day their descendants inhabit the
territory located in the rural area of
Salto de Pirapora, twelve kilometers
from the center of Sorocaba, in the
state of São Paulo.
Mr. Otávio Caetano was a musi-
cian, a top accordion player, the
host of the best parties, a storyteller,
responsible for preserving and pass-
ing on the dialect1 to the younger
generation. We are here thanks to
the strategy of Mr. Otávio, a great
master. In the mid-1970s, almost a
century after Joaquim and Ricarda,
the quilombos in the Sorocaba

Quilombo Cafundó, Dona Cida, benzedeira, rezadeira, yá of the terreiro of Quilombo do Cafundó
August 1980 and community leader in the 1980s and 1990s, undated

Quilombo Cafundó, 1978-1990s

236
237
region began to fall. The last to be
extinguished was that of Caxambu,
which was a sister quilombo. And
witnessing these attacks, Otávio
feared that the same would happen
to Quilombo Cafundó, which at the
time had been reduced to seven and
a half bushels of land. And when
these actions grew more violent,
Mr. Otávio gathered his family
and understood that the life of the
Black man had no value. And that
Mr. Jovenil holding the portrait of his
uncle Otávio Caetano, master of cupópia
and community festeiro, undated
if they wanted to stay alive, they
needed to go after lives of value. So
he goes to the center of Sorocaba
and begins to cupopiar, that is, to
speak in the dialect, which attracts
so much attention, to the point that
the Jornal Cruzeiro do Sul newspa-
per writes a report in which it states
that in Cafundó, which at the time
was still a neighborhood, there is a
village where a “strange” language
is spoken.
Mr. Otávio Caetano, Ms. Dita Pires and
other residents of Quilombo Cafundó,
undated
The news has a wide repercussion,
attracting researchers, anthropol-
ogists, and linguists, who come
to the quilombo and stay to study
this dialect. And the presence of
the academics inside Quilombo
Cafundó made the attacks
decrease. Those were the lives that
mattered, that Mr. Otávio wanted
so much to bring and brought to the
community. And with these white
and powerful people (orofombe, in
cupópia) inside the community the
conversation became different.
Otávio Caetano’s dream was to
be able to read and write. He died
without achieving this, but today
we know that he mastered other
knowledge that was little valued.
Today we are sure that he was a
man far beyond his time. His strat-
egy greatly helped Cafundó in this
process of resistance and survival.2
cintia delgado, one of the commu-
nity leaders, in a conversation with
sylvia monasterios
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Cupópia is a language spoken in the Qui-
lombo Cafundó in Salto de Pirapora, São Paulo,
Brazil. The language combines the structure of
Portuguese with words of African origin, espe-
cially Quimbundo.
2/ Mr. Otávio was also the one who filed a usu-
caption process, which secured the permanence
of the quilombolas in Gleba A (the community’s
remaining 7.5 bushels).
raquel lima In Rasura [Erasure] (2021), Raquel
Lima revisits and reinvents a history
permeated by trauma – intimate,
social, and collective trauma.
Between abandonment, ruins,
layers of writing and habits, her
poetry-performance transposes the
many preceding centuries through
reminiscences that subsist and
return to the surface as if in an eter-
nal cycle. It is not possible to inter-
rupt the time that is running, but
Rasura, 2021
Erasure. Video stills
238
239
Lima finds ways to cross it, shape it
with her voice, and decipher it with
her body in movement.
The word “erasure” (rasura) is
used beyond its semantics, hold-
ing in it the key to decoding and
translation. And if this word is not
the starting point of her thought,
it is certainly its point of arrival.
In contrast to “deletion” (apag-
amento), the total annulment of
an idea, an identity, or a history,
“erasure” presupposes the error,
or the intention to partially erase
something, or to remake it without
disguising it. In the work, “erasure”
also means resistance.
From inside small abandoned
boats, Lima has us look out of the
window at the surrounding ocean
where we see other abandoned
boats adrift. More than life, there
has been exploitation there, and
something has collapsed – but it
has not been deleted. On the island
of Saint Thomas in the Gulf of
Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, the
once-abandoned colonial houses
bear cracks, haunting voids, walls
with peeling paint, ruins upon ruins
that are nevertheless inhabited in
their precarious permanence. Those
occupying this scene are Black bod-
ies, part of the primordial history of
the place to which their ancestors
were taken as merchandise – the
human made thing, erased but
not deleted.
The trauma of centuries of slav-
ery, whose consequences continue
to have repercussions on the fate
of Black populations, is carefully
elaborated in the words with which
the artist performatically-poetical-
ly-visually expresses herself. The
words are inscribed in the “orature”
– an ontological dimension that
proposes other ways of narrating
daily life and history; a cosmovision
– that choreographs meanings in
different times.
No past can be deleted, but its
traces can be transmuted by art. At
least by emancipatory art, a path
crossed by conscious intersection-
ality, which is a path, a movement
and which gives new possibilities to
historical times.
pérola mathias
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
this participation is supported by: Repúbli-
ca Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral
das Artes.
ricardo aleixo

240
241
 Ricardo Aleixo composes poems,
performs words, dances ideas,
and vocalizes images. His work
unravels the interrelationship of
codes in the – not necessarily linear
– processes of creation. However,
the idea of codes is insufficient,
because, before the word, the letter
can express not one language, but
several: the image, the vocalization,
and its sound. In the poet’s own
words, “listening to the letter and
Ricardo Aleixo: Afro-atlântico, 2023
Afro-Atlantic. Film still. Director: Rodrigo Lopes de Barros
writing the voice” is the synthesis of
his work and artistic performance.
The poetry of Ricardo Aleixo,
who has dedicated himself to the
medium for over forty years, con-
nects with everyday life, but not
only that. It informs affections, but
not only that. It is/can be the feeling
itself; it can narrate a dream or be
the dream itself. In Palavrear, he
opens paths so that we can wan-
der through the labyrinth that he
knows “for having it / by heart at
the tip of my feet”. In this journey,
the landscape of his “compositions”
is continuously altered by contexts,
real and historical, which impose
contingencies on the poet, the indi-
vidual, the place where he lives and
the language he speaks.
Aleixo updates the concept used
by concrete poets based on the
work of James Joyce and calls his
poetry “reverbivocovisual”, working
in the written, visual, and sound
dimensions. The body is added to
this as an instrument that emulates,
incorporates, presents and even car-
ries poetry. And in this poetic body
everything is expression, as in the
performances with the “poemanto,”
a kind of parangolé1 with which he
makes the “corpographies.”
pérola mathias
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
rolando castellón “My religion is nature and the
museum is my church,” declares
artist Rolando Castellón, one of the
great references of art in Central
America. Born in Nicaragua and
with strong ties to Costa Rica,
Castellón began his artistic life from
a memory, that of his aunt Rosa,
who used to draw with the tip of
a broom on the floor of her house,
after sweeping it and soaking it
with water. Heir to that gesture,
242
243
over many years, Rolando Castellón
formed his itinerary of rituals and
poetics. Mud and every discarded
inert object or living substance, of
vegetable or animal origin, became
his raw material. Walks on the beach
or in the city, his acute observation,
the collection of objects and under-
valued elements taken to his studio,
the effects of the climate, abandon-
ment, darkness, the presence of
vermin and the cycles of plants are
Dossier – Inventário abreviado, 1960-2010
Short Inventory. Artist’s book
the dynamics that he uses to shape
performance strategies.
Given the impossibility of reduc-
ing his work to a single project,
Rolando Castellón’s presence in this
edition of the Bienal de São Paulo
consists of a selection – or rather an
inventory – of works. In the exhibi-
tion space are deposited only frag-
ments of an extraordinary universe,
which includes what he calls “found
objects” as well as drawings made
with mud, images and compositions
where the accidental prevails. But
the whole is not something simple
or merely naturalistic. Embedded in
all of Castellón’s work are the irony
and paradoxes of possible dialogues
between industrial cultures and
nature, pre-Columbian and post-Co-
lumbian history and contempora-
neity. This corpus of multiple works
also identifies an artistic production
who has woven a work ethic based
on the peculiarity of materials, their
visual harmony, their conceptual
power and respect for the physi-
cal and natural context. As a keen
observer of the micro, Rolando
Castellón explores the plasticity and
visual harmony of dry leaves, insect
corpses, seeds or thorns, to rein-
troduce them into a symbolic and
ritualistic regime.
rossina cazali
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
rommulo vieira conceição

244
245
Milton Almeida dos Santos
(1926-2001) was perhaps the most
prominent and important Brazilian
geographer of the 20th century
who specialized in urban studies
and who theorized the social and
political conditions of Brazilian
urbanization before post-colonial
studies gained its academic foot-
hold. In A natureza do espaço:
Técnica e tempo. Razão e emoção
[The Nature of Space: Technique
O espaço físico pode ser um lugar abstrato, complexo e em construção, 2021
Physical Space Can Be an Abstract Space, Complex and Under Construction
Installation view, Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho (2021). Metal, wood, resin, glass
fiber, polypropylene, polyurethane, and automotive paint
and Time. Reason and Emotion]
(1997) Santos states that today’s
modern city is “luminous,” and the
“naturalness” of technology and
information results in a routine and
mechanical condition of every-
day life. Conversely, the spaces of
the city occupied by the poor are
“opaque” urban areas; yet, these
are the spaces of approximation
and creativity in opposition to the
luminous zones and “espaços de
exatidão” [spaces of accuracy].
It is the inorganic spaces that are
open and because such spaces
escape hegemonic rationalities, the
excluded and marginalized poor
populations are the source of cre-
ativity and of future possibilities.
In his latest work, Rommulo
Vieira Conceição draws upon the
spatial theories of Santos as well
as photographs of the everyday
spatial conditions, architectural
elements, and details of opaque
marginalized spaces of Brazilian
cities such as Favela Nova Jaguaré
in São Paulo, Favela Santa Marta in
Rio de Janeiro, and Bairro Humaitá
in Porto Alegre. Within these
opaque spaces that are sometimes
under the duress of military police,
Conceição explores the creative
construction of situated experi-
ences and their implicit critiques
of the conflation of capitalism,
colonialism, and power. In his
sculptural installation for the 35th
Bienal de São Paulo, Conceição
constructs walls of building mate-
rials and details commonly used
in the favelas and barrios such as
tijolo de barro 6 furos (clay tile brick
with six holes); ceramic tile; and
colonial balusters. These walls and
Greco-Roman Doric columns sup-
port neo-classical pediments that
express socio-cultural and political
values. These are juxtaposed by
suspended military brigade shields
with images of shock battalions
that refer to windows or mirrors.
Finally, an array of supermarket
carts are arranged and scattered
in the work that refer to capitalism
and consumption but also to mobil-
ity which offers the possibility of
encounters as well as the construc-
tion and redesign of values.
mario gooden
rosa gauditano Photographs relate to time. And
this experience is part of a dynamic
of the gaze, which begins from
a place in the past that points to
another time that never ceases to
reconfigure itself. This is how Rosa
Gauditano’s photographs open
time for us. It was Brazil in 1964,
when the dictatorship intervened in
customs seeking to moralize soci-
ety. Repression was, explicitly and
predominantly, directed against
246
247
“subversives,” “communists,”
“abnormal” people, and people
with “deviant” behavior. As a result,
black and LGBT1 people were
persecuted, arbitrarily detained,
assaulted or raped, and killed.
At the same time, in counter-
point, lesbians created resistance
movements. And one such action
was the upkeep of places of social-
ization, such as bars and nightclubs.
In 1979, Gauditano, hired by Veja
magazine and sensitive towards the
political events, made visible the
invisible by registering and celebrat-
ing lesbian bodies for two months at
Ferro’s Bar, in São Paulo. These are
records marked by a strong proxim-
ity between the photographer and
the women who frequented the bar.
These are images that, beyond the
prevailing stigmatizations, narrated
the intimacy of couples, the affective
bonds established in the bar, new
Vidas proibidas, from the series Lésbicas, 1979
Forbidden Lives, from the series Lesbians. Gelatin silver print
family configurations, and aestheti-
cally exposed a political resistance.
Although the essay was censored,
the young photojournalist had no
idea that her gaze would point to the
future, a time when lesbian women
of the present would occupy the
same space as women of the past.
As such, the scenes captured bring
about new experiences, recreat-
ing memories and being renewed
by them, because on August 19,
1983, the bar, which witnessed the
process of political constitution of
the Lesbian-Feminist group (LF),
played a leading role in the Ferro’s
Bar Uprising – the first demonstra-
tion organized by lesbians against
discrimination and the silencing of
sexuality among women. This date
has, since 2008, been recognized in
São Paulo as Lesbian Pride Day. And,
in 2023, Rosa Gauditano’s Lésbicas
[Lesbians] return to propose
new reflections.
barbara copque
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Here we have chosen to keep the spelling of
the period.
rosana paulino Hypersexualization, menial work,1
and the Black mother. These are
some of the stereotypes of Black
women that exist in the Brazilian
popular imagination. This objec-
tivation and sexual appropriation
of the body guides behaviors and
constructs identities that are always
harmful. They naturalize, reduce,
and fix these bodies within a rela-
tionship of domination that crosses
race, gender, and class, subjecting
248
249
Black women to positions of great
social vulnerability.
In an act of protest that per-
vades her entire career, Rosana
Paulino confronts this violence,
deconstructing stereotypes and
representations of the racialized
female body, by stressing (or
revealing) how scientific theories
have founded the racial theories of
official history. A Brazilian educa-
tor, researcher, and interpreter of
Brazilian culture, with a doctorate
in visual arts, Paulino turns the
body into a place of memory; a
body that generates thought and is
filled with questions to be revisited.
Speaking through and for this body,
she weaves, destabilizes, and sub-
verts the colonial certainties that
run through us.
The artist’s body also carries
time. A transformative time that
interrupts violence and disturbs
Rosana Paulino at her studio, São Paulo, 2023
the calm of the river, reshaping
memories and weaving other
narratives and mythologies. In
the 2019 series Búfala, Senhora
das plantas and Jatobá [Buffalow,
Lady of the Plants and Jatobá], in
questioning the construction of
a subjectivity that does not con-
sider the Black female, Paulino
constructs other archetypes and
reclaims expropriated psyches and
affections, revealing the close-
ness of these women with nature,
their bodies merging with plants
and animals, planting roots, grow-
ing branches and expanding the
appreciation of other wisdoms, all
entangled in ancestry.
And being entangled, in African
and Afro-Brazilian religions, is
to be a bit of things, or that is, in
these religions, women are made
of and make up nature. For exam-
ple in the series Mulheres-Mangue
[Mangrove-Women] (2022-2023),
the grandmother of the grand-
mothers in the series Jatobá,
which, with her aerial and con-
nected roots – no longer neces-
sary to hide – as in Afro-diasporic
thought, enables exchanges and
exists between worlds: she is life
and death, beginning and end,
land and water, sweet and salt,
black and white, and the medium,
like mud.
barbara copque
translated from Portuguese by
georgia fleury reynolds
_
1/ “Trabalho servil,” in the original Portu-
guese, is a term used to describe work done by
servants, which is low-paid, often domestic,
sometimes enforced, and commonly likened to
the work done by enslaved people in colonial
Brazil, sometimes considered as a leftover from
that period. [t.n.]
rubem valentim

250
251
 The artist Rubem Valentim
(1922-1991) combined elements of
modernism and geometric abstrac-
tion with African and Afro-Brazilian
cultures, and with various Eastern
philosophical and mystical currents,
always in search of a consciousness
of the earth, of the people.
In a vigorous effort towards
constituting a universal language,
Valentim often incorporated sym-
bols and motifs inspired by religious
Rubem Valentim in his studio,
undated
rituals, originating from the cos-
mogony of candomblé, paving the
way for a numinous and abstract
geometry that impregnated his
paintings, reliefs, and sculptures.
By means of circles, triangles,
trapezoids, rectangles, and colors
from the orisha pantheon, the artist
created a new rhythm in each work.
Rigorous and inventive, the artist
achieved a balance between form
and color, which can be seen in the
monumentality of the set of sculp-
tures and reliefs that make up the
work Templo de Oxalá [Temple of
Oxalá], partially exhibited for the
first time in 1977 at the 14th Bienal
de São Paulo.
Notably one of the fundamental
texts for art historiography, it was
with the emblematic “Manifesto
ainda que tardio” [Manifesto albeit
late] (1976) that Valentim declared
his political and conceptual pur-
pose, and laid the foundations for
his radical aesthetic contribution to
Brazilian and international art tra-
dition. Thus, the integral presence
of the Templo de Oxalá at the 35th
Bienal de São Paulo undoubtedly
materializes the artist’s thought and
legacy. The temple is the celebra-
tion and manifestation of a Brazilian
visual poetics that establishes
the Brazilian riscadura [trace], an
identity that mobilizes geometric
insignia and symbolic elements to
express its connections between
the physical and the metaphys-
ical. The temple is an act that
cleaves time, it is like an arrow that
never delays.
horrana de kássia santoz
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
rubiane maia Insistently throwing a series of
stones towards the ocean, inves-
tigating the body as a receptacle
of the force of winds, performing
displacements in synergy with the
mineral kingdoms, stretching the
time of writing in relation to the
duration of plants, breathing mem-
ories from the sonic capacity to
access immemorial times, sanding
wood to excavate texts present in
the skin itself, are some (among the
Speirein, 2021
Spies. Performance documentation, PSX: a decade of
performance art in the UK, London
252
253
many) gestures that lend structure to
the conceptual and transdisciplinary
texture of Rubiane Maia.
What is at play in the situ-
ations proposed by the artist,
whose work is guided by a hybrid
between performance, images,
and writing, is always the con-
struction of a state of perception
that allows her own body (and
the body of those affected by it)
the possibility of widening and
transmuting what is inscribed in it
over time.
A body that listens, feeds and
multiplies the frequencies,
voices, and cries that precede
us. If each one of us is the
condensation of lived history
from birth and before, when
a memory [or, a set of memo-
ries], is made actual through a
performative action, it ceases
Preparation for Exercício aéreo, a montanha, 2016
Aerial Exercise, the Mountain. Rubiane Maia and Manuel Vason’s video still
to be a memory or a ghost to
become a collective percep-
tion, a constellation.1
In this sense, the body, in the
contexts evoked by Maia, extrapo-
lates (or even refuses) the biologi-
cal-historical-Western conceptions
attributed to it, becoming a set of
forces in a state of differentiation
capable of mobilizing new land-
scapes, exits, and health. Always
considering the landscape and
the environment (especially the
non-human one) as co-creators
of her works, the artist [re]affirms
her commitment to life in a game
that involves both an exercise of
critical (and clinical) fabulation
and a sprouting of what we might
call care. This care, however, rises,
expands towards a collective state,
carrying in itself a network of sto-
ries, relationships, and collective
and individual perceptions.
In Book-Performance, a project
under development and presented
at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo,
Rubiane Maia organizes a series of
actions, conceived in response to
autobiographical texts particularly
influenced by traumatic trans-
generational memories linked to
gender and race issues. The artist
elaborates through gesture and
collaboration with other perform-
ers (always intersected by issues
common to her history inscribed
by migration, motherhood, and
diasporic thinking) a text-body
methodology that aims to “metab-
olize complex or indigestible
memories in small doses of healing
and freedom.”2
tarcisio almeida
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Notes on the artist’s practice. See more at:
www.rubianemaia.com/
2/ Ibid.
 creating trans-corporeal institutions:
transfeminist choreographies for bodies and spaces
ilenia caleo
a body is a body is a body / political choreographies
A body is close to a body that is close to a body. The body
is always a body in a space. The environment is generated
by the body: by the volume it occupies, the duration, its
posture, the way it moves. Bodies are in relation not only to
each other but also to the connective space that activates
them. A body does not lie there, alone, it is not an iso-
lated, hermetic object resting against the environment like
against a lifeless backdrop. This space in-between is active
matter; we can envision it as a flow both vibrant and vis-
cous, a dwelling overrun with different and simultaneous
temporalities, a unity brimming with affective qualities.
The body modifies the space around it and vice
versa, and the relation created between bodies modi-
fies the bodies and the space; while the space enables or
disables the relation between the bodies modifying it in
turn. In this force field, the traffic is multidirectional and
influences reciprocal.
The boundaries between bodies, where one ends
and another begins, cave in and intermediate zones
emerge, which remain nameless. Neither one nor the other.
These zones of subsidence are of particular interest to us,
because here, in this contact, in this rubbing of surfaces,
mixtures occur. The boundary of separate identities comes
undone, matter blends. We cease to see bodies as sealed
entities and a dimension of trans-corporeality emerges.1
The space in-between is governed by a series of con-
ditions, sometimes explicit, more often implicit: the prox-
imity bodies can maintain to one another, the possibility
of contact, the freedom for one body to approach another,
whether it can tilt, stretch, topple over or is forced into
verticality, the allotted space for each body and whether it
is the same for each, and so forth. This is the description
of a choreographic process, but also of how a public space
operates. Vectors, tensions, inclinations, movements: cho-
reographies, in other words; a political writing of bodies.
1/ Stacy. Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of
Nature”, in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 237-64.
254
255
Engaging not with objects but with movements, transitions
and sequences, choreographic writing puts us in touch with
the formless, with continuous variation, it trains our per-
ception of them, our sensitivity towards them. In this sense,
understood as a writing of bodies and of movement in space,
choreography can be seen not so much as a discipline but as
a way of thinking about problems, of composing new prob-
lems within the dimension of corporeality.2 Of all bodies, not
just human bodies. An expanded idea of choreography.
hybrid bodies, artificial bodies
In the live arts, the co-presence of performer and spec-
tator generates an artificial and transient space of com-
monality — and this artificiality offers us some very good
exercises in political imagination. In performance, the
conditions that make something visible, perceivable and
legible are constantly changing, deviating from common
sense. A short-circuit sometimes occurs: we are unable to
immediately recognize a body on stage, or a movement or
composition of bodies in space. This is when something is
happening; when habitual perception falters, new bodily
assemblages are created.
The artificiality proper to the arts, which in the
performing arts involves living bodies, therefore provides
an additional tool to help dismantle the nature-culture
binarism, in alliance with feminist perspectives. Rather
than analysis, here we are in the realm of experimenta-
tion: new organs of perception spring up and branch out, a
whole unimagined mapping of the sensible emerges — the
fictional scores of performance move the body between the
natural, the cultural and the artificial, calling into question
the very status of corporeality. By creating new assem-
blages, they produce effects of reality.
This is the way art generates zones of impurity,
interstices between bodies with their own autonomy;
ambiguous bodies, hybrid, unformed. It makes them
2/ Bojana Cvejić. Choreographing Problems. Expressive Concepts in Euro-
pean Contemporary Dance and Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan
UK, 2015.
visible. Impossible, unreadable, unthinkable bodies can
come to life on stage, even only in passing. Populated
bodies, incorporations that suggest new mixtures, new
composites. This mingled, impure, uncertain, transient,
artificial living being is what we experience directly in the
live arts. A shared experience that consolidates a common
space of sensibility, intensifying and modifying systems of
perception.3
We can recognize in art an ability to “anticipate”
certain mutations — an anticipation not in the realm of
intentional declaration, but which rather reveals itself as
a glimmer, a flicker. It embodies a queer mode of vision,
oblique and incomplete, which brings us close to utopia.4
An activity of prefiguration, an eminently political feature
of the imagination.
bodies and institutions: scores
In the more heterodox tradition of Western political phi-
losophy spanning from Hume to Deleuze, the relationship
between artifice and institutions is foundational,5 and
connects the political sphere to fantasy, imagination, and
the capacity to elaborate associations. There is therefore a
certain intimacy between art and institutions. Institutions
are not a given of nature, they are an invention as well as a
convention, and this is as true at the macro level of social
life as it is at the level of bodily singularities: the body is
constituted by forces both symbolic and material, it is the
seat of fantasies, specters, images, memories, repositories,
contracts, identifications. It is a battlefield. There is nothing
natural about our bodies.
It is in performativity, i.e. in behaviors, conduct,
repertoires, and in the repetition of these given scores that
3/ Jacques Rancière. Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris:
La Fabrique Éditions, 2000.
4/ José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futu-
rity. New York: NYU Press, 2009.
5/ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce
the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, 1739; Gilles
Deleuze, Instincts et institutions. Paris; Hachette, 1953.
bodies become socially intelligible, legitimate, “straight.”
But queer feminist thinking on the performative is not
merely a tool for deconstructing and denaturalizing
existing bodies, sexualities, identities and institutions,
for showing their artificiality.6 Performativity is a form of
action that modifies the world; it is also a transformative,
subversive and instituting activity. Sara Ahmed opens a
feminist reading of the proximity between corporeality
and institutions. “Doing things” depends not so much on a
capacity the subject possesses individually but on “the way
in which the world is available as a space for action,”7 a
plastic space where things may take place.
The institution is thus defined in material and spa-
tial terms — a corporeal mode. It consists of models, proto-
types, incorporated schemes of action. But also repertoires,
scores, postures, gestures, behaviors. Choreographies and
postural and gestural scores become so deeply ingrained
in our bodies as to become automatic. How do bodies move
in space? What scores do they follow? Can we name them?
What is the history of a particular gesture of mine? How to
free other scores, how to change given codifications, how
to give body to subversive political choreographies?
It is within the heart of insurgences, social move-
ments, self-regulated collective behaviors and non-nor-
mative or minoritarian forms of life that new institutions,
new models of shared action, are invented. Not, therefore,
only crystallized institutions and seats of power: institut-
ing, generative and grassroots social processes are open
practices that make the capacity to act possible, boosting
it. They materially take shape in terms of bodily proxim-
ity, of tendencies: what we come into contact with shapes
us, “bodies are hence shaped by contact with objects.”8
Building a common world around us.
6/ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990.
7/ Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory, v. 8,
no. 2, , pp. 149-168, 2007, p. 153.
8/ Ibid, p. 152.
the practices of new institutions: a positioning
I too am now speaking from a specific space, and from
practices I personally experienced that have produced
forms of collective thinking and knowledge, in particu-
lar the struggles of the commons and the queer feminist
movements. With the financial crisis of 2008, as a reac-
tion against the neoliberalist policies of privatizations
and welfare cuts or as a demand for democratic inclusion
in managing the crisis, social movements developed in
southern Europe and around the Mediterranean basin
that experimented radically with the theme of the insti-
tutions of the commons; in Italy the local movements for
the commons and the battle for public water, which were
followed by a string of cultural occupations,9 the 15-M and
“Indignados” movements in Spain, but also the Gezi Park
protests in Istanbul, which then spread across Turkey, the
squares of the Arab revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and so
forth.10 It is also in the light of a reaction to the strength
of these mobilizations that we can read the sovereigntist
and reactionary wave Europe is going through today, and
the closure of spaces of political action in an authoritarian
direction in Tunisia, Turkey or Egypt.
In those moments of insurgence, these move-
ments gave rise to the designation of a political space that
prefigured the Euro-Mediterranean. To bet, as Europeans,
on the idea of an alternative federative Europe built from
the bottom and alternative to the Europe of finance.
A Southern Europe.
The struggles of the 2010s put the practice of
occupying premises at the forefront, with various mani-
9/ Since 2011: Teatro Valle Occupato (Rome), Torre Galfa and Macao (Mi-
lan), L’Asilo Filangieri (Naples), Teatro Coppola (Catania), Teatro Garibaldi
(Palermo), Teatro Rossi Aperto (Pisa), Sale Docks (Venice), La Cavallerizza
(Turin), Cinema Palazzo and Cinema America (Rome). Further reading,
Silvia Jop (ed.), Com’è bella l’imprudenza. Arti e teatri in rete: una cartografia
dell’Italia che torna in scena: (“The Beauty of Audacity: An Arts and The-
aters Network — Mapping Italy’s Return to the Stage.”), Il Lavoro Culturale,
21 Dec. 2012, available online www.lavoroculturale.org/imprudenza/
silvia- jop/. Accessed on: Jul. 2023.
10/ Sparks that found resonance in the #occupy movements in the US.
256
257
festations according to the context. The materiality of the
corporeal and spatial dimensions was decisive. Public
spaces, streets, squares, city parks were occupied, becom-
ing arenas for gatherings, socialization, political organiza-
tion, and collective care. But several existing institutions
were hacked and re-signified in this way too: theaters and
cultural spaces in Italy and Greece, for example, where
precarious subjectivities from art and culture became
actively involved; and in the specific case of Greece, the
occupation and self-government of hospitals. The trans-
national dimension was extremely powerful: links and
networks developed, contacts proliferated. Without there
being a program or prior agreement, common words and
practices resonated on the shores of the Mediterranean:
occupation as a performative practice that mobilizes bod-
ies in space and transforms the latter; self-governance as a
practice of direct democracy; the commons as a challenge
to property and as the invention of alternative institutions.
The subjectivities that became active in these situations
were the transversal, precarious ones, contingent workers,
art and culture professionals, students and precarious
university researchers, and citizens of all kinds: activists
from social movements for the defense of local territories
or for the right to the city and to housing. In this interweav-
ing of unexpected subjectivities, conceiving the ongoing
processes not as protest responses but as a matrix for new
institutions strengthened action and experimentation.
commoning — an art of conflict
This sequence — occupation/self-government/commons —
marks a vocation that goes beyond self-representation and
results in immediate performative, i.e., productive, action
involving the management of the means of production, the
construction of informal economies and of new relational
systems. An art of governing ourselves “otherwise.”
This political experience has taught me that taking
into account the dimension of the body and of contact of
the new institutions means putting into focus again and
again the theme of conflict. Not surprisingly, the extensive
practice of occupying involved wide margins of illegality.
Occupying as a mode of space creation, of world creation:
the scenario does not involve claiming recognition from
constituted or state institutions of any sort, it centers
instead around a commoning that institutes otherwise, a
reappropriation that turns into redistribution — of space, of
economies, of relations, of power, of joy.
Commoning, as verb rather than noun, summons
not the realm of the existing but of processes and actions.
A shift that brings forth the performative and transforma-
tive quality of social cooperation, capable of self-regulation
and of coming up with its own models. The focus shifts
from ontology, which defines what common goods are “in
themselves,” to the performativity itself of the commons,
that is, the how of the practices and subjectivities they
incarnate.11 To transform in order to re/create.
In Performing the Institution “As If It Were Possible,”
Athena Atanasiou defines the “performative reconfigura-
tion of institutions as an infinite and indeterminate sites of
conflict.”12 — it is in this way that the practice of instituting
otherwise becomes disengaged from processes of institu-
tionalization and crystallization. Conceiving autonomous,
communal, queer, feminist, decolonial institutions is to
prefigure changing relational systems that leap out of the
binary opposition between movement and institutions.
Or, to put it in choreographic terms, between codification
and improvisation.
for transcorporeal institutions
That space of imagination and alliances the movements
of the 2010s opened up by has been demolished by the
violence of the more recent migration policies and by the
repressive outcome of the revolutions in North Africa. The
Mediterranean is even more fractured today, a space of
11/ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth. Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 2009; Pierre Dardot and Christian
Laval. Commun: Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle. Paris: Éditions La
Découverte, 2014.
12/ Athena Athanasiou, “Performing the Institution ‘As If It Were Possi-
ble,’” in M. Hlavajova and S. Sheikh (eds.), Former West: Art and the Con-
temporary after 1989. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2016, p. 684.
power dynamics and necropolitics13 — the idea of a Fortress
Europe has succeeded in raising walls in the fluid body
of water.
But before long, another cycle of struggles was
sparked — the transfeminist tide of Ni Una Menos, spread-
ing from Argentina to Chile, Mexico, and other Latin
American territories, and which then reached Southern
Europe, making its strongest impact in Italy and Spain
and taking on a distinct form in Poland.14 New alliances,
new threads. New resonances, new scores. It is from here,
from the feminist perspectives generated by this most
recent wave, that we can return to look at the relationship
between bodies and institutions.15 The question of gender
and male violence has forced us to focus on other areas of
political activation: intimacy, sexuality, corporeality, affec-
tive and reproductive labor and care. And on the institu-
tions governing all these things.
A body does not lie there alone, as we said: radical
interdependence is a constitutive feature of lesbian, homo,
trans, queer, women’s and/or racialized communities; of
the most vulnerable subjectivities. It is not a minus but a
political potential, and it prompts us to imagine other-in-
stitutions that will give texture to more informal relational
systems, to networks of other intimacies.16 This is a point
on which recent queer feminist movements in Italy and
Spain have insisted a great deal: consolidating infrastruc-
tures of mutualism to build an alternative economy of
intimacy, of affects, of caring for bodies, of dwelling. This
13/ The idea of a Black Mediterranean is being outlined in the work of
decolonial researchers and activists.
14/ For an inside look at the movements, see Verónica Gago, La potencia
feminista: O el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019.
15/ For a feminist perspective on the commons, see Federica Giardini,
Politica dei beni comuni. Un aggiornamento. DWF, no. 2, 2012; Id., “Beni
comuni, una materia viva,” in Laboratorio Verlan (ed.), Dire, fare, pensare
il presente. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2011; Silvia Federica, “Il femminismo e
la politica dei beni comuni,” DEP. Deportate, esuli, profughe, no. 20, 2012.
16/ On the idea of queer infrastructures characterized by use and move-
ment, see Laurent Berlant, “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling
Times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016, v. 34, no. 3,
pp. 393-419.
is how forms of collective care become authentic practices
of self-defense, at the point where violence and precarity
combine with a cumulative effect. It is a question of invent-
ing new political choreographies to compose bodies, rela-
tionships and affects with the materiality and precarity of
the most exposed lives. Tactile, tentacular, fluid, transcor-
poreal institutions. Even in art and cultural institutions
there is a need for these sites of conflict and sets of models
of communal action, of other forms of life, well beyond the
labels Queering or Decolonizing, which are so in vogue in
Europe but that leave the system unscathed. The question
of vulnerability and interdependence emerged powerfully
during the Covid-19 pandemic, occupying a central posi-
tion in public discourse and politicizing, far beyond the
sphere of feminist activism, the topic of care.17
for more-than-human policies of interdependence
Saying where one body ends and another begins, defining
the inside and outside of living beings, whether it be the
skin, the surface, or the exoskeleton, would seem so intu-
itive and evident. So clear-cut. Yet the Covid-19 virus has
challenged the concept of a hermetic and self-sufficient,
unified and homogeneous body — the virus is a body among
bodies; tiny, invisible, yet an active agent. It disregards the
boundaries established by the skin. In contagion it is worth
thinking not in terms of individualized bodies but in terms
of transcorporeality, of complex and interrelated systems.
Other bodies already inhabit us; we are permeable.
In managing the social and public health emer-
gency, state rhetoric adopted the metaphors of war, the
enemy, invasion, of immunity as the military defense for
our bodies. Reinforcing borders, building walls, identify-
ing an enemy — a lexicon of war that at the symbolic level
readied us for actual war (in Ukraine). Transfeminist posi-
17/ The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdepen-
dence. London; New York: Verso, 2020. For a mapping of self-organization-
al practices in the care crisis, see also Pirate Care Collective, Pirate Care
Syllabus, 2020. Available at: syllabus.pirate.care. On racist violence and
transformation, see also Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories. Episodes of
Everyday Racism, Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2008.
258
259
tions, on the other hand, offered us another vocabulary,
other escape routes, seizing the opportunity to rethink the
human and its hierarchies.
During the years of the pandemic, we learned to
concretely recognize the widespread condition of inter-
dependence — among bodies, among individuals, and
also among causes in general. And we learned to identify
different forms of vulnerability that would otherwise have
remained invisibilized. Interdependence is a trajectory
that draws hidden political maps, suggesting how to weave
unforeseen alliances. Connecting different forms of pre-
carity, multiple forms of violence.18 If the self-sufficiency
of the individual is a liberal and patriarchal myth, so too is
the separateness of bodies.
Remedying for the individualized, healing the cuts
produced by the idea that self-sufficiency is synonymous
with freedom.19 In this sense, the performative and trans-
formative activity that shapes what surrounds us, that cre-
ative and instituting capacity, can be understood as a form
of care; for neo-materialist feminist thinkers care is synon-
ymous with re-creating,20 remaking the world. Care is then
no longer a mere maintenance activity, but transformation
into a more-than-human world, an activity performed
by an interweaving of human and non-human forces,
entities and subjects.21 A collective doing that embraces
18/ Cartographies of violence and exploitation are needed for us to create
other alliances. See Veronica Gago, op. cit. The struggles of delivery riders
in Italy and Europe during the pandemic, when from a fragmented and
violently precarized subjectivity they became part of a strategic sector in
urban logistics, adopted the slogan: “not for us but for everyone.”
19/ For the concept of reparation, widely employed in discussions on
the restitution of works of art in the context of colonial conquests, see K.
Attia, La réparation c’est la conscience de la blessure, in L. Cukierman, G.
Dambury, F. Vergès (sur la dir.), Décolonisons les arts!. Paris: L’Arche, 2018.
20/ Valeria Graziano, Recreation at Stake, in Ana Vujanović, Livia Andrea
Piazza (eds.), A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary
Europe. Berlin: b_books, 2019. For worlding, D. J. Haraway, Staying with
the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2016.
21/ Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience:
Assembling Neglected Things,” Social Studies of Science, v. 41, no. 1, 2011,
pp. 85-106.
mutual dependence, a kind of maintenance that is also a
keeping-alive, a form of self-governance that resembles
the regulatory capacity of an ecosystem. Recognizing the
expressive and agentive capacity of the many forces at play
beyond human ones has an immediate political fallout.22
And it returns us to a vision of a materiality that is vital but
not harmonious, not pacified, made up of colliding forces,
of choreographies of human and nonhuman bodies.

translated from Italian by gianmaria senia

22/ This is a perspective we find in materialist new feminism, but one

that the thought and cosmologies of indigenous and non-Eurocentric cul-
tures have developed independently. Cf. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A
Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, and Mi-
chel Serres (1977), Lucrezio e l’origine della fisica. Palermo: Sellerio, 2000.
sammy baloji 130 years ago, work on the Hotel
Tassel was completed in Brussels,
Belgium. Thus Art Nouveu was born.
A style that celebrated modernity
and its leading class, the industrial
bourgeoisie that had amassed enor-
mous wealth by intertwining its des-
tiny with that of the colonial affair.
In Hobé’s Art Nouveau Forest
and Its Lines of Color (2021),
Sammy Baloji reproduces an Art
Nouveau-style display, incorpo-
260
261
rating some patterns inspired by
the Congolese textile tradition.
Similar patterns, in fact, were once
integrated into the design of the
Royal Museum for Central Africa,
in Tervuren, Belgium, not to men-
tion that architecture and objects
often made use of materials from
the Congolese colony: copper,
ivory, and wood. It is this connec-
tion between the floral style of Art
Nouveau and colonial dispossession
that Baloji emphasizes. Not only
that, the colors the artist chooses
are the same colors that writer and
historian W.E.B Dubois had used
for the diagrams exhibited at the
Exhibit of American Negroes during
the 1900 Universal Exhibition in
Paris. This choice, according to the
artist, alludes to the idea “to divert
the ethnographic reading that one
could have had of these works by
emphasizing the modern aspect of
Hobé’s Art Nouveau Forest and Its Lines of Color, 2021
Exhibition view, Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021)
these ancient practices.”1 The colo-
nial archive is probed to break the
Western monopoly on modernity.
Thus, two colonial liturgies,
Christian mass and factory work,
are featured in the film Tales
of the Copper Crosses Garden:
Episode I (2017). Here, images
of a copper processing plant in
Katanga province (Democratic
Republic of Congo) are accompa-
nied by a recording of colonial-era
Christian praises. The songs are
sung by the Congolese choir of the
Singers at The Copper Cross. In a
black-and-white photograph that
Baloji juxtaposes with the film, the
aforementioned copper cross, also
known as Katanga Cross, adorns
the cassock robes of the choristers.
That type of cross, however, was
used as currency in the region as
early as the 13th century. Detail
that, once again, demonstrates the
artist’s ability to lay bare the hidden
nexuses of colonialism, this time
those between religion, extractiv-
ism and economics.
marco baravalle
_
1/ Portfolio of the artist. Available at: imanefar-
es.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/if-sam-
mybaloji-portfolio-eng-1.pdf. Accessed on: July
2023.
santu mofokeng “Who were these people?
What were their aspirations?
What was the occasion?
Who is gazing?
Look at me.”
These transfixing questions and
provocations by the photographer
Santu Mofokeng (1956-2020) appear
interwoven between arresting
portraits of black working- and
middle-class families from an era
where the world went to war twice
and Apartheid took hold over the
southern expanses of the African
continent. Made in collaboration
with ten families across the prov-
inces of Gauteng, North West, and

262
263
Orange Free State (South Africa),
The Black Photo Album / Look At Me:
1890-1950 is a monumental image
text installation masquerading as a
photo album slideshow. Unfolding
over eighty slides (35 images and
45 texts), the work collides concep-
tual and vernacular forms; individual
and collective subjects; spectral and
material worlds. As a whole, The
Black Photo Album / Look At Me:
1890-1950 is archive as assemblage,
The Black Photo Album / Look at me: 1890-1950,1997
35 mm slides
a formulation that theorist Achille
Mbembe considers “a story that
acquires its coherence through the
ability to craft links between the
beginning and the end.”1
Straddling multiple moments
in time, the piece took root during
the fledgling years of South African
democracy, when Mofokeng
worked in the visual documentation
department of the African Studies
Institute at the University of the
Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg.
While many were fixated on ren-
dering the future of the public
sphere in technicolor, Mofokeng
turned inwards, orchestrating this
in-depth research project rooted
in the monochrome past. He has
said “I was doing this project not to
deny other stories, other narratives,
but I was trying to insert this work
within the body of knowledge of
the past.”2 First presented at the
1997 Johannesburg Biennale, The
Black Photo Album / Look At Me:
1890-1950 resounds even more
powerfully now, in São Paulo, in
the beginning of another century.
It subverts the master narratives of
the nation state by centering minor
histories, through fraught forms
of relation that can only be gener-
ated photographically.
oluremi onabanjo
_
1/ Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive
and its Limits” in C. Hamilton et al. (ed.),
Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip,
2002, 21.
2/ Santu Mofokeng, quoted in interview with
Tamar Garb. Figures and Fictions: Contemporary
South African Photography. Göttingen: Steidl,
2011, 283.
sarah maldoror

suzanne lipinska
Portrait of Sarah Maldoror in Guinee Bissau, c. 1970
Gelatin silver print

264
265
 From the very choice of her
name, taken from the songs of
Lautréamont, Sarah Maldoror
(1929-2020) always combined her
vision as a poet with a political
expression that rejects institutional-
ized narratives to compose each of
her works: whether written or cine-
matographic, which add up to more
than twenty productions between
documentaries and feature films.
Different facets of pan-African
Sarah Maldoror, 1974
Gelatin silver print
thought and leading figures in
processes of resistance are striking
features in Maldoror’s work.
A French-Antillean in the Popular
Movement for the Liberation of
Angola, she filmed the colonial
war through the eyes of a woman,
in Sambizanga (1972) – a film
being shown at the 35th Bienal
– convinced that the struggle
would be doomed to failure if it
did not involve the entire popula-
tion through actions in their daily
lives and not merely as a mili-
tary operation.
This work that reveals what has
historically been invisibilized is
also the artistic legacy built from
the perspective of a person who,
in Paris, 1956, was the only woman
among the 63 delegates at the
First Congress of Black Writers
and Artists and contributed to the
construction of a theater in which
African presence supplanted ser-
vant characters, with the founda-
tion of the company Les Griots.
When dealing with the work
of Sarah Maldoror, it becomes
unavoidable to address what could
not be achieved. All the confronta-
tions, of gender and race, as well
as the First-Third World dynamics
– today Global North-South – the
complexities of the nation-states
that emerged as a result of African
decolonization from the mid-1950s
onward, are still expressed in
projects and scripts that have never
been filmed and are therefore also
part of the choreographies of the
impossible. The findings among
her personal documents reinforce,
above all, her poetic and singular
project in favor of the collective.
heitor augusto
translated from Portuguese by
mariana nacif mendes
sauna lésbica When asked about Sauna lésbica
[Lesbian Sauna], Malu Avelar
by malu avelar promptly answers that it is not
possible to think about her work
along with without understanding her body
ana paula mathias, and the place where she came
anna turra, from. Reviewing questions that
bárbara esmenia pervade her identity markers, Malu
and marta supernova highlights the ways in which she
reacts to a territory that structu-
ally brutalizes, most of the time
in a silent way, everything that is

266
267
different from it. “Structured on a
binary model of gender, this town
forces people with other(ed) iden-
tities to live in a permanent state of
alert and vulnerability.”1 This act of
silently inhabiting imminent death,
her questioning about gay sau-
nas – “what if there was a lesbian
sauna?”2 –, the encounters she had
with other sapatão artists during
the artistic residency PlusAfroT/
Germany,3 and her desire to settle
malu avelar
Sauna lésbica, 2019
Lesbian Sauna. View from the Festival do Valongo (2019)
her body were factors that led the
artist to create this work.
This artwork – whose first edi-
tion took place in 2019, at Valongo
Festival, in Santos, São Paulo – is
relational, installative, and unapol-
ogetically presents a neon sign
with the words: Sauna lésbica. It is
crucial to remember that lesbianity
long lived on policies of forget-
ting and silencing, and has been
reclaimed in a collective and polit-
ical sense. Based on negotiations
and provocative actions by invited
artists, Malu Avelar, along with Ana
Paula Mathias, Anna Turra, Bárbara
Esmenia, and Marta Supernova
propose a collective project and
turn the artwork into a space that
is nurtured by the choreography of
those who occupy it. It is a space
organized around the desire for
encounters that cross the visible
and invisible limitations hindering
dissident existences and shaping
stereotypes. Through an exercise
of abstraction and radical imagina-
tion, the installation tensions the
contradictions of the identitarian
policies, at the same time as it
celebrates the presence of Black
lesbians and sapatonas;4 a space
for listening, for fabulations, for the
displacement of subjectivities, and
for the performativity of the bodies
in contact with the Sauna.
barbara copque
translated from Portuguese by
bruna barros and jess oliveira
_
1/ Malu Avelar in a conversation with the
author.
2/ Ibid.
3/ Among the participants of the PlusAfroT
residency are Grace Passô, Mahal Pitta, Ana
Paula Mathias, Lenna Bahule, Malú Avelar, Iagor
Peres, Guinho Nascimento, and Rebeca Carapiá.
Available at: amlatina.contemporaryand.com/
pt/editorial/plusafrot/. Last accessed June 2023.
4/ Plural of sapatão: a Brazilian-specific
identity in the lesbian spectrum of gender/
sexuality. See Barros, Bruna and Jess Oliveira.
2020. “Black Sapatão Translation Practices:
Healing Ourselves a Word Choice at a Time”.
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Issue 14:
43–52. [t.n.]
senga nengudi

268
269
It is from two works conceived in
a period of almost thirty years,
the triptych Masked Taping (1978-
1979) and the video installation
Warp Trance (2007), that Senga
Nengudi responds to the curatorial
provocation of the 35th Bienal –
choreographies of the impossible.
Of undeniable historical relevance,
her works promote the radical re/
de/composition of the choreogra-
phies with which the implications
between visual arts and politics
were elaborated. In the context of
her early production, the artist’s
dive into abstraction transcended
the symbolic ecology that sur-
rounded what was recognized
as African-American art, and her
gesture demanded that the arts
environments be affected by what
was presented outside the lim-
its established by the categories
of representation.
Masked Taping, 1978-1979
Contact sheet, gelatin silver print
Nengudi invests in collective
practices, engagement strategies,
territorially situated aesthetic inter-
ventions and in what she defines as
abstracted reflections of used bod-
ies.1 In her research into ephemeral
materials that are deeply rooted
in everyday use, such as the sec-
ond-hand tights from the famous
R.S.V.P. (1997/2003) installation,
or the white adhesive tape with
which the artist masks her body in
Masked Taping, Nengudi works on
the multiple uses of transformed
matter. In the performance, the
body in intimate movement with
ordinary matter updates the dimen-
sion of the rite, and one perceives
the Masked Taping triptych as the
presentification of a trace of ances-
tral memory, the artist dancing to
embody a transcultural heritage. In
Warp Trance, the profound impli-
cation of the material used with
the social field persists; this time,
it is the machine that dances and
operates the modification of mat-
ter. Designed on Jacquard cards,
an invention that revolutionized
the patterning of fabrics, the work
opens a gap of images in initially
noisy abstract compositions, which
acquire rhythm, sonically packing
the overlapping of textures and,
finally, of colors. We experience
the duration of the making of the
thread into fabric, in poetic dimen-
sions, as a kind of sensual reflection
on time.
cíntia guedes
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ See this concept in “Statement On Nylon
Mesh Works,” 1997, published in Senga Nengudi
– Topologies. Exhibition catalog. Munich; São
Paulo: Lenbachhaus; MASP, 2020, p. 117.
sidney amaral During the later years of his life,
Sidney Amaral (1973-2017) kept his
job as an art teacher in the public
school system of the municipality
of Mairiporã, in São Paulo. This
experience, combined with his
sensibility and his political-ideolog-
ical project, ended up galvanizing
work that highlighted a complexity
that is often withheld from daily
proletarian life. This is why ele-
ments of classical literature and
270
271
art are sometimes reinterpreted in
his plastic narratives and incorpo-
rated into them, which equally do
not exclude psychological aspects
and biographical data of the author
that, however disturbing, are as
such confronted by him.
The amalgam of artist,
researcher, and teacher resulted in
the realization of a constellation of
poetic propositions, which spec-
ulated densely on the languages
of drawing, painting, sculpture,
engraving, and installation.
In O estrangeiro [The Foreigner]
(2011), the artist uses acrylic paint
to create another of his charac-
teristic self-portraits. In fact, in a
recurring manner, Sidney Amaral
presents his own body as a territory
conflicted by the most introverted,
intimate, and private expressions,
and also those of an extroverted
and social character.
In the work in question, Amaral
assumes the role of Charon, a
ferryman who in Greek mythology
transports souls from the realm of
the living to that of the dead. This
crossing was also that of the artist,
who faced the obstacles of a much
less favorable time than today
regarding the circulation of Afro-
diasporic symbolic production. A
foreigner in both realms of life and
death, the artist and his work are
the elements that connect dispa-
rate spheres. This painful journey
was, of course, not his alone, and
the artist understood this. It is very
significant that, in its 35th edition,
the Bienal de São Paulo inverts this
equation and the work of Amaral,
who died prematurely, is now
enshrined in the Olympus that he
once portrayed as an obstacle.
claudinei roberto da silva
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
O estrangeiro, 2011
The Foreigner. Acrylic on canvas, 210 × 138 cm
simone leigh and Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-
madeleine hunt-ehrlich Ehrlich have been working together
for years as part of a loose group of
largely Black, women artists, schol-
ars and other cultural producers,
several of whom make an appear-
ance in Conspiracy (2022)
Prior to this project the two
engaged in the archive of the
United Order of Tents – the oldest
African American women’s group
in the United States, established by
Conspiracy, 2022
Video still
272
273
formerly enslaved women in 1867.
That involvement led to Hunt-
Ehrlich’s “surrealist documentary”
Spit on the Broom (2019), which
sought to earmark the significance
of the order, without revealing the
secrets that helped them survive for
over a century. This concern – how
to talk about a history that is secret,
and derives its power from that
secrecy – is central to both these
artists practices.
In Conspiracy, Leigh and Hunt-
Ehrlich overlay beautifully rendered
shots of the tools and processes of
Leigh’s trade, with haunting vocal-
izations and narration drawn from
Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of
the Spirit: African & Afro-American
Art & Philosophy1 and Zora Neale-
Hurston’s Tell My Horse.2 The
diasporic breadth of the artists’
interests are made clear with each
text discussing traditional practices
in Central Africa and the Caribbean
respectively. The voice of Deborah
Anzinger, whose work is also fea-
tured in this exhibition, and canon-
ical performance artist Lorraine
O’Grady also make an appearance
in the film.
A full apprehension of this
conspiracy requires that you know
who O’Grady is, that you have
some sense of her significance
for art history, and Black women’s
place (or lack thereof) in it. You will
also miss something if you don’t
know about Ehrlich-Hunt’s ongo-
ing exploration of Black women’s
interiority and archives; her work
on Martinican anti-colonial, fem-
inist Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, for
example. There is also something
in Deborah Anzinger’s inclusion,
her reading of Hurston, who was
herself a diasporic lynchpin. If you
recognize author Sharifa Rhodes-
Pitts, another long-time co-con-
spirator, and know enough of her
work to ken the significance of her
inclusion you’ll have understood
a bit more. The film taunts us, as
neither Anzinger nor Rhodes-Pitts’
names appear in the credits. It is
a conspiracy after all, if you know,
you know.
You may seek to enroll yourself in
these goings-on by getting to know,
as I did. For example, I sought out
the 1974 album by Jeanne Lee for
which the film was named. And boy
am I happy I did. What awaits you
there? I won’t say. I’ve already named
too many names. What I can tell
you is, there’s a reason this is a film
about labor. Until then, sit and watch
that thing that has been saddled
with all the value, that object more
exalted than its makers, burn.
nicole smythe-johnson
_
1/ Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the spirit:
arte e filosofia africana e afro-americana (1984).
São Paulo: Museu Afro-Brasil, 2011.
2/ Zora Neale-Hurston, Tell my Horse (1938).
New York: Harper Collins, 2008.
sonia gomes “An invisible and tonic thread
Patiently weaves the net
Of our millenary resistance.”
– conceição evaristo1
Véu de Maia, 2022
Maia’s Veil. Fabric, 203 × 265 cm
274
275
Materials ask from the artist that
they be given another life. She
then sews, twists, covers, ties, and
transforms scraps, fabrics, threads,
and wires into sculptural objects.
Following this, the artist invites the
viewer to move around, to see her
creations with their bodies.
It is impossible to appreciate the
work of Sonia Gomes with one’s
eyes alone. Her creations invite us
to move from a passive position
to that of an engaged spectator,
who moves, bends, tilts their body,
raises their head, gyrates, in a
dance with the object, in order to
perceive it from another angle, to
discover and pay attention to the
detail that is hidden in the next tor-
sion, on the other side, down here
or up there.
Her works are not figurative, and
yet themes such as race, gender,
and temporalities emerge in the
Untitled, from the series Torção, 2004-2021
Torsion. Stitching, bindings, different fabrics and
laces, 180 × 100 × 80 cm
various critical readings of her
artistic work. What are the stories,
the memories, the affections stored
in the fabrics and cloths used
by Sonia Gomes? What are the
origins of the materials and what
paths will they still follow after this
exhibition? From the time when
these objects still had a utilitarian
function – the wedding dress, party
blouse, school uniform, table-
cloth, protective cover, linen pants,
etc. – to a new time in which, tied,
twisted, frayed, and sewn, they
become sculptural objects.
The 35th Bienal de São Paulo
presents dozens of works by the
Minas Gerais artist, forming a
robust and representative body
of her poetics and trajectory. Wall
works, hanging pieces, rods, and
some pieces from the Torção
[Torsion] series – Gomes’ trade-
mark – will comprise the space.
As such, the condensed, tonic
time and entangled memories of
the millenary resistance of black
women takes shape and manifests
itself in the choreographies of
the impossible.
juliana de arruda sampaio
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Conceição Evaristo, “A noite não adormece
nos olhos das mulheres”, in Cadernos negros,
vol 19, org. Márcio Barbosa, Sônia Fátima
Conceição & Esmeralda Ribeiro. São Paulo:
Quilombhoje; Ed. Anita, 1996.
stanley brouwn

276
277
stella do patrocínio Since little is known about Stella
do Patrocínio, the words we use to
talk about her, ever elusive, must be
fabulated from the choreographies
of the impossible. This is also how
falatório [chatter], her body-vocalic
practice of the word, requires us to
connect with it – closing our eyes
to hear the collapse of boundaries.
In every minute that passes in the
1 hour, 39 minutes, and 15 seconds of
these recordings, Patrocínio oper-
278
279
ates a new fold in time, making those
horizontal lines curve – from those
drawn by the psychiatric asylum to
those of literature – that stole her
body, that wanted to steal her word.
This scramble, until recently echoed
by degenerative disorders, eugen-
ics, the fetish of madness, poetry!,
is now shattered by a chatter that
recasts the very arena of guerrilla
warfare. And she affirms: in spite of
Eco, these are my terms.
 Echo, the nymph forced
to repeat the words of
others. Or even Echo –
the white consensus.1
Exu, movement,
life force – makes time and
message circulate.
In the conclave between Echo
and Exu, the score is not settled,
nor is the debt; but time spirals:
Stella do Patrocínio before her
forced hospitalization
crossed by forces of asphyxiation
– the police, literature, domestic
labor, electroshock therapy –,
Stella do Patrocínio opens her
Exurian chatter to the creation of
escape routes and to retaliation,
to aesthetic fabulation in the
space of enclosure. And it is in this
opacity that the chatter dances
– not only poetry, nor testimony,
nor any other classifications that,
by themselves, are not enough:
If I tear that heavy one in half,
from half to half, slam slam
slam her on the floor, on the
wall, throw her out, in the mid-
dle of the bush, or on the other
side of the wall, it’s a malicious
little pleasure [...] Kill the
whole [scientist’s] family. Let
them make a cart, dump them
all dead and go far away.2
Stella claims to be from the time of
captivity, because she understands
the fantasy-machinery that lies
behind the incarcerations of Black
bodies since her great-grand-
mother’s time. She says aloud:
Clarice, Celeste, Meritempe,
Luzadia, Adelaide – names we may
never know much about beyond the
affection with which she utters them.
In a language that wanders in
a rhythmic pretuguês,3 syncopat-
ing the repetition of differences,
Stella dislodges previous notions
of what time, space, home, family,
science, the body and its study are
– and proceeds as far as possible.
Her vocals contain vertebrae, and
she constructs worlds of language
to cast an exu-chatter that tears
through time and kills, today, the
echoes of yesterday.
sara ramos
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ A reference to Grada Kilomba, Ilusões vol. I –
Narciso e Eco. In Grada Kilomba: Desobediências
poéticas. Exhibition catalog. São Paulo: Pinaco-
teca de São Paulo, 2019.
2/ CD2_01. Third part of testimonies/inter-
views/talks. 6’53”. In: Sara Martins Ramos,
Stella do Patrocínio: entre a letra e a negra
garganta de carne, 2022. Master’s Dissertation
– 2022. Available at: dspace.unila.edu.br/han-
dle/123456789/6465. Accessed on: Jun 2, 2023.
3/ A pun between the words “Black” and “Por-
tuguese”. Reference to Lélia González, “Racismo
e sexismo na cultura brasileira”. Revista Ciências
Sociais Hoje, Anpocs, pp. 223-44, 1984.
tadáskía

Ave preta mística, 2022

Mystical Black Bird. Pencil, colored pencil,
oil pastel and spray on paper, 65 × 50 cm

280
281
At the very beginning of Ave preta
mística [Mystical Black Bird] (2022),
Tadáskía’s first book of loose pages,
the artist announces that the words
that follow are dedicated to her
allies. Guiding us through the flight,
she presents herself as a sister and
embodies the bird that addresses
the members of her confraternity.
She is among us, but the haughty
vibration of her words surpasses
her amiable tone and positions
her as the matriarch of the flock,
“the mother of the house.” We join
her in her dreamlike flight and, as
if in prayer, with every turn of a
page, with every beat of a wing,
we realize in her verses that a life
without ties is a constant and col-
lective exercise.
The work is divided into bilin-
gual texts, with references to the
black feminist thinker Audre Lorde,
and drawings of different colors
and thicknesses, which look like
“ruffled feathers.” The crooked
and curved lines traced on those
pages, whether in her verses or
in her drawings, are the matrix
gesture of Ave preta mística. The
alternation between the writing
and the pages with colored images
provides the shape and rhythm of
the narrative. Like the formation of
a flock, each part of the book is a
singular expression: they are ele-
ments that relate to each other and
reconfigure themselves with each
new passage.
For the 35th Bienal de São
Paulo, in addition to presenting the
book’s pages spatialized in a room,
Tadáskía will exhibit a set of works
that derive from materials that are
common in her output: three sculp-
tures made of bamboo, straw, and
cattail, similar in shape but with
different elements at their base – in
the first of them, a plate with sewn
eggs; in the second, a selection of
fruits that must be consumed by
the public and the institution’s staff
or be renewed before deteriorat-
ing; in the third, a quantity of face
powder of different colors. On the
inner wall of the room, Tadáskía will
display a large-scale drawing made
of dry pastels and charcoal.
thiago de paula souza
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
taller 4 rojo At the beginning of the 1970s, Taller
4 Rojo articulated a critical visuality
and carried out actions directly and
supporting social movements under
the National Front governments.
This Liberal and Conservative
parties coalition resulted in one
of the most authoritarian periods
in Colombia, with open violation
of human rights, as well as con-
solidated the armed conflict in
the country.
282
283
In this context, the Taller 4 Rojo
founded a popular school and
carried out field work linking
up with peasant and indigenous
communities, trade unions and
marginalized urban sectors, docu-
menting their experiences. These
records, together with images
collected from the press, were the
testimonial substance that they
transfigured through operations
taken from the graphics and the
Latin American cinema of the time,
such as montage, the production
of series and sequences, the work
with patterns and high contrast.
The visual grammar of Taller 4
Rojo wasn’t the result of an analyt-
ical distance, but was elaborated
from the bodily experience of
having walked with the communi-
ties that were soon brought into
its images. Posters such as A la
huelga 100 a la huelga 1000 [100 to
Agresión del imperialismo a los pueblos, A la agresión del imperialismo: guerra popu-
lar, Vietnam nos señala el caminho, 1971-1972
Imperialism’s Aggression Against Peoples, to Imperialism’s Aggression: People’s War,
Vietnam Shows Us the Way. Silkscreen print, 100 × 216,6 cm
the Strike 1000 to the Strike] (1978)
were made along several years of
collaboration with independent
trade unionism. The Testimonios
[Testimonies] folder was an early
evidence of the torture practised
by the military forces amidst the
persecution of dissident political
movements throughout the coun-
try. The engravings show wounded
and bound bodies, blindfolded or
screaming in the middle of open
and inhabited landscapes. In the
trilogy América II, montage and
photo-serigraphy take over the
tortured body, rewriting it in a more
complex plot, which seems to point
to the theological-political nature
of the pacts of power as histori-
cal continuity.
The emblematic photo serigraph
trilogy Agresión del imperialismo a
los pueblos, A la agresión del imperi-
alismo, guerra popular and Vietnam
nos señala el camino [Imperialism’s
Aggression Against Peoples, to
Imperialism’s Aggression: People’s
War, Vietnam Shows Us the Way]
was made in 1971-1972 in solidar-
ity with the popular resistance in
Vietnam, but also with other pro-
cesses of anti-imperialist struggle in
Latin America and Africa.
What happens to us today,
forty years later, when we see the
sequence of the disintegrating dollar
note and the war plane turned into
pieces in a pasture? For a moment,
these images seem to anticipate
the moment when war and money
change form, disintegrate to
become a molecule and mutate,
paving the way for the financing
and technologization of the massa-
cre. But this turning point is also a
point of interruption to the totalizing
impulses of the history of capital.
Between the three images, it is also
possible to retain the movement of
the body of a peasant woman, which
takes on different tonalities, gaining
space and proximity, showing this
other time of the bodies that don’t
take their feet off the ground and
regenerate themselves among the
ruins left behind by commodities
and necropower.
fernanda carvajal
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
taller de gráfica popular
charles white
elizabeth catlett
john woodrow wilson
leopoldo méndez
margaret taylor
goss burroughs
“I am black, a woman, a sculp-
tor, and a printmaker. I am also
married, the mother of three
sons, and the grandmother of
five little girls (now seven girls
and one boy) [...] all of these
states of being have influenced
my work and made it what you
see today”
– elizabeth catlett
Collaborative processes have a
rich tradition in Mexico, and one
of the initiatives whose imprint is
widespread is that of the Taller de
Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic
Workshop), better known as the
TGP, which dates back to 1937.
Several of the founding mem-
bers came from another group
called the Liga de Escritores y
Artistas Revolucionarios (League of
Revolutionary Writers and Artists).
Reverberating precepts promoted
by Muralism, they continued to
encourage visual production com-
mitted to struggles and social jus-
tice, denouncing situations in which
peasants and workers lived, and
especially resisting and question-
ing messages, effects or practices
linked to prevailing fascism.
The TGP’s graphics – in the spirit
of agitation and propaganda – also
circulated through posters, flyers
and calendars, appealed to a visual
militancy and also to a critique of
production models focused on the
individual artist.
The TGP promoted instead orga-
nizational resources of a collec-
284
285
tive nature through meetings and triarchalizing of history, is being
assemblies, as can be seen in the revalued and situated.
photographs. In them they dis- Given the great artistic perfor-
cussed what to represent, how to mance and the profuse political
form the group of volunteers who activity of the TGP, various foreign
would produce the image, taking artists (mainly American) temporar-
care that the agent in charge was ily joined the workshop to contrib-
recognized, and at the same time, ute their work to the production
the collective exercise through the of socio-political prints; these
TGP’s distinctive seal/logo. artists were called guest artists and
In March 1938 the TGP approved some of them were: John Wilson,
a document which contained its Hannes Meyer, Lena Bergner,
interests and objectives, a kind of Charles White, Eleanor Coen,
manifesto or statement in which Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs,
they agreed to work in lithogra- Rini Templeton, Elizabeth Catlett,
phy, metal and wood printmaking among others. These links consol-
and linoleum. idated the international character
of the TGP and in a way stimulated
This workshop is created in the development of other related
order to stimulate the produc- projects such as Workshops of
tion graph in order to benefit Graphic Art in Los Angeles, San
the interests of the people of Francisco and New York.2
Mexico, and for that objective
is proposed to bring together _
the largest number of artists
through the method of collec- 1/ Humberto Musacchio, El Taller de Gráfica
Popular. Mexico: FCE, 2007, 25.
tive production.1
2/ Alberto Hijar Serrano, Catálogo TGP 80 años.
Although this document was Taller de Gráfica Popular. Mexico City: Museo
not published, years later, in Nacional de la Revolucion, 2017, p. 39; Hum-
berto Musacchio, op. cit., 30-60.
March 1945, they published their
Declaration of Principles in which
they reaffirmed themselves as a
center of collective work for func-
tional promotion, as well as their
vision of art at the service of the
people, so that their production
should reflect the social realities of
their time.
Like other collective strategies
over time, the TGP had various
moments of cohesion and internal
tension, its participants varied in
number and geographical origin at
different times. Among its mem-
bers were artists such as Leopoldo
Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins, Luis
Arenal and Adolfo Mexiac, also
had an important participation of
women artists such as Mariana
Yampolski, Rini Templeton,
Elizabeth Catlett and Margaret
Taylor, whose work, in the context
of the new feminisms and the depa-
 The production of Elizabeth Catlett
(1915-2012) is distinguished by the
determined and politicized visual
representation of working women
and other agents who challenged
racism and the violence imposed on
communities that have suffered vio-
lence, principally African-American
and indigenous people. By 1946
Catlett won a Julius Rosenwald
Fund grant and began work on
a series inspired by the working
elizabeth catlett
Negro es bello II, 1969
Black is Beautiful. Lithograph, 78 × 57 cm
women of the Carver School, with
which she was able to travel to
Mexico accompanied by Charles
White. Catlett stated that from the
TGP she developed “a new under-
standing of how she wanted to
work as an artist and what exactly
it was that she wanted to fight
for”3 by attending to a work for the
Mexican people rather than framing
it in gallery or museum circuits.
Similarly, Catlett’s presence
added new axes of work to the TGP,
such as awareness of race and gen-
der. One of her emblematic series
is The Black Woman (1946), com-
posed of 15 linoleum prints in which
she installs a kind of protest about
the oppression, resistance and
survival of Black American women.
After her time at the TGP, Catlett’s
production continued to focus on
African-American themes, produc-
ing works that became iconic in
the movement for the civil rights of
African-American citizens, such as
Negro es bello [Black is Beautiful]
(1969) and Malcolm X nos habla
[Malcolm X Speaks to Us](1969).
3/ Comisarenco, “Negro Woman y La Postme-
moria de La Esclavitud En Elizabeth Catlett”.
Another of the guest artists was
Charles White (1918-1979), like
Catlett of African-American origin,
whose production was primarily
focused on combating distortions
and stereotypes about African-
Americans that were disseminated
in popular visual culture. Over
time, his interests became linked
to political, trade union and gender
realities. White traveled to Mexico
in 1946, accompanied by Elizabeth
286
287
Catlett, and upon coming into
contact with the TGP reaffirmed
his interest in printmaking given
the scope it could have due to the
reproducibility, the diaspora or
circulation that print runs allowed,
and its low cost of production.
He returned to New York in
1949 and collaborated in the New
York Graphic Workshop, which,
like the Mexican TGP, would have
an important effect on the dis-
semination of social graphic art,
especially in defense of the rights
of African-Americans. Some of his
portraits stand out, such as that
of Bessie Smith, the blues pioneer
popularly known as the “empress
of the blues,” who was buried in
a grave without a headstone until
Janis Joplin wrote the following
epitaph: “The greatest blues singer
in the whole world will never stop
singing. Bessie Smith, 1895-1937” or
the portrait of Frederick Douglass
who was linked to various anti-slav-
ery initiatives and who promoted
abolitionism. Douglas was born into
slavery and therefore developed
critical perspectives on freedom
and human rights mainly related
to African-American communities
who, like him, were subjected
to enslavement.
charles white
Exodus, 1961
Linocut print on paper, 80 × 125 cm
 In the case of John Woodrow
Wilson (1922-2015), the African-
American artist went to Mexico
with the interest of getting to know
one of the main representatives of
Mexican muralism, José Clemente
Orozco, whose exhibitions he
had visited and whose way of
representing the situation of the
oppressed classes in Mexico he
identified with. Although Orozco
had died, Wilson joined the TGP,
john woodrow wilson
The Trial, 1951
Lithograph on cream-colored wove paper,
40,8 × 32,4 cm
where he found a collective con-
text of widely distributed image
production through printmaking.
At the TGP he coincided and pro-
duced concomitantly with Elizabeth
Catlett and Charles White, with
whom he shared an interest in mak-
ing visible and working with and for
the African-American community.
An example of this is the work
The Trial (1951), a lithograph in
which a young man of African-
American origin stands (proportion-
ally diminished) before three white
judges who loom menacingly over
him, making visible the unequal and
vertical treatment to which they
were subjected. During his produc-
tion in Mexico, Woodrow painted
a mural that was later destroyed
called The Incident (1952), which
pictorially narrates the violence and
terror of the lynching of an African
American by the Ku Klux Klan. It
seems that the title operates more
as a terrible sarcasm in the face
of normalized xenophobic and
supremacist violence.
In 1952, Margaret Taylor Goss
Burroughs (1915-2010), an African-
American artist and poet, joined
the TGP. Her interests were equally
focused on expressing her racial
and cultural identity and teaching
art. She was involved in shaping
important political projects in the
visual arts, co-founded the Sur
Side Community Art Center (1939),
which included a gallery and studio
space for African American art-
288
289
ists, and the DuSable Museum of
African American History (1961),
both in Chicago. During her time in
Mexico she also painted a portrait
of Bessie Smith, adding to the
representation of significant figures
of African-American origin in a
temporal context where racism was
widely and uncritically prevalent.
margaret taylor goss burroughs
Bessie Smith, Queen of the Blues, 1953
Lithograph, 46,5 × 40 cm
Regarding the participation of the
Mexican artist Leopoldo Méndez
(1902-1969), considered one of the
most important Mexican engravers,
a social and collective perspective
was reflected in the productions he
made for various organizations such
as the League of Revolutionary
Writers and Artists, the Mexican
Communist Party, the Popular
Socialist Party of Mexico and the
Confederation of Latin American
leopoldo méndez
Fusilado (para la película Un día de vida), 1950
Shot to Death (for the film Um dia de vida). Linocut
print on paper, 47,7 × 58,8 cm
Workers. Méndez’s artistic produc-
tion took shape when he joined the
Estridentismo movement, and his
work promoted leftist and post-rev-
olutionary ideals that allowed him
to generate a broad visual vocabu-
lary linked to the socio-political his-
tory of Mexico, but also to criticize
and denounce the violence pro-
moted by fascist projects in Europe.
These works – which are pio-
neering for the conformation of
other subjectivities – far from oper-
ating on an exclusively retinal level,
contributed to the insertion of other
subjects of representation continu-
ally reviled in the tradition of artis-
tic representation or, alternatively,
repositioned and framed them in a
dignified way and in another aes-
thetic-political-symbolic order that
we can read today from a proto-de-
colonial perspective.
The validity of the TGP – in a pres-
ent where rights are disputed, new
turns of violence exist and where
artistic production can go through
the crossroads of art/politics thanks
to graphic – asks us not only to
reflect but also to permanently
sustain points, representations and
frameworks that incite us to read
critically in and from the present.
getsemaní guevara and sol henaro
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
taller nn Printed in Lima in 1988, Carpeta
negra [Black Folder], by art col-
lective Taller NN, was, at the time
of its publication, an unbearable
visual and textual device for both
the official culture and the leftist
Peruvian culture. Its pages dared
to touch the untouchable, staining
with a monstrously seductive chro-
matic make-up the mythical faces
of the revolution in a wide left-wing
political spectrum, from Mao
Zedong to José Carlos Mariátegui,
from José María Arguedas to Edith
Lagos or Che Guevara. A barcode
was printed on them, showing the
enigmatic number 424242 (in ref-
erence to the telephone number
the population was encouraged to
dial in order to make anonymous
denunciations of people suspected
of terrorism). The image of the
student Javier Arrasco Catpo, killed
by the civil guard during a protest
in 1988, is the hinge to another
group of images, showing different
massacres – Guragay, El Sexto,
Pucayacu, Uchuraccay, and
El Frontón – and the word “Peru” is
printed on them as a country-brand.
Images of mass graves or corpses
of journalists in rubbish bags, taken
from the anesthetized mass media,
are also colored as a way of giving
them back the ability to scream.
Both series, the faces of the revo-
lution and the anonymous bodies
of the massacres, are marked by
290
291
the capital, which inscribes its
signs on them – the barcode, the
logo – perhaps as a password to
the ancient knot between money
and coloniality, which precedes
and exceeds the chronology of
Carpeta negra.
Carpeta negra creates a mobile
device of partial and precarious
memory of the years that turned
Peru into a deposit of open-air
horror, working as a key to the new
phase of capital accumulation on
a global scale. But in its audacity
full of antidogmatic irony, without
a state or a party as interlocutor,
the Taller NN generated a device
capable of constructing an inter-
relation with time, in every time.
What happens when these images
look back and get in contact with
the previous period of the Agrarian
Reform (1969-1975)? Or what image
does Carpeta negra give back to
Peru today, in the revolts that broke
out in a decentralized way among
the mainly Indigenous and peasant
population in December 2022, and
which once again show a colonial
wound, impossible to suture?
fernanda carvajal
translated from Spanish by
ana laura borro
NN Perú (Carpeta negra), 1988
NN Peru (Black Folder). Screen print and photocopy on paper, 43 × 30 cm
tejal shah

292
293
Tejal Shah’s installation Between
the Waves evokes landscapes that
seem to be simultaneously extrater-
restrial and too terrestrial. One can
recognize the desert, the balcony,
the mangrove, the city, the landfill
site, the sea or the swimming pool
as ordinary locations, common
places on the planet. At the same
time, the performers’ clothing
and the type of relationship they
establish with each other and their
Between the Waves, 2012
Video stills. 5 channel video installation, color & black and white,
multi-channel sound; 85’25’’
surroundings produce an exciting
strangeness. Sensuality governs
contact between bodies – be they
plant, animal or mineral, raw or
manufactured materials – as well as
the way they are portrayed: intri-
cately. Colors, textures, and sounds
of this equally raw and imagined
universe are not differentiated or
organized by taxonomic hierar-
chies. In this sensory horizontaliza-
tion, a central element of modern
and universalizing discourses is
betrayed: the subject that produces
itself as human through the separa-
tion, classification, and consequent
possession of things in the world.
In this work, everything is touched
and portrayed as a sensitive,
excitable surface, inseparable from
everything else.
The head ornaments are notable
for the contrast of white and the
verticality through which they cut
the image, a phallic aspect with no
necessary genital correspondence.
Although they assume a penetra-
tive function in the more explicit
scenes, they also pass for horn,
fin, funnel, or cone, conferring a
kind of animality and objectuality
to the moving bodies. Apart from
these contrassexual prostheses,1
there is another element whose
symbolic and performative charge
is worth noting: the arrangement
of artificial flowers, bath sponges,
and other colorful objects carefully
deposited at the bottom of a pool,
with the performers swimming
around it, like fish around marine
corals. There is no contradiction
between nature and artifice, there
is only brilliance and beauty, and
among the waves, the bodies orbit
their surroundings.
miro spinelli
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ On the notions of contrassexuality and
prosthesis, see Paul B. Preciado, Manifesto con-
trassexual. São Paulo: n-1, 2014. In this book,
the author reminds us that the phallus is not a
substitution for the penis, but the opposite, and
that the penis, in turn, is nothing but a dildo
of flesh.
the living and A spiral is the image that opens
the dead ensemble Ouvertures (2019), the first film by
the transnational collective The
Living and The Dead Ensemble. The
image is the synthesis of what moves
the group’s creative process: a
sinuous line in a continuous move-
ment of approach/departure, from
inward/outward, without beginning
or end. In the films and installa-
tions of this collective, creating
is a matter of traveling, displace-
The Wake, 2021
Video stills. 3 channel video installation, full HD,
color, sound; 35’
294
295
ment – Haiti-France, forest-beach,
past-future, revolution-crisis. Poetry,
performance, film, music, and
theater are merged with varying and
blurred intensities – as in The Wake
(2019-ongoing), the group’s second
work, which is at once a multichan-
nel installation, a play, a film, and a
radical Black manifesto.
The spiral shapes the creative
process that is built in act, in
incarnation, and in evocation of
ghosts – making visible and alive
those and that which never ceased
to be there. Thus, to the rhythm of
the créole, poets and revolution-
aries from different eras meet and
converse through processes of
fabulation and activation. Speech
blurs the boundaries between
the dead and the living – as the
group’s name states. Frankétienne,
Toussaint Louverture, Édouard
Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau and
so many other artists/intellectuals/
revolutionaries confabulate in the
proposition of a Caribbean imag-
ination that is utopian, urgent,
and timeless.
In this sinuosity, the voices – of
ghosts, revolutionaries, and mem-
bers of the collective – overlap in
images multiplied on simultane-
ous screens or in sounds that are
echoed by the members of the
group that are on a stage. In this
amalgam proposed by the cre-
ations, raps, speeches, narratives of
Black revolts, a cacophonous cho-
rus is formed in which the chaotic
materiality of sounds and stories is
intrinsic to the senses of the works.
And fire (a recurring element of
these productions) blazes on the
nights when revolutions are dreamt
of and remembered. The flames
destroy and transform – also in con-
tinuous movement. Following this
displacement in between (worlds,
times, countries), the music and
dance performed by the collective
members summon the body to burn
also, and invite those who watch to
glimpse (im)possible utopias in the
flesh of the works.
kênia freitas
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
torkwase dyson When asked in the March 1982 issue
of the architectural journal Skyline
whether any particular architecture
of the past or present act as forces of
liberation or resistance, the French
theorist Michel Foucault states that
“no matter how terrifying a given
system may be, there always remain
the possibilities of resistance, dis-
obedience, and oppositional group-
ings […] Liberty is a practice […]
liberty is what must be exercised.”
However, the exercise of liberty
understood in relationship to space,
time, and being leads to an under-
standing that liberation is a spatial
practice. Key to this understanding is
the interrogation of situated condi-
tions and the relationships of power
to space, the body to autonomy, and
subjectivity to perception.
European perspectival construc-
tion is predicated upon a subject
in the guise of the Vitruvian ideal

Liquid a Place, 2021

Steel, painted brass, mirror and graphite, 3 pieces,
243,8 × 365,8 × 121,9 cm (each)

296
297
“man” whose eyes are the origin of
a line of sight along the center of
view that designates all knowledge
to be comprehended. Furthermore,
perspectival painting and drawing
position this ideal man at a station
point with a 60 degree cone of
vision towards a horizon line that
exists at infinity. Understanding the
spatial practice of liberation chal-
lenges the notion of universalism
and the ideal subject whose gaze
Force Multiplier 1 (Bird and Lava), 2020
Graphite, acrylic, and ink on paper,
27,9 × 35,6 cm
surveilles, objectifies, and seeks to
subsume the world within European
epistemology and colonialism.
In her work exploring the archi-
tectural space-making of Black
compositional thought, artist
Torkwase Dyson asks: What was
the ocular experience of Black
and Brown people in the slave
ship hold? In the self-emancipa-
tory spaces of the garret or crate?
Or under the Medieval architecture
Force Multiplier 2 (Bird and Lava), 2020
Graphite, acrylic, and ink on paper,
27,9 × 35,6 cm
of the slave castle? Or under the
conditions of racial capitalism,
slavery, imperialism, colonization
and all forms of terror, occupation
and enclosure?
In the work On Ocular Brutality
(2023), with specific reference to
Castelo de Garcia d’Ávila / Forte
de Garcia d’Ávila in Mata de São
João, Bahia, Dyson asks: How did
looking become extraordinary? In
this 16th century castle, that at its
exterior overlooked the Atlantic
Ocean and the sugar cane plan-
tations of enslaved indigenous
peoples, and at its interior housed
a double torture chamber whereby
an imprisoned runaway slave would
be subjected to the terror and
death by a captured and starved
animal, Dyson explores the ocular
work of the hidden, obscured,
concealed, or untraceable body.
Dyson’s sculptures are instruments
for new and yet unknown ways
of seeing and tools to think about
the “liveness” of those who died
in captivity.
mario gooden
trinh t. minh-ha From the most elementary unit
of film – the gaze – towards the
unknown until the final con-
sequences, back to the gaze.
Questioned, expanded, cut out,
turned over, this driving force
constantly pulses in Trinh T. Minh-
ha’s work. It is a work that flows
– like the water of Surname Viet
Given Name Nam (1989) – along
the paths of cinema, anthropology,
post-colonialism, music, and liter-
298
299
ary theory, areas in which the artist
has been intensely producing since
the 1980s.
The gaze in check: filmmaking,
observing the other, the interstitial
regions that make us as individ-
uals and groups. “What I see is
life looking at me,” as Minh-ha’s
voiceover says in Reassemblage, a
film essay that questions the idea of
an ethnography founded in scien-
tific objectivity and the anxiety of a
comprehensive record of the real.
This questioning is materialized
above all in the form, language,
and craftsmanship of those who,
rather than thinking in the binomial
“form-content,” take into account
everything that escapes control
when considering the politics of
“forms and forces” resistant to the
unifying logic of genders (accord-
ing to the theoretical texts of
Minh-ha herself). Thus, they feed
Bodies of the Desert, 2005
Video; 20’
back on themselves endlessly:
Who is looking? Who is looking at
who or what? Who is looking back?
Who will look at who was looking
back at who was looking? And the
spiral can keep going round and
round indefinitely.
The interests and cultures that
engage the artist are as dynamic
and complex as the abstractions
of force-form: Senegal, China,
the experimental music of The
Construction of Ruins band, Japan,
Togo, Vietnam… Then there are the
mountains and deserts (The Desert
is Watching, 2003), and Bodies
of the Desert, 2005), where the
transportation and journeys of the
gaze reflect on the fleeting human
presence in the geological con-
text of this planet, whose rhythm
and dance — through the in-be-
tween place that Minh-ha founded
– no longer allows any disinter-
ested contemplation.
igor de albuquerque
translated from Portuguese by
georgia fleury reynolds
ubirajara ferreira braga “the most fruitful plastic artist
in the colony”: almost 3 thou-
sand paintings.

Autorretrato, 1987
Self-portrait. Gouache on paper, 66,5 × 50 cm

300
301
from the nearly 60 years old almost
until his death, in the year 2000
(when the Y2K did not bug, unlike
the psyche), Ubirajara Ferreira Braga
(1928-2000) painted thousands
of canvases.
he also printed a business card,
in which he proudly showcased his
profession: “plastic artist”. a movie
telling of his diagnostic sheet paints
him as a “calm, conscious resident” of
the Juquery (psy-chi-a-tric) colony.
Artistas-pacientes, 1987
Artists-Patients. Gouache on paper, 66,5 × 50 cm
and the public archive stored by the
world wide web documented that
he was, also, for a brief moment,
dealer of his own artworks. this
occurred within a unique dwelling
that was, in fact, an asylum, that
has gone down in history as the
“city of the mad,” situated in the
city of franco da rocha. the asylum
had strict regulations concerning
the external circulation of artworks
created by its residents.
another account, passed down
through word-of-mouth by those
who fight for justice, also refer to
that city as the “city of the dead”:
50 thousands.
well, on that frank rock1 over
which this ambiguous city – both
known as the city of the mad and
city of the dead – was constructed,
Ubirajara Ferreira Braga, with his
tupi name, meaning The Lord of the
Spear reveals so much about his
history, painted his almost 3 thou-
sand paintings.
in these etymo-geographic twists,
something resides between Ògún,
the blacksmith (as in the painter’s
surname;2 God of the forge, of sur-
vival technologies), Ṣàngó of truth,
who – always embodies – a type of
justice (and of quarry, like the one
that housed the city of the city of
the mad), and, of course – this is
where these words wanted to land,
since the beginning – Òṣósi: hunter,
spearman, maddened, maddening.
dweller of the forest.
there is a legend that narrates
how Òṣósi, driven to madness
(perhaps by love?) ventured deep
into the heart of the forest, seek-
ing solace away from the world.
only his beloved daughter, Ọya,
danced his death, for many nights
and days, allowing his spirit to get
to Orun, another sort of heaven.
another sort of dwelling. maybe a
calm one. where maybe Ubirajara
now lives. without as much red, as
i have seen in the works he painted
inside Juquery’s walls.
tatiana nascimento
translated from Portuguese by
bruna barros and jess oliveira
_
1/ “frank rock” [rocha franca] refers to the city
name “Franco da Rocha.” [t.n.]
2/ “ferreira” means blacksmith in Portuguese.
[t.n.]
ventura profana It is a late afternoon on a sunny
Sunday. In a residential neighbor-
hood, children are playing on the
sidewalk, some with a ball, others
with rope, some at home on their cell
phones. There are men and women
in front of the houses, talking and
looking at their children, daugh-
ters, nieces. In one of the houses
music is playing as the barbecue
edges into the early evening. At one
point, a child points to the sky and
302
303
announces: “Mom, Dad, come here,
quick! What’s that? Is it flying?”
Gradually, everyone begins to look in
the indicated direction. Blinded by a
radiant glow, they see a beautiful fig-
ure approaching, bright and golden,
shining like the sun, gliding through
mist towards the ground. The child
approaches it and asks: “Are you
God?” and the answer is clear: “You
can call me Deize, I have something
to tell you.1”
RESPLANDECENTE, 2019
Resplendent. Videoclip; 5’20’’
Ventura Profana is an artist with
several practices, a glorious prophet,
a pastor in her divine capacity. By
producing music, video clips, digital
collages, installations, and photo-
graphs, she creates visualities and
life performances that build new
imaginaries about religion and faith.
In these imaginaries, existences
that escape the traditional con-
trols of gender and sexuality are
possible. The existences to which
CONCÍLIO DAS LAMENTAÇÕES, 2020
Council of the Lamentations. Pigment print on Photo
Matt Fibre 200g, 140 × 100 cm
the artist refers are the transves-
tilities, guardians of the sources of
life, forests, and mangroves, those
who make themselves alive in the
midst of the Dead Sea, who are like
the mountains of Zion that do not
shake, guardians of ecosystems and
sacred life. In her work it is possible
to recognize dissident corporealities
as a point of torsion between an
inflexible tradition and the creation
of other emancipatory perspectives.
In other words, her production elab-
orates modes of epistemology that
critique conservative and colonial
systems of truths and beliefs. To this
end, Profana performs inversions
and insertions in the neo-Pentecostal
linguistic, visual, and performative
resources inherited from the familial
context. Among some of her inter-
ventions in the order of discourse,
by replacing Lord with the transves-
tite, the artist places this mode of
existence as a central and disrup-
tive element of traditional thought,
elaborating a discourse without
Lord, weaving a critique of neo-Pen-
tecostal dogmas, as well as being
anti-patriarchal and anti-militaristic.
It is thus possible to recognize that
Ventura Profana’s output cries out
for life in abundance, herself the
missionary body that prophesies and
praises for health, love, and freedom
for all transvestites. At its limit, her
artistic production broadens the
perception that, by founding a world
in which transvestite life is possible,
all lives will be possible, immersed in
power and glory.
maria luiza meneses
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
_
1/ Author’s fabulation of what Deize’s descent
to Earth might look like, based on the artist’s
visual references. [E.N.]
wifredo lam Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902-
1982) produced the illustrations for
French writer André Breton’s Fata
Morgana (1941)1 in the context of
political refuge and an imminent
transatlantic journey. The drawings
include the signature imagery he
developed in subsequent work:
horned creatures, quadrilateral
heads, crescent moons with eyes,
and the horse-like figure that
became his celebrated inter-spe-
304
305
cies femme-cheval, as seen in Mujer
sentada [Seated woman] (1949).
In his art Lam centers Black cul-
ture through visual synecdoche
on Santería (also known as Regla
de Ocha and Lucumí), an African-
diasporic religion largely based on
Yoruba beliefs and traditions, pep-
pered with aspects of Catholicism.
Titles such as Le Sombre Malembo,
Dieu du carrefour [Dark Malembo,
God of the Crossroads] (1943)
Le Matin vert, 1943
The Green Morning. Oil on paper mounted
on canvas, 186,7 × 123,8 cm
identify Malembo, a slave trade
station in West Africa, and Eleguá,
an orisha or Yoruban deity who is
the guardian of the crossroads,
and is represented by Lam with
a horned head and circular eyes.
Here the “crossroads” might refer
to the Middle Passage as well as to
Lam’s own transatlantic journey
back home to Cuba. Key to such
work is how Lam decolonizes rep-
resentational codes: hybrid figures
Omi Obini, 1943
Oil on canvas, 178 × 126 cm
displace distinctions between
male/female, human/animal,
animal/plant, challenging dominant
Western classificatory systems and
ontological separations.
Lam also bodies forth such
displacements through his paint-
erly transmutations that work at
the level of material application,
whereby, for example, the thinned
paint in Omni Obini (1943), and its
ensuing watercolor effect, intensify
Lam’s purposeful delocalization of
color – blues and greens with pas-
sages of reds, oranges, and yellows
– to further animate the relations
among the elements in his painted
worlds. In doing so, Lam harnesses
the orishas’ life forces, their aché,
as a decolonial method that flows
across the human, animal, and veg-
etal and that he visually translates
not only as hybrid beings but also
through their entwinement with the
surroundings through the interpen-
etration of figure and ground. His
purposeful entanglement of oppo-
sitions also suggest how different
entities might interlock in nonhier-
archical ways to be mutually trans-
formative. At the center of what I
call Lam’s “aché modernism” is thus
the shifting nature of identity and
embodiment, whereby ontological
crossings and relational openness
draw attention to the liveliness of
the relations between material and
immaterial worlds.
kaira cabañas
_
1/ The edition presented at the 35th Bienal
is: André Breton, Fata Morgana. Illustrated
by Wifredo Lam. Buenos Aires: Éditions des
Lettres Françaises, 1942.
this participation is supported by:
Institut français.
will rawls The artistic practice of choreogra-
pher, dancer, writer, and teacher Will
Rawls investigates Black poetics,
addresses the limits and encounters
between dance and language,
explores ambiguities, and questions
notions of power and form.
Moving our bodies, dancing with
letters, (de)constructing and playing
with words and phrases, saying the
chosen letter out loud, arranging,
rearranging, arranging differently,
306
307
in an open choreography under
construction. PELE is the version for
the Bienal de São Paulo’s audience of
Uncle Rebus, a performance previ-
ously held in other spaces.
The dynamic of the performance
itself invites spectators to read the
words formed, which transform into
others throughout the activation.
In Uncle Rebus, the text on which
the action is based is the Brer
Rabbit set of fables, narrated by
Uncle Remus and written by folk-
lorist Joel Chandler Harris, a white
man from the American South.
Uncle Remus is a kind of composite
identity created from the stories
of plantation oral culture to which
Harris had access. Full of linguistic
bias, the stories are written in what
the author interprets to be the dia-
lect of Southern Blacks at the time.
By manipulating the available
letters, the performers are at the
Uncle Rebus, 2018
Performance documentation. High Line at 17th Street, New York (2018)
same time spelling aloud parts of and recognize different accents
the text, destabilizing the author’s and stresses, for the collective and
fictionalized dialects, exploring the interactive formation of words that
limits of linguistic normativity and generate thought.
written discourse.
In the version of the perfor- PELE/
mance for the 35th Bienal de São LEPE/
Paulo, a different text will serve as EPLE/
the basis for the activation of the PEL/
work. We can expect the forma- PLE/
tion of both familiar and unusual ELP/
words. The invitation is to open up ELE/
EE…
juliana de arruda sampaio
translated from Portuguese by
philip somervell
xica manicongo this document should enable us
to imagine a face, but we are
presented only with a tomb. it is
History that lies in the tomb. the
archive of the history of transatlan-
tic slavery is the record of a dis-
appearance. these documents are
therefore nothing more than ashes.
why choose to preserve the
account of a European colonizer,
and not the life of a Black star? the
answer to this question is irrelevant.
308
309
the damage has already been done.
we are too late.
what matters, however, is that
after more than four hundred years,
we don’t even know the name of
the man.... but we remember with
great fondness the name of Xica
Manicongo, a name that is also a
fable. Manicongo is a distorted way
of saying Mwene Kongo, lord of the
Congo; Xica was a way that gender
dissidents, especially Black women,
used to rescue her from a violent
naming that the world of slavery
had addressed to her: Francisco.
thus, Xica Manicongo is a way of
fabulating the sonic signature of
this creature whose unfathomable
beauty we will never know.
Xica was forcibly brought to
Salvador at the end of the 16th
century. according to reports, a
man named..., a man... was report-
edly disturbed by Xica’s radically
free gender and sexuality perfor-
mativity, denouncing her to the
Holy Inquisition. Xica defended her
refusal, choosing to remain free.
finally, to avoid death, she decided
to retreat, to deceive the usurpers
using her man costumes. would this
have been the first record of a Drag
King in the history of the invaded
territory called Brazil?
what can we imagine before
these crooked letters arranged on
this moldy paper? a memory. the
memory that even oblivion is never
absolute. the memory of unpre-
dictability, in which what should
have been annihilated resur-
faces in another way, in another
place: Sertransneja, Coletiva Xica
Manicongo, Jaqueline Gomes de
Jesus, Bixarte, Xica a peça, Xica
Manicongo... the memory of the
loud laugh, the serene gingado, the
brute force and the indomitable
courage of the one we now call
Xica Manicongo.
ashes have long been used in
Africa and Abya Yala as a com-
ponent of soil fertilization. there,
then, we are summoned to imagine,
before this tomb, new wild fruits of
the African diaspora in Brazil that
erupt and stir a different way of
writing to traverse time.
abigail campos leal
translated from Portuguese
by mariana nacif mendes
yto barrada Yto Barrada takes play seriously.
For this perpetual learner, play is
a powerful educational tool that
appeals to the senses as much as to
the intellect. For instance, Land and
Water Forms (2019), a set of acrylic
and gesso works on cardboard, dis-
plays a grammar of natural shapes
adapted from Montessori molded
trays. Conversely, educational play
is an ideal framework for artistic
experimentation – the joy of making

310
311
and breaking rules. The video Tree
Identification for Beginners (2017)
tells the story of the artist’s moth-
er’s first trip to the USA – and larger
stories of the Cold war and civil
rights activism – through a captivat-
ing and hilarious montage of voice
over, Foley sounds, and animated
Montessori toys.
A historian by training, Barrada
is interested in the myriad ways
in which historical events and the
Model for Untitled (Casablanca Unit Blocks-with Bettina), 2023
Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 35th Bienal
social fabric constitute each other.
As an artist, she is constantly on
the lookout for forms that might
translate the complexity of those
relations. Politics pervades her
work, but always obliquely, as
serious questions are best tack-
led with humor. See the levity of
her posters’ wordplay (“I am not
exotic I am exhausted”; “Sheikh
Spear is Arab”…) or the satiri-
cal text “A Modest Proposal to
Modernize Morocco and Maximize
its Resources and Efficiency”
(2010), attributed to a fictional
character whose name, Yahia
Sari, is an Arabic adaptation of
Jonathan Swift.
Many real characters have also
come to populate her photo and
video work over the years. The
Sleepers (2006), The Smuggler
(2006), and The Magician (2003)
are beautiful marginals who find
creative ways of resisting the
chokehold of neoliberal domina-
tion. In addition, some historical
characters recur, chief among them
is Hubert Lyautey, the first French
Resident General in Morocco
(1912-1925), a brutal colonizer
admired by some for his intro-
duction of modernist urbanism
and his (selective) preservation of
local craft traditions. Beyond the
surface affect, Barrada exposes
the figure of Lyautey, playing
with his well-known quotes and
famous moustache in posters and
collages, or offering his name up
as a (de)construction game in the
various versions of her Lyautey
Unit Blocks. Here, as in most of her
work, politics and play, seriousness
and irreverence go hand in hand.
omar berrada
zumví arquivo What does it mean to constitute a
afro fotográfico photographic archive of, through,
and for Afro-Brazilian life? Zumví
Arquivo Afro Fotográfico [Zumví
Afro Photographic Archive] is the
closest answer we have. Founded
in 1990 by Lázaro Roberto, Ademar
Marques, and Raimundo Monteiro,
and physically housed between
Pelourinho and Fazenda Grande
in Salvador, Bahia, Zumví archive
houses 30,000 photographs (as

Olodum Carnival Parade, with the theme
“The Treasures of Tutankhamun”,
Pelourinho square, Salvador, BA, 1993
Digital transfer film photography, 70 × 105 cm
312
313
Rosário dos Pretos Sisterhood protest at the
Pelourinho Square, during the celebrations of Bahia
Independence, in the 2nd of July, 2012
Digital transfer film photography, 80 × 120 cm
well as personal documents, post-
ers, postcards, and various docu-
ments) spanning three decades. It
is a community archive to the core,
without institutional support nor
bureaucratic bluster. Its vast cache
of images aligns sights and routes
of protest alongside everyday street
scenes – shaping a visual space
that reveals precisely how spheres
of social and political life unfolded
in Bahia during the final decades
Photographer Lázaro Roberto self-portrait, 1980
Digital transfer film photography, 50 × 75 cm
of the twentieth century. Engaging
various photographic perspectives,
these pictures grasp the pain and
pride, love and insistent possi-
bility embodied in the condition
of Blackness.
As a whole, Zumví Arquivo Afro
Fotográfico is an assertion of Afro-
Brazilian existence and autonomy,
articulated through the notion of
aquilombamento. Functioning as
more than an accretion of represen-
Capoeira Circle at the Black Awareness Day, São Bartolomeu
Park, Subúrbio Ferroviário neighborhood, Salvador, BA, 2013
Digital transfer film photography, 70 × 105 cm
tations, the political clarity of the
archive’s purpose is immediately
legible in its name: a simultaneous
contraction of “zum–vi”1 and an
invocation of Zumbi, the leader of
Palmares, a monumental commu-
nity of quilombos that resisted the
Portuguese and Dutch for a full
century (1595-1695). Through the
ongoing efforts of Lázaro Roberto
and his nephew José Carlos,
Zumvi’s spirit of self-determina-
tion integrates the photograph as
a site of sociopolitical struggle,
a place where movement work
can happen. If we take seriously
scholar and activist from Sergipe
Beatriz Nascimento’s argument that
“quilombo is fundamentally a social
condition, a place where liberty
is practiced, [it is] the acceptance
of Black culture,”2 we might then
consider this archive as a pictorial
extension of this social condition.
Zumví is a fugitive passageway
made photographic, a place where
Black consciousness is cultivated
in the fix and expands beyond
the frame.
oluremi onabanjo
_
1/ “Zum” sounds as zoom (of photographic
lenses), and “vi” translates as “saw”. [e.n.]
2/ Beatriz Nascimento, “O conceito de
quilombola e a resistência afro-brasileira.”
Afrodiáspora, n. 6-7, 1985, pp. 41-49.
 performances of oralitura:
the body as a place of memory
leda maria martins
“Between silence and sound
drums and shadows laugh.
Children created memory
before creating hair.”
− edimilson de almeida pereira,
Nós, os Bianos [We, the Bianos], 1996
“To start from a word.
To start with a word.
Text, a place of encounter.”
− ruy duarte de carvalho,
Hábito da terra [Earth habit], 1988
While observing the beautiful program of this event,1 one
notes the repeated use of the signifier “memory,” orches-
trated in one of its places of recognition: writing. The
present text comes as an invitation to think about mem-
ory in another context, in which it is also inscribed, spelt
and postulated: the voice and the body, expressed in the
spheres of oral performances and ritual practices.2
In Brazil’s written literature, the predominant leg-
acy is that of textual archives and the European narrative
tradition. Even the discourses that emerged as founders
of Brazil’s literary legacy in the 19th century had as their
anchor and basis of literary creation the Occidental literary
style and form. The textuality of African and indigenous
peoples — their narrative and poetic repertoires, domains
of language and ways of apprehending and figuring the
real, left on the sidelines — did not reverberate in our
written words. This was observed by [Roger] Bastide and
reiterated by Risério:
When Europeans began to produce texts in what
is now Brazilian territory, the native peoples
1/ Lecture given at the XXXI Semana de Letras — VII International
Seminar on Language and Literature promoted jointly by the Literature
department and the Graduate Program of the Federal University of Santa
Maria (UFSM) in October 2002.
2/ Originally published in Língua e Literatura: Limites e Fronteiras, Santa
Maria (RS), n. 26, pp. 61-81, jun. 2003.
314
315
had already been producing their own for some
time. And just as Europeans transported here
a vast and fruitful textual repertoire, Africans,
forcibly engaged in the greatest migratory
process in the history of mankind, brought
their creative verbal forms to the other side of
the Atlantic. Thus, in turning first to the history
of the creative text in our geographical region,
Romanticism was to be confronted, in theory,
with the ensembles formed by Amerindian and
African texts. In theory. In fact, this is not quite
what happened. [...] The African creative text
has invariably been sidelined or ignored in our
setting. [...] In other words, Black words drifted
by in white clouds.3
In this sense, the mastery of writing becomes a metaphor
for an almost exclusive idea of the nature of knowledge; cen-
tered around the elevation of vision, imprinted in the optical
field by the perception of the letter. Memory, inscribed as
spelling by the written word, is thus articulated to the field
and process of vision mapped by the gaze, apprehended as a
window of knowledge. Everything that escapes the appre-
hension of the gaze — a privileged principle of cognition — or
that is not circumscribed in it, is therefore “ex-otic” to us. It
is outside our field of perception, distant from our optics
of understanding, exiled and alienated from our contem-
plation, from our knowledge. Indeed, we are fertile in the
resources for safeguarding this memory: our books, archives,
libraries, monuments, theme parks and, more recently,
technological advances, such as increasingly sophisticated
hardware and software. Mnemosyne, the muse of memories,
is certainly uneasy about this. In the mythical narrative, all
knowledge that wants to be reminiscent cannot do without
Lesmosyne, forgetfulness — a forgetfulness that is inscribed
in every spelling, every trace that, as a signifier, brings in
itself the lacunae and erasures of knowledge itself. In this
perspective, the Greek graph is much more expansive and
3/ Antônio Risério, Textos e tribos. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1993, pp. 69-70.
inclusive than the secular semantic selections elected by
the West would have us believe. The places of memory are
not restricted, in the very genealogy of the term, to its aspect
of alphabetic inscription, to writing. The term refers us to
many other forms and procedures of inscription and spell-
ings, among them to which the body, as a portal of alterities,
dionysically refers us.
In the twists and turns of etymologies, let us try
another approach. In one of the Bantu languages of the
Congo, two verbs derive from the root word ntanga: write
and dance. These verbs highlight variant shifting mean-
ings, which refer us to other possible sources for the
inscription, safeguarding, transmission and transcreation
of knowledge, practices, procedures, anchored in and by
the body in performance. But what is performance?
By the various prisms of its conceptual and meth-
odological use, as well as by the scope and perhaps dispro-
portionate amplitude, the term performance, according
to Richard Schechner,4 is inclusive. Performance can be
approached both as a hand fan and as a net. As a fan it
includes — by modal adherence — rites, everyday perfor-
mances, family scenes, playful activities, theater, dance,
processes of artistic making, as well as, among other prac-
tices, performances of great magnitude. In the fan, all these
practices, with their specific modes and conventions, are
arranged as non-hierarchical settings, in a horizontilinear
landscape, proceeding as a continuum. When thought of as
a net, in a different design and epistemological perspective,
this system is organized more dynamically, no longer by
the relations of disposition in the continuum, but above all
by the interactions processed there.
Schechner’s theory — which embraces and takes
as its object both experimental theatrical performances
(in the strict sense of theatrical action) and the liturgical
ceremonies of predominantly ritualistic cultures — is
developed in the very liminality of the relations between
theatrical practice and anthropology. Hence its scope, and
the unique possibilities it offers us in macroscopic terms,
4/ Richard Schechner, Performance Theory. Revised and expanded edition.
New York and London: Routledge, 1988, pp. xii e xiii.
to think about the spheres of performance theories and the
thematic, conceptual and methodological adjunctions that
derive from it. In this respect, the term performance can
be accommodated in the context of, for example, theater or
oral narratives, as it escapes a synonymic collage with the
term’s representation and staging, which are also inflated
and semantically saturated. All of these practices, however,
ostensibly reveal what Schechner calls “deep structures,”
which connect them performatically, by modulations or
qualities (repetitiveness, provisionality, incompleteness,
transience, modes of duration and consignment of space,
etc.); by techniques and procedures; by the relations
between performers and their audience, real or virtual; by
the inclusion or exclusion of pre- and post-performance
activities that, in many practices, constitute the perfor-
mance itself; by their immediate and/or extensive effects
in historical, cultural and social terms.
Each of these practices (theater, dance, ritual, sport,
play, games, collective enactments, artistic acts, and even
emotive pulsive expressions) are subjunctive, liminal
modes, performative genres whose conventions, proce-
dures, and processes are not only a means of symbolic
expression, but constitute in themselves what institutes
the performance itself. In a performance of orality, for
example, the gesture is not only a mimetic representation
of a possible meaning conveyed by the performance, it
institutes and establishes the performance itself. Or rather,
the gesture is not simply narrative or descriptive, but per-
formative. Performative practices are not to be confused
with ordinary experience. They are always provisional and
inaugural, even when they rely on deeply rooted and tra-
ditional modes and methods of transmission. They always
rely on conventions, styles and spatial and temporal
frames, even if slippery (for example, the constitution and
designation of space, be it the theater-building, the street,
an alley, a public square, a church, an auditorium; or even
the modulation of temporal duration in hours, days, years).
To think a poetics of performance would thus require us
to consider not only the mode, scope, size and duration
of the performance, but also its displacement and “exten-
sion across cultural boundaries and its penetration into
the deepest strata of historical, personal and neurological
human experience.”5
This inclusive way of thinking about performance,
both as a contingent quality and as an attribute of certain
artistic and cultural practices, as well as a possible system
of universals that finds its particular modes and conven-
tions culturally, does not find an easy definition. The term
is used by Schechner6 in the sense of restored behavior
conditioned/permeated by play or twice-behaved behavior,
that is, as a double repetition of an already repeated action,
a provisional repetition, which is always subject to revi-
sion, always subject to reinvention; a repetition that never
offers itself in the same way, even when sustained by the
constancy of its transmission.
Exploring the rich archaeology of the term and the
relationships between performance and memory, body
and knowledge, Joseph Roach proposes thinking about the
genealogies of performance through three basic principles:
kinesthetic imagination, vortices of behavior (habits) and
displaced transmission:
Performance genealogies draw on the idea of
expressive movements as mnemonic reserves,
including patterned movements made and
remembered by bodies, residual movements
retained implicitly in images or words (or in the
silences between them), and imaginary move-
ments dreamed in minds, not prior to language
but constitutive of it, a psychic rehearsal for
physical actions drawn from a repertoire that
culture provides.7
It is within this broad epistemological spectrum that I am
currently developing my research, which focuses on per-
5/ Richard Schechner, 1988, op. cit., p. 283.
6/ Idem, 1988, op. cit., p. 95. See also Richard Schechner, “O que é
performance?”, Percevejo. Revista de Teatro, Crítica e Estética, ano 11, n. 12,
2003, p. 34.
7/ Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 26.
316
317
formance and ritual scenes, through which I think of the
body and the voice as portals for inscribing knowledge of
various kinds. My theory is that the body in performance
is not only an expression or representation of an action,
which symbolically refers us to a meaning, but above all
a place for the inscription of knowledge, a knowledge that
is written in gesture, movement, choreography; in the
solfège of vocality, as well as in the adornments that per-
formatively cover it. In this sense, what is repeated in the
body is not only repeated as a habit, but as a technique
and procedure for inscribing, recreating, transmitting
and revising the memory of knowledge, be it aesthetic,
philosophical, metaphysical, scientific, technological, etc.
In the context of Afro-Brazilian rituals (and also those
of indigenous origin), for example, this conception of
performance allows us to grasp the complex plethora of
African knowledge and know-how that is restored and
reinscribed in the Americas, recreating a diverse gnosis
and episteme. In this perspective and sense, as Roach
further states, “performances reveal what texts hide.”8
After all, as Pierre Nora also warns us,9 the memory of
knowledge is not only kept in “places of memory” (lieux
de mémoire), libraries, museums, archives, official monu-
ments, theme parks, etc, but it is constantly recreated and
transmitted through “environments of memory” (milieux
de mémoire), i.e. through oral and bodily repertoires, ges-
tures, habits, whose transmission techniques and proce-
dures are means of creating, passing on, reproducing and
preserving knowledge. Ritual performances, ceremonies
and festivities, for example, are fertile environments of
memory for the vast repertoires of mnemonic reserves,
kineshetic actions, patterns, techniques and residual
cultural procedures recreated, restituted and expressed
in and by the body. Among other things, rites transmit
and institute aesthetic, philosophical and metaphysi-
cal knowledge, as well as procedures and techniques,
8/ Ibid., p. 61.
9/ Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoire”, in
Geneviève Fabre e Robert O’Meally (ed.), History and Memory in Afri-
can-American Culture. New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994.
whether in their symbolic framework, in their modes of
enunciation, or in the apparatuses and conventions that
sculpt their performance.
In the context of Afro-Brazilian rituals, the sung
and vocalized poetic word resonates as an effect of a pul-
sional and mimetic language of the body, inscribing the
issuing subject, who conveys it, and the receiver, whom
it also circumscribes, in a given circuit of expression,
potency and power. As murmur, breath, diction and per-
formative event, the spoken and sung word is recorded in
the performance of the body, the portal of wisdom. As an
index of knowledge, the word is not calcified in a static
deposit or archive, but is essentially kinesthetic, dynamic
movement, and requires attentive listening, as it refers us
to a whole poiesis of the performative memory of sacred
songs and sayings in the context of rituals. The study of
this textuality highlights the inscription of African mem-
ory in Brazil in various domains: in the array of poetic
and rhythmic forms and aesthetic and cognitive proce-
dures based on other modulations of creative experience;
in the techniques and genres of textual composition; in
the methods and processes of safeguarding and trans-
mitting knowledge; in the attributes and instrumental
properties of performances, in which the body that
dances, vocalizes, performs, writes. Among this formal
and procedural repertoire, Antônio Risério highlights the
oriki, a Nagô-Yoruba poetic form, as one of the many arts
of the word transplanted from Africa:
The oriki is born within the rich fabric of
verbal games, of ludi linguae, which are woven
into Yoruba daily life. [...] The expansion of a
verbal unit is a common phenomenon in the
world of texts. Joles speaks of proverbs that
expand into long proverbial poems. A similar
thing happens between the oriki-name and the
oriki-poem, with the attributive name expand-
ing verbally towards the ideal constitution of
a signic body clearly perceived and defined
as “poetic.” [...] In fact, the expression “oriki”
refers to names, epithets, poems. It therefore
covers the spectrum of oral creation on a poetic
level from one end to the other.10
In the oriki-poem, for example, Risério observes the expan-
sion of a minimal thematic unit that unfolds and expands,
“adding other units that are linked to it by ties of linguistic
kinship, or by syntactic affinities”; “the hyperbolic spin
of the word”; “broad, coruscating and blunt” images; the
unusual metaphors, the chained nomination “of a series of
syntagms that, arranged in sequence or juxtaposed, revise
a paradigm of excess,” configuring the physiognomy of the
recreated object; the technique of linking and the play of
decentralized intertextualities, aspects that, in summary,
make the oriki an “intertextual phanomelopoeia.”
In the textual landscape of Bantu reminiscence,
other poetic forms not only recreate, in the order of enun-
ciations, the memory of African diasporas in Brazil, but
also inscribe it, as responsos, in the techniques and per-
formances of many narrative genres, in the lattices of the
creative enunciation of the word and the poetic games of
language, transcribing the memory of many wisdoms, of
other diction and phrasing, of other poetic veins, thus mani-
fest and vibrant in this beautiful song, performed in various
vocal and rhythmic timbres, in the rituals of Congados:
Zum, zum zum
In the middle of the sea Zum, zum, zum In the mid-
dle of the sea
It is the siren’s song
That makes me sad It seems she knows what is
to come
Help me, queen of the sea
Help me, queen of the sea Who rules the earth
Who rules the air
Help me, queen of the sea
10/ Antônio Risério, Oriki orixá. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1996, p. 35.
 Zum, zum zum assumed subjects should say and do and what, through
In the middle of the sea Zum, zum, zum countless practices, they actually said and did. In this oper-
In the middle of the sea ation of asymmetrical balance, displacement, metamor-
It is the siren’s song phosis and concealment are some of the basic operating
And her cries much more In that deep sea principles and tactics of Afro-American cultural forma-
Farewell, Minas Gerais. tion, which the study of performative practices reiterates
and reveals. In the Americas, African arts, crafts and
Help me, queen of the sea… knowledge took on new and ingenious forms. As stated by
(Song of the Congados Mineiros) Soyinka,11 under adverse conditions, cultural forms trans-
form to ensure their survival. Or as Roach argues:
Zum, zum zum
Lá no meio do mar In the life of a community, the process of sur-
Zum, zum, zum rogation does not begin or end but continues
Lá no meio do mar as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the
network of relations that constitutes the social
É o canto da sereia fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through
Que me faz entristecer death or other forms of departure, I hypothesize,
Parece que ela adivinha survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates.12
O que vai acontecer
Black culture is also, epistemologically, a place of intersec-
Ajudai-me, rainha do mar tions. The Brazilian cultural fabric, for example, derives
from the intersection of different cultures and symbolic
Ajudai-me, rainha do mar systems — African, European, indigenous and, more
Que manda na terra recently, from the Orient. From these processes of transna-
Que manda no ar tional, multiethnic and multilingual intersections, varied
Ajudai-me, rainha do mar vernacular formations emerge; some wearing new guises,
others mimicking, with subtle differences, old styles. In an
Zum, zum zum attempt to better apprehend the dynamic variety of these
processes of transit, interactions and intersections of signs,
Lá no meio do mar Zum, zum, zum I use the term crossroads as a theoretical key that allows
Lá no meio do mar us to cleave some of the forms and constructs that emerge
É o canto da sereia from it.13 The notion of crossroads, used as a concep-
E seus prantos muito mais Naquele mar profundo tual operator, offers us the possibility of interpreting the
Adeus, minas gerais. systemic and epistemic transit that emerges from intercul-
tural and transcultural processes, in which performative
Ajudai-me, rainha do mar...
(Cântico dos Congados Mineiros) 11/ Wole Soyinka, “Theatre in African Traditional Cultures: Survival
Patterns”, in Michael Huxley e Noel Witts (ed.). The Twentieth-Century
Black culture in the Americas has a double face, a dou- Performance Reader. London: Routledge, 1996, p. 342.
ble voice, and expresses, in its foundational constitutive 12/ Joseph Roach, 1996, op. cit., p. 2.
modes, the disjunction between what the social system 13/ Leda Maria Martins, A cena em sombras. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1995.

318
319
practices, conceptions and cosmovisions, philosophical
and metaphysical principles, various knowledges, etc., are
confronted and intersected, not always amicably.
In the Nagô/Yoruba philosophical conception, as
well as in the worldview of Bantu cultures, the crossroads
is the sacred place of intermediaries between different
systems and instances of knowledge. It is often translated
by a cosmogram that points to the circular movement
of the cosmos and the human spirit that gravitate in the
circumference of their intersecting lines.14 In the sphere
of the rite, and therefore of performance, the crossroads
is a radial place of centering and decentering, intersec-
tions and deviations, text and translations, confluences
and alterations, influences and divergences, fusions and
ruptures, multiplicity and convergence, unity and plurality,
origin and dissemination. An operator of languages and
discourses, the crossroads, as a third place, is the gener-
ator of a diversified production of signs and, therefore, of
plural meanings. In this conception of a discursive inter-
section, the kinesthetic and sliding nature of this enun-
ciative instance and the knowledge instituted therein is
also highlighted.15
In the context of the crossroads, the very notion of
center is disseminated, as it displaces itself — or rather, is
displaced — by improvisation. Just as jazz players retrace
secular rhythms, dialectically transcribing them in a
dynamic, retrospective and prospective relationship, Black
cultures, in their varied modes of assertion, are dialogi-
cally founded in relation to the archives and repertoires of
African, European and indigenous traditions, in the move-
ments of languages, in rites and in many other perfor-
mative practices that they establish. In this environment
of reminiscences, the Black Congados and Reinados, for
example, deserve special attention. In addition to a whole
representational apparatus of the sacred that the liturgi-
14/ Cf. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, African and African:
American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books, 1984; Leda Maria
Martins, Afrografias da memória, o reinado do rosário no Jatobá. São Paulo:
Belo Horizonte: Perspectiva; Mazza, 1997.
15/ Leda Maria Martins, ibid., pp. 25-6.
cal ceremonies of the Congados restore (already revisited
by me in Afrografias da memória: o reinado do rosário no
Jatobá),16 one must emphasize in the Congados perfor-
mances a whole plethora of mnemonic procedures and
stylistic techniques by means of which some of the most
cherished African philosophical principles are reprocessed
and inscribed in the Brazilian ethno-cultural formation, as
true vehicles of civilization; among them, the principles of
ancestry, that is, of celebration of ancestors and that of an
alternate and alternative conception of time.
Congados, or Reinados, is an alternate religious
system established at the very crossroads between the
Christians religious systems and the African ones, of Bantu
origin, through which devotion to certain Catholic saints —
Our Lady of the Rosary, Saint Benedict, Saint Iphigenia
and Our Lady of Mercy — is processed through African-style
ritual performances, in their metaphysical symbolism,
conventions, choreography, structure, values, aesthetic
conceptions and in the very worldview that establishes them.
Performed through a complex symbolic and liturgical struc-
ture, the rites include the participation of distinct groups,
called guardas, and the installation of a Império negro [Black
empire], in the context of which dramatic autos and dances,
coronation of kings and queens, embaixadas [embassies]
liturgical, ceremonial and scenic acts, create a mythopoetic
performance that reinterprets the crossing of Blacks from
Africa to the Americas. Travelers’ accounts and other oral
and written records map its existence since the 17th century,
in Recife, and its spread to other regions of the Brazilian
territory, in many cases linked to the Irmandades dos Pretos
[Brotherhoods of the Blacks].
In its structure, the festivities of the Congados are
rites of affliction and reconnection founded by a cos-
mogonic narrative that develops through an elaborate
symbolic structure; a theater of the sacred, whose festive
performance brings us back to the setting of the ritual, con-
ceived by Turner17 as an orchestration of actions, symbolic
16/ Id., ibid.
17/ Victor Turner, From Ritual To Theatre, the Human Seriousness of Play.
New York: PAJ Publications, 1982, p. 109.
objects and sensory, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory,
gustatory codes, full of music and dance. As such, they
carry aesthetic and cognitive value, transcribed by means
of strategies of concealment and visibility, procedures
and techniques of expression which, kinesthetically and
dynamically, modify, amplify and recreate the cultural
codes interwoven in the performance and in the sphere
of the rite, in whose context everyday reality, however
oppressive, is replaced and altered, in the symbolic order
and even in the historical-social series.
All ritual acts emerge from a narrative of origin,
which narrates the removal of the image of Our Lady of the
Rosary from the waters. The summary of one of the versions
tells us that in the days of slavery an image of Our Lady of
the Rosary appeared in the sea. The enslaved saw the saint
in the water, with a crown whose brilliance outshone the
sun. They called the landowner and asked him to let them
pull the lady out of the water. The farmer did not allow it
but ordered them to build a chapel for her and fill it with
adornments. After the chapel was built, the sinhô gathered
his White peers, pulled the image out of the sea and placed it
on an altar. The next day, the chapel was empty, and the saint
was floating in the water again. After several failed attempts
to keep the deity in the chapel, the White man allowed the
slaves to try to retrieve her. The first Blacks to head out to
sea were a group of Congo. They adorned themselves in
bright colors and, with their lively dances, tried to attract
the saint. She found their singing and dancing very beau-
tiful, rose from the waters, but did not follow them. Then,
the older Blacks, who were very poor, went into the woods,
chopped wood, made three drums from tree trunks, the
sacred candombes, and covered them with yam leaves. They
gathered the group and, singing and dancing, entered the
waters. With their rhythmic, muted drumming, their earthly
dance and their hymns of strong African tones, they capti-
vated the saint who sat on one of their drums and accompa-
nied them to the chapel, where everyone, Black and White,
sang and danced to celebrate her.
During festivities, this founding myth is recreated
and alluded to in processions, statements, songs, dances
and fabulations, in a multifaceted narrative, in whose
320
321
development the mystical and the mythical interact with
other themes and narratives that recreate the story of the
crossing of Black Africans and their Brazilian descendants.
The protagonists of the event are many, depending on the
region and communities. The ritual festivities present a
complex structure, including novenas, raising of masts,
processions, dramatic dances, banquets, embaixadas,
fulfillment of promises, under the baton of the Congo kings.
In Minas Gerais, the diversity of guardas18 includes,
among others, Congos, Moçambiques, Marujos, Catopés,
Vilões and Caboclos. Among these, however, two groups
stand out: the Congo and the Moçambique, who arranged
for the removal of the saint from the water. Both dress in
white pants and shirts. The Congos, meanwhile, in addi-
tion to skirts, usually pink or blue, wear flashy helmets
decorated with flowers, mirrors and colored ribbons. They
move in two sections, in the middle of which stand the
masters, the soloists, and perform choreographies of fast,
leaping movements, sometimes with a warlike staging
and a fast pace. The group of Congos represents the van-
guard, the ones who start the processions and clear the
way, breaking through barriers with their swords and/or
long colored staffs. The terno de Moçambique, which most
closely resembles the original sound of the candombes, is
generally clad in blue, white or pink skirts over all-white
clothing, turbans on their heads, gungas (rattles) on their
ankles, carrying larger drums, with more muted, bass
sounds. They dance in groups, without any choreographed
steps. Their movement is slow and from their drums
echoes a vibrant, syncopated rhythm. The moçambiqueiros’
feet never stray far from the ground and their dance, which
vibrates throughout the body, is strongly expressed in the
curved shoulders, torso and feet. The terno de Moçambique
is the guardian of the majesties, which represents the
greater spiritual power and the earthly power of the ances-
18/ In the congadeiros’ own lexicon, the term “guarda” or “terno” des-
ignates a specific group of dancers with their own vestments, liturgical
functions and characteristics. Other variations of the narrative, as well as
a more detailed study of the Congados, can be found in my book Afrogra-
fias da memória: o reinado do rosário no Jatobá, op. cit.
tors, which emanate from the sacred drums and guide the
community rite. Their songs accentuate, in lyrical and
rhythmic enunciation, the slow pulse of their movements
and the mysteries of the sacred.
All the versions of the story, in the most varied
regions of Brazil, make it possible to underline the com-
mon narrative element through which this re-engineering
of knowledge and power takes place in the structure of the
Black Reinados. There are, basically, in the dramatizations
and performances, three elements that insist in the enun-
ciation network and in the construction of its enunciation:
1st) the description of a situation of repression experi-
enced by the Black slave; 2nd) the symbolic reversal of this
situation with the removal of the saint from the water, the
singing and dancing being governed by the drums; 3rd) the
institution of a hierarchy and of another power, the African
one, founded by the mythical and mystical framework.
By removing the saint from the water and giving it
movement, the Black slave performs an act of appropriation
and reconfiguration, inverting, in the diction of the sacred,
the positions of power between Whites and Blacks. The
sound of the drums, invested with a divine ethos sets song
and dance in motion and, in an oracular way, foreshadows a
subversion of the social order, slave hierarchies and hege-
monic knowledge. This displacement interferes with the
syntax of the Catholic text, now pregnant with an alterna-
tive language that, like a style and a stylus, is written and
pulsates in the conjugation of the sound of drums, singing
and dancing, intertwined in the articulation of speech and
voice of African timbres. The very foundation of the Catholic
mythical text is erased, and African deities are introduced
into it like a palimpsest. Thus, the saint of the Rosary also
evokes, by displacement, the great African chthonic mothers,
ladies of the waters, the earth and the air.
In a perspective that transcends the symbolic-re-
ligious context, this act of displacement and repossession
induces the possibility of reversibility and transformation
of the power relations of the adverse historical-social con-
text. It is therefore increasingly significant that the narra-
tives and performances emphasize the coming together of
different African nations and ethnicities, overriding his-
torical ethnic and linguistic differences and rivalries. The
collective is therefore superimposed on the singular, as
an operator of forms of social and cultural resistance that
reactivate, restore and reterritorialize, through emblematic
metamorphoses, an alternative knowledge, embodied in
the memory of the body and the voice. Both in the enuncia-
tion of the mythical narration and in the dramatic perfor-
mance that scenically represents it, the partial overcoming
of ethnic diversities recreates the common ethos and the
Black collective act as strategies for replacing and reor-
ganizing the fractures of knowledge. It is thus possible to
read between the lines of the fabular enunciation the pen-
dulum gesture: they sing in favor of divinity and celebrate
the Black majesties and, simultaneously, sing and dance
against the seizure of freedom and against oppression, be
it slavery in the past or in the present.
From this gesture emerges the second movement
dramatized in the narratives: the establishment of an alter-
native power structure that reorganizes Black ethnic rela-
tions and the strategic positions imbricated therein. The
Congo guardas open the processions and clear the paths,
like a vanguard warrior force. The Moçambique, chosen as
the leader of sacred rites and guardian of the crowns that
represent the African nations and the Lady of the Rosary,
leads kings and queens. The sound of its drums represents,
in a specular relationship engendered by the fable, the
most genuinely African voice, the reminiscence of the ori-
gin that, iconically, translates the memory of Africa. Lord
of the crowns and guardian of mysteries, the Moçambique
is the earthly and warlike power that manages the African
continuum reorganizing the not always friendly power
relations between the Black peoples scattered throughout
the Diaspora. Consequently, new hierarchies are estab-
lished in the parallel structure of spatial relations of the
Black Reinados, founding the social microsystem, which
operationalize the communication networks and power
relations between the Blacks themselves, and between
Blacks and Whites.
The myth also reveals a process of substitution in
the production of ritual objects and adornments and the
re-signification of the geographical and symbolic setting.
Slaves produced their sacred drums from logs, leaves and
vines, and used the tear beads and materials available
in the American geography in place of opals and other
embellishments. It is important to note that in Africa, as
well as in African cultures of the Americas, one of the ways
in which the body writes is through the use of shells, seeds
and other concave objects, in varying sizes and colors, for
the making of necklaces, bracelets and other adornments
that cover the subject, in addition to other arabesques that
adorn their skin and hair. Arranged in a given position
and order, the beads, seeds and shells, as well as certain
drawings, function as morphemes that form words, words
that form sentences and sentences that form texts, making
the body’s surface a text, and the subject a sign, interpreter
and interpretant, simultaneously. Written in and through
the adornments, “the person emerges from these writings,
woven of memory and making memory.”19
The entire history of the constitution of the Congados
(violently repressed and persecuted from the second half
of the 19th century to the mid-20th century), and of Black
cultures in general, seems to reveal the primacy of these
processes of displacement, substitution and resemanti-
cization, suturing the voids and cavities originated by the
losses. The institution of this alternative power, which is still
fermenting today in several Black communities, prefigures
the strategies of cultural and social resistance that drove the
slave revolts, the effective action of the quilombolas and sev-
eral other Black organizations against the slave system. As
the famous saying goes, “the beads of my rosary are artillery
shells.” Or as Roach puts it, “texts can obscure what perfor-
mance tends to reveal: memory challenges history in the
making of circum-Atlantic cultures and revises the unwrit-
ten epic of their fabulous co-creation.”20
In the mythopoetic narrative — in the songs, ges-
tures, dances and in all the liturgical derivations of the
19/ Mary N. Roberts e Allen F. Roberts, “Body Memory. Part. 1: Defining
the Person”, in Mary N. Roberts and Allen F. Roberts (ed.), Memory, Luba
Art and the Making of History. New York; Munich: The Museum for African
Art; Prestei, 1996, p. 86.
20/ Joseph Roach, 1995, op. cit, p. 61.
322
323
ceremonial Reinado — the congadeiro sings and dances
the Catholic divinity and, with it, the nanãs of the African
waters, Zâmbi, the supreme Bantu God, the ancestors
and all the sophisticated African gnosis resulting from
an earthly philosophy that recognizes in nature a certain
degree of the human, not in an animistic way, but as an
expression of a necessary cosmic complementarity, which
does not elide the divine breath and matter, in all the
forms and elements of cosmic physis .
The myth, therefore, configures the rite of passage
from a situation of distress, fragmentation and disorder to
a new social, political, artistic and philosophical order that
reconfigures the cultural corpus subverts the dominator/
dominated relationship and inseminates the Catholic reli-
gious fabric with the earthly African theology.
All the memory of this knowledge is instituted in
and by the ritual performance of the Congados, through
techniques and performative procedures conveyed by the
body, in several of its attributes, among them the voice, in a
refined aesthetic and artisanal stylization. The universe of
cognition expressed in the rituals of the Congados tran-
scends, in the Americas, African artistic styles, ways of living
and belonging, a distinct perception and understanding of
the cosmos, as well as a singular reflection on the sacred that
transcends Western metaphysical languages. Knowledge,
therefore, conveyed by the spoken and sung word, and by
music, choreographed in dance. According to the philoso-
pher Bunseki Fu-Kiau, Africa is the “dancing continent,” in
that music and dance permeate every activity, being a form
of inscription and transmission of knowledge and values.
Every sound, every gesture, in Africa, has meaning, which
leads Robert Farris Thompson to say that “Africa introduces
a different history of art — the history of a dancing art.”21
In the context of the Congado performance, for
example, in its apparatus — songs, dances, costumes,
adornments, ceremonial objects, settings, parades and
festivities — and in its philosophical and religious cos-
movision, the textual, historical, sensorial, organic and
21/ Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act. Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1979, p. xii.
conceptual repertoires of distant Africa are reorganized,
the scores of their knowledge and know-how, the alternate
body of recreated identities, memories and reminiscences,
the corpus, in short, of memory that cleaves and crosses
the voids and gaps resulting from diasporas. Rites thus
fulfill an exemplary paradigmatic pedagogical function,
as a model and index of change and displacement, since,
according to Turner, “as a model for, the ritual can antici-
pate, even generate, change; as a model of, it can inscribe
order in the minds, hearts, and will of its participants.”22
This process of intervention in the environment and
this potential for formal and conceptual reconfiguration
make rituals an effective way of transmitting and reterrito-
rializing a complex plethora of knowledge, among them an
instigating conception of chronos, time. In the Brazilian case,
rites of African descent, both religious and secular, reterrito-
rialize one of the most important African philosophical and
metaphysical conceptions, that of ancestry which
constitutes the essence of a vision that theorists
of African cultures call the Africentric world-
view. This force causes the living, the dead, the
natural and the supernatural, the cosmic and
the social elements to interact, forming the links
of a single, indissoluble chain of meaning....23
The African ancestral conception includes, in the same
phenomenological circuit, divinities, cosmic nature, fauna,
flora, physical elements, the dead, the living and those yet to
be born, conceived as rings of a necessary complementarity,
in a continuous process of transformation and becoming.
According to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in the African cosmology,
we who are in the present are all, potentially,
mothers and fathers of those who will come
after. To revere the ancestors really means to
revere life, its continuity and change. We are
22/ Victor Turner, op. cit., p. 82.
23/ Laura Cavalcante Padilha, Entre voz e letra: o lugar da ancestralidade
na ficção angolana do séc. XX. Niterói: EDUFF, 1995, p. 10.
the children of those who were here before us,
but we are not their identical twins, just as we
will not engender beings identical to ourselves.
[...] In this way, the past becomes our source of
inspiration; the present, an arena for breathing;
and the future, our collective aspiration.24
This cosmic and philosophical perception interweaves,
in the same circuit of significance, time, ancestry and
death. The primacy of ancestral movement, as a source of
inspiration, softens the curves of a spiral temporality, in
which events, stripped of a linear chronology, are in the
process of perpetual transformation. Birth, maturity and
death become, therefore, natural contingencies, necessary
in the mutational and regenerative dynamics of all vital
and existential cycles. In the spirals of time, everything
goes, and everything returns. For Bunseki Fu-Kiau,25 in
Nicongo societies, experiencing time means inhabiting a
curvilinear temporality, conceived as a scroll that simulta-
neously seals and reveals, rolls up and unrolls the tem-
poral instances that constitute the subject. The Kicongo
aphorism, “Ma’kwenda! Ma’kwisa!, what happens now
will resume later” tastefully translates the idea that what
flows in cyclical motion will remain in motion. This same
idea is spelled out in one of the most important African
inscriptions, transcribed in various ways in Afro-Brazilian
religions, the cosmograms, signs of the cosmos and the
continuity of existence, also present in the choreographies
of the Congos. In this synchrony, the past can be defined
as the place of an accumulative knowledge and experience,
which inhabits the present and the future, and is also
inhabited by them.
The mediation of ancestors, manifested in the
Congados by the power (axé) of the candombes (the sacred
24/ Ngũgĩ Ngugi wa Thlong’o, Writers in Politics: a Re-engagement with
Issues of Literature and Society. A revised and enlarged edition. Oxford;
Nairobi; Ports Mouth: James Currey; EAEP; Heineman, 1997, p. 139.
25/ K. K. Bunseki Fu-Kiau, “Ntangu-Tandu-Kolo: The Bantu-Kongo
Concept of Time”, in Joseph K. Adjaye (ed.), Time in the Black Experience.
Westport; London: Greenwood Press, 1994, p. 33.
drums), is the master key of the rites and it is from it
that comes the power of the spoken word and the bodily
gestus, instruments of inscription and retransmission
of ancestral legacy. In the ritual performance, the con-
gadeiro simultaneously mirrors the traces marked by
ancestors, reifying them, but also distances himself from
them, imprinting, as in melodic improvisation, his own
tones and style. In the rituals, “each repetition is to some
extent original, but at the same time it is never entirely
new.”26 This pendular process between tradition and its
transmission establishes a curvilinear, reactivating and
prospective movement that synchronically integrates, in
the moment of the performed act, the present of the past
and the future. As a logos in movement from the ancestor
to the performer and from the latter to the ancestor and
the infans, each ritual performance recreates, restores
and revises a phenomenological circle in which pulsates,
in the same contemporaneity, the action of a continuous
past, synchronized in a present temporality that attracts
to itself the past and the future and also spreads itself in
them, abolishing not time, but its linear and consecutive
conception. Thus, the idea of temporal successivity is
obliterated by the reactivation and updating of the action,
similar and different, already performed both before and
after the instant that restores it, in an event.
In the performative genealogy of the Congados, the
spoken word resonates as the effect of a pulsional language
of the body, inscribing the issuing subject in a given circuit
of expression, potency and power. As murmur, breath,
diction and event, the spoken word is spelled in the per-
formance of the body, a place of wisdom. For this reason,
the word, the index of knowledge, is not confined to an
immobile deposit or archive, but is conceived kinestheti-
cally. As such, the word echoes in the performative remi-
niscence of the body, resonating as a singing and dancing
voice, in a contiguous expressive syntax that fertilizes the
kinship between the living, the ancestors and those yet to
be born. Dynamic force and principle, the word becomes
26/ Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, Performers, Play, Agency.
Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 1.
324
325
language “because it expresses and externalizes a process
of synthesis in which all the elements that constitute the
subject intervene.”27 That is why it needs music, dance,
rhythm, colors, performative gestus and adaptation for its
realization. Hence the numinous nature of the voice and
the auratic power of the body in Afro-Brazilian religions,
resonances of their Africanity. According to Sodré, along
with words, along with sound, there must be the concrete
presence of a human body, capable of speaking and lis-
tening, giving and receiving, in an ever-reversible move-
ment.”28 Thus, “to sing/dance, to enter into the rhythm, is
like listening to the beating of one’s own heart — it is to feel
life without ceasing to inscribe death in it,”29 the rhythm
itself being the movement “of the impulse that leads the
body to search for the absence.”30
For the congadeiro, this knowledge is also estab-
lished spatially. Visited space is a consecrated, reterritori-
alized site. The processions and walks revisit recognized
places, retrace the circles around masts, crosses and
churches, travel paths previously cleared by ancestors, and
pave new roads. The choreographies of the dances mimic
this spiral circularity, both in the movement of the body
and in the spatial occupation that the body draws around
itself. Through this constitutive evocation, the gesture and
voice of ancestry embody the present event, prefiguring
the becoming, in a curvilinear genealogical conception,
articulated by performance. In this, the choreographic
movement occupies the space in unfolded circles, figuring
the ex-centric notion of time. In other words: time, in its
spiral dynamics, can only be conceived through space or in
the spatiality of the gap that the revolving body occupies.
Time and space thus become mutually reflected images.
This enunciative temporality does not conceive of the
present as “the present of the very being that is delimited,
27/ Juana Elbein dos Santos, Os nagô e a morte: Pàde, Àsese e o culto Egum
na Bahia, 5. ed. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988, p. 49.
28/ Muniz Sodré, Samba, o dono do corpo, 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad,
1998, p. 67.
29/ Id., ibid., p. 23.
30/ Ibid., p. 68.
by internal reference, between what is going to become
present and what is no longer present.”31
On the contrary. In the context of the spiral time,
the body in performance, in the Congados, is the place
of what curvilinearly still and already is, of what could
and can become, for being it in the simultaneity of pres-
ence and belonging. The event staged in and by the body
inscribes the subject and culture in a discontinuous
spatiality that engenders a cumulative and accumulative
temporality, both compact and fluid. As such, the perfor-
mance updates the tuning forks of memory, memories
slipped into oblivion, braids ringed in improvisation that
embroiders African remains, residues and traces into new
expressive forms. Thus, the representation theatricalized
by ritual performance, in its ingenious craftsmanship,
can be read as a supplement that covers the many gaps
and voids created by the oceanic and territorial diasporas
of Blacks, something that stands in place of something
inexorably submerged in the crossings, but perennially
transcribed, reincorporated and restored in its otherness,
under the sign of reminiscence. A knowledge, a sapience.
These gestures, these inscriptions and performa-
tive palimpsests, spelled out by the voice and the body, I
have called oralitura, nuancing in the concept of this term
the singular cultural inscription that, as a letter (littera)
cleaves the enunciation of the subject and its collectivity,
also underlining in the term its value of /litura, erasure of
language, significant alteration, constitutive of the alterity
of subjects, cultures and their symbolic representations.32
The signifier oralitura, as I present it, does not refer
us univocally to the repertoire of forms and cultural proce-
dures of the verbal tradition; but, specifically, to what in its
performance indicates the presence of a residual, stylistic,
mnemonic, culturally constitutive trace, inscribed in the
spelling of the body in movement and in vocality. Like a sty-
lus, this kinetic trace inscribes knowledge, values, concepts,
worldviews and styles. Oralitura is of the realm of perfor-
31/ Émile Benveniste, Problemas de linguística geral, trad. Eduardo Guim-
arães et al. São Paulo: Pontes, 1989, v. II, pp. 85-6.
32/ Cf. Leda Maria Martins, 1997, op. cit., p. 21.
mance, its anchor; a spelling, a language, whether drawn
in the performative letter of the word or in the movements
of the body. As we have already emphasized, in one of the
Bantu languages of the Congo, the same verb, tanga, desig-
nates the acts of writing and dancing, from whose root the
noun ntangu, one of the designations of time, a plurisignifi-
cant correlation, insinuating that the memory of knowledge
is inscribed, without illusory hierarchies, both in the hand-
writing on paper and in the body in performance. In this
perspective we can think, after all, that there are no agraphic
cultures, because not all societies confine their knowledge
only in books, archives, museums and libraries, but safe-
guard, nurture and convey their repertoires in other memory
environments, their performative practices.
In Brazilian ritual dances, be they of Bantu or Nagô-
Yoruba descent, the concave and convex choreographies
that create a space of circumscription of the subject and
the cosmos refer us not only to the semantic and symbolic
universe of the action re-presented there but constitute
in themselves the very action instituted and constituted
by the performance of the body. To dance is to perform, to
inscribe. Ritual performance is thus an act of inscription. In
predominantly oral and gestural cultures, such as African
and indigenous ones, for example, the body is, par excel-
lence, the site of memory, the body in performance, the
body that is performance. As such this body/corpus not only
repeats a habit, but also institutes, interprets and revises
the re-enacted act. Hence the importance of emphasizing in
the performative traditions their metaconstitutive nature, in
which doing does not elide the act of reflection; the content
is imbricated in the form, the memory is written on the body,
which records, transmits and dynamically modifies it. The
body, in these traditions, is therefore not only the extension
of a re-presented knowledge, nor the archive of a static
crystallization. It is the site of a knowledge in continuous
movement of formal recreation, remission and perennial
transformations of the cultural corpus. In Afro-Brazilian
ritual traditions, harlequinized by their various constitutive
symbolic intersections, the body is a body of props: move-
ments, voice, choreography, language properties, costumes,
drawings on the skin and hair, adornments and props graph
this body/corpus, stylistically and metonymically as a locus The Congados testify that, just as there is no total, absolute
and environment of knowledge and memory. The subjects and eternal reminiscence, forgetting is also of the order of
and their artistic forms that emerge from it are woven of incompleteness. In the genealogies of their performance, the
memory; they write history. congadeiros irrigate the scrolls of history and give us back
The body in performance restores, expresses and, a subject who, cleaved by memory, maps, with its harle-
simultaneously, produces this knowledge, written in the quined Black body, the many shades of Brazilian culture and
memory of the gesture. Performing, in this sense, means American territories. After all, the numinosity of the voice,
inscribing, repeating transcribing, revising and rep- as alethéa, apparition, and the body, domus of knowledge,
resents “a potentially alternative and contesting form of confirm to the eye and ear the courses of sounds, of gestures,
knowledge.”33 The memory of knowledge is disseminated bringing with them the beings and the spheres in which they
through countless acts of performance, beyond what is are, recreating another arkhé, another axé, mirror of another
recorded by the alphabetic letter; through bodily perfor- logos. As the poet Edimilson says:36
mance — movements, gestures, dances, mime, dramatiza-
tions, celebratory ceremonies, rituals, etc. — the selective Family Place
memory of prior knowledge is instituted and maintained
in the social and cultural spheres. Thus, in the oralitura A river does not divide two banks.
of the Congados, the body is a portal that simultaneously What is planted on the sides
inscribes and interprets, signifies and is signified, being
projected as continent and content, place, environment is what separates it.
and vehicle of memory, “a place of transference, [...] a mir- ....................
ror that contains the gaze of the observer and the object of For the devout everything is many things. A ravine
the gaze, mutually reflecting each other.”34 of water that surrounds
It is said that, long ago, African enslaved in the living and dead.
Americas drew on the shell of sea turtles and on the plumage ....................
of certain birds cosmograms of, their cultures of origin, to We Bianos have solved the riddle.
communicate to their ancestors, who rested in Africa, their The pond where we are thinks itself river.
stops in the distant landscapes of the Americas. In the poetic
forms that sustain us, in response to the gestures of ancestry, Here and there are parts
we can echo the Angolan poet Ruy Duarte de Carvalho: of eyes in motion.
As they are in their difference the same God
There is no place found and Zambiapungo.
with no place lost.
The lines of a place are married together, Família Lugar
in the meeting of memory
with the matrix.35 Um rio não divide duas margens.
O que se planta nos lados

33/ Joseph Roach, op. cit., pp. 46-7. é que o separa.

34/ Mary N. Roberts e Allen F. Roberts, op. cit., p. 86.
35/ Ruy Duarte Carvalho, Lavra: poesia reunida 1970-2000. Lisboa: Coto-
via, 2005, p. 231. 36/ Edimilson de Almeida Pereira, op. cit.

326
327
 ....................
Para um devoto tudo é muitas coisas. Uma
ravina de águas que envolve
vivos e mortos.
....................
Estamos nós, os Bianos, de enigma resolvido.
A lagoa onde somos tem ideias de rio.
Aqui e lá são peças
dos olhos em movimento.
Como são na diferença os mesmos Deus
e Zambiapungo.
The Afro-Brazilian textuality and the performances of
orality offer us a wide range of possibilities of perception,
writing the history and memory of Blacks. This memory
of knowledge is also written as vermicelli on the staves of
paper and of body. A knowledge that is embroidered by the
thin blade of the word or in the delicate gesture. Littera and
litura. Engravings of the letter, the body and the voice.
Translated from Portuguese by Mariana Nacif Mendes
_ Prestei, 1996.
references
BENVENISTE, Émile. Problemas de linguística geral. Trans. Eduardo
Guimarães et al. São Paulo: Pontes, 1989, v. II.
CONNERTON, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambrigde: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
DREWAL, Margaret Thompson. Yoruba Ritual, Performers, Play, Agency.
Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.
FU-KIAU, K. K. Bunseki. “Ntangu-Tandu-Kolo: The Bantu-Kongo Concept of
Time”. In: Joseph K. Adjaye (ed.). Time in the Black Experience. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1994.
MARTINS, Leda Maria. A cena em sombras. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1995.
_________. Afrografias da memória: o reinado do rosário no Jatobá. São Paulo:
Belo Horizonte: Perspectiva; Mazza, 1997.
NORA, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de memoire”. In:
FABRE, Geneviève; O’MEALLY, Robert (ed.). History and Memory in African:
American Culture. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994.
PADILHA, Laura Cavalcante. Entre voz e letra: o lugar da ancestralidade na
ficção angolana do séc. XX. Niterói: EDUFF, 1995.
PEREIRA, Edimilson de Almeida. Nós, os Bianos. Belo Horizonte: Mazza, 1996.
RISÉRIO, Antônio. Oriki orixá. São Paulo: Perspectiva,1996.
_________. Textos e tribos. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1993.
ROACH, Joseph. Culture and Performance in the Circum-Atlantic World. In:
PARKER, Andrew; SEDGWICK, Eve (ed.). Performativity and Performance.
Nova York; London: Routledge, 1995.
_________. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996.
ROBERTS, Mary N.; ROBERTS, Allen F. “Body Memory. Part. 1: Deftning the
person”. In: ROBERTS, Mary N.; ROBERTS, Allen F. (ed.). Memory, Luba Art
and the Making of History. New York; Munich: The Museum for African Art;
SANTOS, Juana Elbein dos. Os nagô e a morte: Pàde, Àsese e o culto Egum na
Bahia. 5. ed. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1988.
SCHECHNER, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
_________. “The Fun and the Web”, in Performance Theory. Revised and
Expanded Edition. New York; London:,Routledge, 1988.
SODRÉ, Muniz. Samba, o dono do corpo. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 1998.
SOYINKA, Wole. “Theatre in African Traditional Cultures: Survival
Patterns”. In: HUXLEY, Michael; WITTS, Noel (ed.). The Twentieth-Century
Performance Reader. London: Routledge, 1996.
THIONG’O, Ngũgĩ wa. Writers in Politics, a Re-engagement with Issues of
Literature and Society. A revised and enlarged edition. Oxford; Nairobi; Ports
Mouth: James Currey; EAEP; Heineman, 1997.
THOMPSON, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit, African and African: American
Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
_________. African Art in Motion: Icon and Act. Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1979.
TURNER, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre, the Human Seriousness of Play. New
York: PAJ Publications, 1982.
ZUMTHOR, Paul. A letra e a voz: a “literatura” medieval. Trans. Amálio
Pinheiro and Jerusa Pires Ferreira. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1993.
essays and collaborations
essays
diane lima is an independent curator, writer, researcher
and a key Black feminist voice in Brazilian contemporary
art. In 2021 she was awarded the Ford Foundation Global
Fellowship program that celebrates the next generation of
social justice leaders around the world. Its trajectory made
up of projects that challenge institutional and curatorial
practices resulted in the organization of the book Negros na
Piscina: contemporary art, curatorship and education (2023)
and Textes à lire à voix haute (2022). Other recent projects
include the exhibitions Paulo Nazareth: Vuadora (Pivô, São
Paulo, 2022); Antônio Obá: Path (Oude Kerk, Amsterdam,
2022) and Frestas – 3rd Sesc-SP Art Triennial – The river is
a serpent (Sesc Sorocaba, São Paulo, 2020-21). Master in
communication and semiotics from PUC-SP, her lectures
and texts have resonated in several institutions and inter-
national publications.
grada kilomba is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and
holder of a PhD in philosophy from the Free University of
Berlin (Germany). She has taught at several international
universities, such as the University of Arts in Vienna,
Austria. Her work raises questions around knowledge,
power and cyclic violence, and has been exhibited at
significant events such as the 10th Berlin Biennale;
Documenta 14; La Biennale de Lubumbashi VI; and
32nd Bienal de São Paulo; as well as numerous inter-
national museums and theaters. Kilomba works across
various mediums such as performance, scenic reading,
texts, video and installation, focusing on memory, trauma,
gender and post-colonialism. Her works feature in public
and private collections including Tate Modern (England).
330
331
hélio menezes is an anthropologist and internationalist
at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and an affiliated
scholar at the BrazilLab at Princeton University. He was
curator of contemporary art at Centro Cultural São Paulo
from 2019 to 2021, where he also served as curator of liter-
ature between March and October 2019, and international
coordinator of the World Social Forum in Belém (2009),
Dakar (2011) and Tunis (2013). Some of his most recent
works are Carolina Maria de Jesus: A Brazil for Brazilians
(ims Paulista), Histórias Afro-Atlânticas (masp and Instituto
Tomie Ohtake) and dos brasis (Sesc). In 2021, he was
acknowledged by ArtReview as one of the 100 most import-
ant people in the contemporary art world.
manuel borja-villel is PhD in art history from the City
University of New York and he was director of the Museo
Reina Sofía (Spain), responsible for the development and
the profound reinterpretation of the museum’s collection.
In recent years, Reina Sofía has strengthened its position
as a reference for cultural production through the work
carried out with an asymmetrical network of institutions
that includes, among others, museums, universities and
independent institutions. He directed the Fundación Antoni
Tàpies (Spain) from its creation in 1990 until 1998, and
made the foundation an experimental institution with a
program centered on institutional criticism. Already at the
head of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona from
1998 to 2008, he placed public management at the service
of the citizen’s agenda, creating a place of dissent through
radical pedagogy, criticism and institutional experimenta-
tion. He reflects on these and other themes in his latest book:
Campos magnéticos: Escritos de arte y Política (2020).
denise ferreira da silva is an artist, philosopher, profes-
sor, and director of The Social Justice Institute-GRSJ at the
University of British Columbia (Canada). Among her works
are the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy
(2018), and Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), the latter
in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman.
gladys tzul tzul, of the Maya K’iche’ people, is a PhD in
sociology and author of essays books. She has worked as
an expert witness in Guatemalan courts, in defense of
imprisoned community members, and in Honduras she
presented her gender expertise in the trial for the murder
of the environmental activist Berta Cáceres.
hagar kotef is a professor of political theory in the
Department of Politics and International Studies of
SOAS University of London (UK). She is the author of
The Colonizing Self: Or Home and Homelessness in Israel/
Palestine (2020) and Movement and the Ordering of Freedom:
On Liberal Governances of Mobility (2015).
leda maria martins is a poet, essayist, playwright, and
teacher. She published, among others, Afrografias da memória:
O reinado do Rosário no Jatobá (2021) and Performances do
tempo espiralar: Poéticas do corpo-tela (2021).
rizvana bradley is an assistant professor of film and
media at the University of California, Berkeley (USA). Her
research and essays on contemporary art, film, and media
have been published in several journals and offer a critical
examination of the Black body in a range of experimental
artistic practices.
tiganá santana is a composer, poet, multi-artist, trans-
lator, and researcher, and also professor of arts at the
Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) and at the Instituto
de Estudos Brasileiros of the Universidade de São Paulo
(IEB-USP) (Brazil). He was the first composer in Brazil to
present an album with songs in African languages.

ilenia caleo is a performer, activist, and researcher. With

a master’s degree in contemporary philosophy, she is a
researcher at Università Iuav di Venezia and co-founder
of the masters program in gender studies and politics at
Università Roma Tre (Italy). Her research focuses on bod-
ies, feminist epistemologies, experimental performing arts,
and new cultural institutions.
collaborations
abigail campos leal moves between art and philosophy
to create anti-colonial poetics. She is a professor of the
specialization course in Human Sciences and Decolonial
Thinking at PUC-SP. She presented performances at
the Museu da Imagem e do Som do Ceará and at Itaú
Cultural (São Paulo, Brazil), and published, among others,
ex/orbitâncias: os caminhos da deserção de gênero (2021).
ana longoni is a writer, curator, researcher, and professor
at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) (Argentina).
She studies the intersections between art and politics in
Argentina and Latin America from the mid-20th century to
present days and is the author of Parir/Partir (2022), among
other books.
barbara copque is a professor at the Universidade do
Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) (Brazil), anthropolo-
gist-who-photographs, member of the Visual Anthropology
Committee of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology
and advisor to the Museu Afrodigital Rio de Janeiro. She
takes part in the Afrovisualidades group, in the project
Mapeando Arte e Cultura Visual Periférica [Mapping Art
and Visual Culture in the Outskirts] and has works in the
collection of the Museu de Arte do Rio.
beatriz martínez hijazo is a researcher. She holds a mas-
ter’s degree in contemporary art history and visual culture
from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and was the
cocurator of the exhibition Un ato de ver que se despliega –
Colección Susana y Ricardo Steinbruch (2022) at the Museo
Reina Sofía (Spain).
carles guerra is an artist, writer, and independent
researcher. He was the director of La Virreina Centre de la
Imatge, chief curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo
de Barcelona (MACBA) and, between 2015 and 2020,
executive director at Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Spain). He
was the curator of the exhibition Francesc Tosquelles: Like a
Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field (2022) at the Museo Reina
Sofía (Spain).
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cíntia guedes is an multidisciplinary artist, researcher,
and professor. She has a PhD in communication from the
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), with an
emphasis on racial relations and the coloniality of power
and the production of subjectivity.
claudinei roberto da silva is a guest curator at the Museu
Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo. He curated the exhibitions
Sidney Amaral: O banzo, o amor e a cozinha (2015), at the
Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo, 13ª Bienal Naïfs do
Brasil (2016), at Sesc, and 37º Panorama da Arte Brasileira:
Sob as cinzas, brasa (2022), at the Museu de Arte Moderna
de São Paulo (MAM-SP) (Brazil).
david pérez is a professor of keys of artistic speech at the
Universitat Politècnica de València and member of the
Centro de Investigación Arte y Entorno, in the same uni-
versity (Spain). He is also the author of several essays on
art, aesthetics, and thought.
déba tacana is a visual artist, researcher, and professor
of visual arts at the Universidade Federal do Acre (UFAC)
(Brazil). She develops a poetic investigation of the visible
and invisible dimensions through matter: ceramic body ×
Indigenous body × territory-body, in dialogue with trans-
formations of borders and landscapes of wars in Abya Yala.
emanuel monteiro is an artist and professor of visual arts
at the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR) (Brazil). His
research focus on the languages ​​of drawing and painting.
fernanda carvajal is a sociologist and works on the inter-
sections between art, sexuality, and politics. She is currently
a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones
Científicas y Técnicas (Conicet) (Argentina) and a member of
the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (RedCSur).
getsemaní guevara romero is an art historian, archi-
vist, and curator. She works at Centro de Documentación
Arkheia, part of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo
MUAC (Mexico). Her research focus on feminisms, memory,
and archives.
heitor augusto works on the intersections between film
curatorship and programming, research, writing, and
teaching in the field of cinema. He works as the head of
programming for Instituto Nicho 54 (Brazil).
horrana de kássia santoz is a curator and educator, and
conducted the curatorial research for the exhibitions 40
anos do Videobrasil, of the Associação Cultural Videobrasil,
and Zonas de sombra, at Pinacoteca de São Bernardo do
Campo (Brazil). Since 2007, she has been working in the
development of new educational practices in museums
and cultural institutions.
igor de albuquerque is an editor, translator, and essay-
ist. He worked as the editor of Revista Barril and today is
the editor of Revista Canarana. In 2022 he won the Serrote
essay award. He published -13, -38: Amanhã de novo (2019)
and is now a PhD candidate in art and philosophy at the
Universidade de São Paulo (USP) (Brazil), studying the
work of Carlo Michelstaedter.
isabel tejeda is a professor at the Universidad de Murcia
(Spain). She has curated more than eighty exhibitions in
Spain, Italy, Morocco, France, United Kingdom, Puerto
Rico, and Argentina. She specializes in feminisms and
modern and contemporary artists.
josé antonio sánchez is the author of Brecht y el expresion-
ismo (1992), Dramaturgias de la imagen (1994), Prácticas
de lo real en la escena contemporánea (2007) and Cuerpos
ajenos (2017). He is a professor at the Universidad de
Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) and founder of the research
group ARTEA (Spain). He has recently worked in exhibi-
tions and public programs of several museums in Spain,
México, and Colombia.
juliana de arruda sampaio is an anthropologist and
works as a researcher and curatorial assistant. She
holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from the
Universidade de São Paulo (USP) (Brazil) and her research
focus on visual arts, Black feminism, and curatorship.
kaira cabañas is the associate director for Academic
Programs and Publications at the Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts (The Center) at the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (USA). She is the author
of many books, such as Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and
Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art (2021) and
Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global
Contemporary Art (2018), which will be published in Brazil
in 2023.
kênia freitas is a curator and programmer at Cinema
do Dragão (Brazil). She has a PhD in communication and
culture from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
(UFRJ) and, as an independent researcher, she focus on
afrofuturism, Black cinema, and film curatorship and
criticism. She is also a member of FICINE – Itinerant Black
Cinema Forum (Brazil).
kike españa is an researcher and activist based in Málaga.
He works as the editor of the publishing house Subtextos,
and also takes part in the collective bookshop Suburbia
and the social and cultural center La Casa Invisible (Spain).
luciana brito is a historian and a professor at the
Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB)
(Brazil). She is the author of Temores da África: Segurança,
legislação e população africana na Bahia oitocen-
tista (Thomas Skidmore award, 2019) and also a columnist
at Nexo Jornal.
luciane ramos silva is a dance artist, anthropologist, and
educator. She has a PhD in performing arts and a master’s
degree in anthropology from Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (Unicamp) (Brazil), and researches afro-dias-
poric and African corporeities, articulating the ideas of
plurality, transformation, and counter-hegemonic writings.
She is also co-editor of the magazine O Menelick 2o Ato.
marco baravalle is a researcher, activist, and curator. He
is a member of Sale Docks, a collective and self-managed
space for visual arts and activism in Venice, and takes part
in the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI). A research
fellow at Università Iuav di Venezia (Italy), he is the author
of L’autunno caldo del curatore: Arte, neoliberismo, pandemia
(2021) and co-editor of Art for UBI (Manifesto) (2022).
maria luiza meneses is an independent curator. She stud-
ies art history at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo
(Unifesp) and is a member of the collectives Red LEHA,
Nacional Trovoa, and Rede Graffiteiras Negras. She carries
out the Pinacoteca Digital Mauá project and was the cura-
tor of the exhibition Travessias do moderno em Mauá.
mario gooden is a cultural practice architect and direc-
tor of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design. His
practice involves the cultural landscape and the intersec-
tionality between architecture, race, gender, sexuality,
and technology. Gooden is also a professor at the Graduate
School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
of Columbia University, where he is the director of the
master of architecture program and co-director of the
Global Africa Lab (GAL) (USA). He is the author of Dark
Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity (2016).
miro spinelli is an artist and researcher. He is a PhD candi-
date in performance studies at New York University (NYU)
(USA) and works in the overlapping between performance,
writing, visual arts, and theory. His artistic and intellec-
tual practice is engaged in anti-colonial strategies created
through a radical union with things, materials, and the
invisible produced in the relations with and between them.
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natalia arcos salvo is a curator, researcher, and art
theorist. She is a founding member of the Grupo de
Investigación en Arte y Política (GIAP), based in Chiapas
(Mexico), where she also runs the center for artistic resi-
dencies since 2013.
nicole smythe-johnson is a writer and independent
curator from Kingston (Jamaica). She is currently a PhD
candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the
University of Texas at Austin (USA). She curated If we are
here… (2023-2024) at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin
and worked at the 2022 Kingston Biennial and at the exhi-
bition John Dunkley: Neither Day Nor Night (2017-2018), in
the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
oluremi onabanjo works as an associate curator in the
Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art
History and Archeology at Columbia University.
omar berrada is a Moroccan writer and curator whose
work focuses on the politics of translation and intergener-
ational transmission. He is the author the poetry collection
Clonal Hum and is currently studying racial dynamics in
North Africa.
pérola mathias is a sociologist, researcher of contempo-
rary Brazilian music, and works as a journalist.
philippe cyroulnik was the director of Le Crédac and
Le 19, Crac (France). He was curator of solo and group
exhibitions and wrote essays on Magdalena Jitrik, Martin
Reyna, Ceija Stojka, Alain Clément, Jean-Louis Delbes, Joël
Kermarrec, among others.
rafael garcía has been part of the Temporary Exhibitions
Department of the Museo Reina Sofía (Spain) since 2003,
and was responsible for the coordination and management
of more than forty exhibitions, several of them organised
with museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA
(USA) and Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Brazil).
renato menezes is a PhD candidate in art history and
theory at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
(France). He is coeditor of França Antártica: Ensaios inter-
disciplinares (2020) and currently works as a curator at the
Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Brazil).
rocío robles tardío has a PhD in art history and is an
assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the
Universidad Complutense Madrid. She works as a cura-
tor for several institutions (Museo Reina Sofía, Artium
Museoa) and is a researcher in national/ international proj-
ects, having authored many essays and books such as Dora
Maar: código documental para la serie fotográfica “Guernica”
de Picasso (2023) and Informe “Guernica”: Sobre el lienzo de
Picasso y su imagen (2019).
rossina cazali is an independent curator and researcher.
She received the John Guggenheim Fellowship and the
Prince Claus Award for her work. She has curated con-
temporary art exhibitions from Guatemala in museums
such as Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC)
(Mexico), Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC)
(Costa Rica) and Museo Reina Sofía (Spain). She currently
heads LABORAL project and is a co-founder of the LAICA
project for research and experimentation in contemporary
art and design.
sara ramos is a researcher, editor, translator, and poet
from Tocantins (Brazil). She has a master’s degree in
comparative literature at the Universidade Federal da
Integração Latino-Americana (UNILA) (Brazil) and is the
author of pequeno manual da fúria (2022).
sol henaro is a curator specializing in memory(s) policies
and a member of Red Conceptualismos del Sur (RedCSur)
since 2010. She is the curator of the Documental Collection
and responsible for the Centro de Documentación Arkheia
of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC)
(Mexico).
sylvia monasterios is a Venezuelan curator, cultural
manager, and translator. She has a master’s degree in art,
education, and cultural history, and was the curator of
Núcleo de Artes Visuais do Centro Cultural São Paulo and
a programmer at Secretaria Municipal de Cultura de São
Paulo (Brazil).
tarcisio almeida is an independent curator and
researcher. A PhD candidate in Núcleo de Estudos da
Cultura Contemporânea at the Universidade Federal de
Mato Grosso (UFMT) (Brazil), he has a master’s degree in
clinical psychology at the Center for Subjective Studies
(PUC-SP) and currently focus his research on artistic exper-
iments and modes of creation based on liberation, free-
dom, and cognitive justice from the field of visual arts.
tatiana nascimento is an artist and researcher in sexu-
al-dissident Black poetics. She published, among others
books, Palavra preta (2021), Lundu (2016), Oriki de amor sel-
vagem (2018) and Leve sua culpa branca pra terapia (2019).
thiago de paula souza is a curator, educator, and
researcher. A PhD candidate at HDK-Valand – Academy of
Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden),
he is responsible for co-curating the Nomadic Program
2022/2023 at the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art
(Netherlands) and is a member of the Nesr Art Foundation
artistic committee (Angola).
josé olympio da veiga pereira
president – fundação bienal de são paulo

Every two years, the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion becomes the space, and tie together texts and images. In keeping
a stage for the most relevant works and themes in the art with the financial and administrative health of the event,
world at the time. Visitors walking among the paintings, together, these teams provide the environment needed to
sculptures, drawings, research, installations, and so many host the Bienal.
other languages in constant transformation, and realized The installations happen with tight deadlines, and
by artists from the most diverse settings, can imagine the each step in this phase must be studied and measured
effort that goes into each part of the exhibition. The task beforehand. First, the walls are erected and the archi-
of orchestrating a show on the scale of the Bienal de São tecture starts to take shape. The pavilion is overtaken by
Paulo, and with the degree of excellence that it demands, is construction workers, wood, plaster, and iron. Once the
only possible thanks to the collective work of professionals building has been prepared, it is time to welcome the
from the most varied specializations. artworks and the boxes they are packaged in, which are
Everything begins with the choice of a curatorial unpacked so the installers can mount the works with care
proposal, which is always new, always innovative. From that and precision. In an ocean of details and finishings, the
moment, the preparations begin, only ending when the exhi- text panels are mounted, the lights turn on, visitor guides
bition closes. The endless meetings and difficult decisions, take their places, and another Bienal opens its doors.
messages exchanged and contracts needing signing, sched- For the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, the curatorial
ules and their multiple revisions, budget and fundraising, collective formed of Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio
and strengthening ties with public authorities and private Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel, selected over a hundred
initiatives in a network of sponsors, supporters, and partner- participants who, in incalculable ways, choreographed the
ships. Everything needs to be negotiated with transparency impossible. The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo is proud to
and designed in a way that respects the conservation of the hold this exhibition and, in its own way, to play a part in this
pavilion itself — a jewel of modern architecture — as well as impossible choreography, orchestrated by collective work.
the environment, according to the institutional guidelines
that include mitigating the event’s carbon footprint.
The production team transforms the abstract into
concrete: building bridges between the collections, work-
ing alongside suppliers of the most varied trades, arrang-
ing transport, dealing with programming, and creating the
conditions necessary for the works to be included in the
exhibition with the utmost care, safety, and creativity. The
education team offers formation courses for educators,
sets up outreach programs in schools and research centers,
produces educational publications, their tools of the trade,
and mediates the relationship between the works and vis-
itors interested in creating new connections between their
experiences and the art exhibited in the show. The com-
munication team, in turn, delivers news and announces
the exhibition contents to a captive and demanding Bienal
public while simultaneously inviting people who have
never had the chance to see the exhibition up close. It is
also down to them to coordinate publications, signpost

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margareth menezes
minister of culture of brazil

Sharing the historic mission of the Ministry of Culture

of the Federal Government to promote the growth of the
cultural field and make it more accessible, in addition to
fostering the creative economy, the Bienal de São Paulo
now reaches its 35th edition with yet another innovative
curatorial project in tune with the most urgent issues of
our time. This is a milestone in the history of this event,
whose goal has always been to welcome a wide audience
and showcase the latest in the art world, while promoting
sustainability and human rights, which are essential for
strengthening an increasing civic culture.
Since its first edition in 1951, the Bienal de
São Paulo has occupied a prestigious place in national
culture that goes far beyond its exhibitions. Its consistent
continuity over the years has been responsible for forming
and training cultural workers in the most varied fields,
such as educators, art critics, assemblers, architects, pro-
ducers, editors, communicators, designers and many other
trades, with each project directly and indirectly impacting
an extraordinary number of individuals, families and lives.
Among the impacts of the exhibition, it is import-
ant to highlight the impeccable educational activity of the
Bienal. Each of its editions creates the necessary condi-
tions to reach new audiences and foster the critical knowl-
edge of new visitors of all ages. With a permanent educa-
tion team, the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo develops free
courses, facilitation initiatives and training programs for
educators and facilitators, in addition to producing educa-
tional publications, essential working tools for artistic-ped-
agogical projects.
In the colorful and multiple framework of the
Bienal de São Paulo, opportunities are created to learn
more about ourselves, appreciate the diversity of the world
and celebrate culture. For the Federal Government, repre-
sented here by the Ministry of Culture, there is no national
unity without art, and no art without democracy. Let’s
celebrate another Bienal de São Paulo. Long live art!
itaú cultural instituto cultural vale

In its 35-year history, Itaú Cultural (IC) has played a fun- Instituto Cultural Vale is delighted to be a part of the
damental role in supporting art and culture in its most 35th Bienal de São Paulo – Choreographies of the Impossible,
diverse languages and manifestations. This is achieved and its educational program, which is exploring new for-
through research, content production, mapping, incen- mats and approaches this year.
tives, and dissemination, but also through partnerships Given the curatorial proposal to create a “space for
with agents who are aligned with our values, such as the experimentation, open to the dances of the unimaginable”,
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. as defined by the curators, we have joined this initiative
Support for the Bienal de São Paulo – an important that connects art and education, expands access to culture
space of encounter and exchange between artists, cura- and brings students, teachers and families closer to inter-
tors, critics, and the public – reaffirms IC’s commitment disciplinary experiences.
to promoting the visual arts and their transformative role. With a joint, horizontal and diverse curatorship,
Within this area, the organization is coordinating various the Bienal – the largest contemporary art exhibition in
actions, both physical and virtual exhibitions, as well as the Southern Hemisphere – invites us to think of art as an
educational activities. exercise in dialogue, as an opening to new narratives and
Among recent exhibitions, Um século de agora as a space for learning.
[A Century From Now] presented an overview of art and It is, in this regard, also connected to the purpose
culture currently produced in Brazil, jointly curated by Júlia of the Instituto Cultural Vale: to expand opportunities for
Rebouças, Luciara Ribeiro, and Naine Terena. Urban art also learning, reflecting, developing new visions and sharing
had its space, with Além das ruas: histórias do graffiti [Beyond art, culture and education inside and outside museums
the Streets: Graffiti Stories], running until the end of July. throughout Brazil.
On itaucultural.org.br, the public can find the virtual exhibi-
tions Filmes e vídeos de artistas [Films and Videos by Artists],
which features audiovisual works of an experimental nature,
and Livros de Artista na Coleção Itaú Cultural [Artist Books in
the Itaú Cultural Collection], whose immersive and interac-
tive resources allow for a detailed appreciation.
In the area of education, the Entreolhares program
offers courses and workshops aimed at developing those
who will work professionally in the field of the visual
arts. These and other courses are available at Escola Itaú
Cultural (escola.itaucultural.org.br). The Enciclopédia Itaú
Cultural (enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br) is an important
tool for sharing knowledge, offering access to entries on
characters, works, and events in the visual arts.

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bloomberg
Bloomberg is proud to sponsor Choreographies of the
Impossible, the 35th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo.
For more than a decade we have supported the Bienal’s
exceptional contemporary art exhibitions in the stunning
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park and around
Brazil, through our partnership with Fundação Bienal. This
year’s edition continues the tradition of presenting capti-
vating and thought-provoking art installations that are free
and open to the public.
Every day, Bloomberg connects influential decision
makers to a dynamic network of information, people, and
ideas. With more than 19,000 employees in 176 offices,
Bloomberg delivers business and financial information,
news and insight around the world. Our dedication to inno-
vation and new ideas extends to our longstanding support
of arts, which we believe are a valuable way to engage cit-
izens and strengthen communities. Through our funding,
we help increase access to culture and empower artists and
cultural organizations to reach broader audiences.
sesc são paulo
Confronted with the incessant problems of humanity,
perhaps it is worth dwelling a little longer on some open
questions, taking sustenance from resources that allow us
to dig and build answers procedurally. In this sense, art, in
its many guises, offers fertile ground for critical elabora-
tions about the world and ourselves.
The meeting of art and education — both understood
as fields of knowledge — enables the torsion of time and
space: it becomes possible, thus, to suspend neutralities
and dilate what is precipitated in structures. How far is this
approach able to infer the real and interfere in it? It allows
us to (re)populate imaginaries, to unpick the universalizing
statute attributed to concepts, practices and people, and
thus to carve out reality with narratives that articulate the
individual and the collective, in a procedural and coherent
manner regarding the issues that permeate existence.
It is according to this panorama that Sesc São Paulo
and the Fundação Bienal, through the 35th Bienal de São
Paulo, reiterate their long-standing partnership, a mutual
commitment to fostering experiences of coexistence with
the visual arts, expanding access to cultural actions and
the exercise of otherness.
This partnership, which has been established and
renewed for over a decade, has led to the promotion of
projects such as simultaneous exhibitions, public meet-
ings, seminars and training for educators, as well as the
consolidated itinerant exhibition with excerpts from the
Bienal in Sesc units in the wider state of São Paulo. The
confluence of choices and propositions is part of the insti-
tutional perspective of culture as a right, and conceives,
together with one of the largest exhibitions in the country,
an accessible horizon for contemporary art in Brazil.
fundação bienal de são paulo
Founder
Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho ·
1898 –1977 chairman e meritus
Governing board
Eduardo Saron · president
Ana Helena Godoy Pereira de
Almeida Pires · vice president
Lifetime members
Adolpho Leirner
Beno Suchodolski
Carlos Francisco Bandeira Lins
Cesar Giobbi
Elizabeth Machado
Jens Olesen
Julio Landmann
Marcos Arbaitman
Maria Ignez Corrêa da Costa Barbosa
Pedro Aranha Corrêa do Lago
Pedro Paulo de Sena Madureira
Roberto Muylaert
Rubens José Mattos Cunha Lima
Joaquim de Arruda Falcão Neto Board of directors
José Olympio da Veiga Pereira José Olympio da Veiga Pereira ·
(on leave) president
Kelly de Amorim
Ligia Fonseca Ferreira Marcelo Mattos Araujo · first
Lucio Gomes Machado vice president
Luis Terepins Andrea Pinheiro · second
Maguy Etlin vice-president
Manoela Queiroz Bacelar Ana Paula Martinez
Marcelo Mattos Araujo (on leave) Daniel Sonder
Miguel Wady Chaia Francisco J. Pinheiro Guimarães
Neide Helena de Moraes Luiz Lara
Octavio Manoel Rodrigues de Barros Maria Rita Drummond
Rodrigo Bresser Pereira
Ronaldo Cezar Coelho
Rosiane Pecora
Sérgio Spinelli Silva Jr.
Susana Leirner Steinbruch
Tito Enrique da Silva Neto
Victor Pardini
Audit board
Edna Sousa de Holanda
Flávio Moura
Octavio Manoel Rodrigues de Barros

Members International Advisory Board

Alberto Emmanuel Whitaker Maguy Etlin · president
Alfredo Egydio Setubal Pedro Aranha Corrêa do Lago ·
Ana Helena Godoy Pereira de vice president
Almeida Pires Andrea de Botton Dreesmann and
Angelo Andrea Matarazzo Quinten Dreesmann
Antonio Henrique Cunha Bueno Barbara Sobel
Beatriz Yunes Guarita Catherine Petitgas
Camila Appel Frances Reynolds
Carlos Alberto Frederico Mariana A. Teixeira de Carvalho
Carlos Augusto Calil Mélanie Berghmans
Carlos Jereissati Miwa Taguchi-Sugiyama
Claudio Thomaz Lobo Sonder Paula Macedo Weiss and
Daniela Montingelli Villela Daniel Weiss
Danilo Santos de Miranda Sandra Hegedüs
Eduardo Saron
Fábio Magalhães
Felippe Crescenti
Flavia Buarque de Almeida
Flávia Cipovicci Berenguer
Flavia Regina de Souza Oliveira
Flávio Moura
Francisco Alambert
Gustavo Ioschpe
Heitor Martins
Helio Seibel
Isay Weinfeld
Jackson Schneider

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Team Communications Superintendency
Ana Elisa de Carvalho Price ·
Superintendencies coordinator – design
Antonio Thomaz Lessa Garcia · Adriano Campos
chief operating officer Eduardo Lirani
Felipe de Melo Gomes
Felipe Isola · chief projects officer Francisco Belle Bresolin
Joaquim Millan · chief projects officer Julia Bolliger Murari
Luciana Araujo Marques
Caroline Carrion · Marina Fonseca
chief communications officer Rafael Falasco
Executive Superintendency Bienal Archive
Giovanna Querido Ana Luiza de Oliveira Mattos ·
Marcella Batista manager
Laís Barbudo Carrasco · manager
Institutional Relations and Amanda Pereira Siqueira
Partnerships Ana Helena Grizotto Custódio
Irina Cypel · manager Anna Beatriz Corrêa Bortoletto
Deborah Moreira Antonio Paulo Carretta
Laura Caldas Daniel Malva Ribeiro
Marjorie Faria Kleber Costa Timoteo
Raquel Silva Marcele Souto Yakabi
Viviane Teixeira Melânie Vargas de Araujo
Pedro Ivo Trasferetti von Ah
Projects Superintendency Raquel Coelho Moliterno
Sheila Virginia Rocha de
Production Oliveira Castro
Dorinha Santos · Leandro Melo · conservation advisor
production coordinator Aila Passeto Castro de Sousa · intern
Ariel Rosa Grininger Fernanda Lustosa · intern
Bernard Lemos Tjabbes Júlia Maia Lisboa · intern
Camila Cadette Ferreira Julia Schettini Alves · intern
Camilla Ayla Milena Ondichiatti Bessan · intern
Carolina da Costa Angelo
Manoel Borba
Nuno Holanda de Sá do Espírito Santo
Tatiana Oliveira de Farias
Financial and administrative
Finances
Amarildo Firmino Gomes · manager
Edson Pereira de Carvalho
Fábio Kato
Silvia Andrade Simões Branco
Materials and property
Valdomiro Rodrigues da Silva Neto ·
manager
Larissa Di Ciero Ferradas ·
coordinator
Angélica de Oliveira Divino
Daniel Pereira
Victor Senciel
Vinícius Robson da Silva Araújo
Wagner Pereira de Andrade
Planning and operations
Rone Amabile
Vera Lucia Kogan
Human resources
Higor Tocchio
Juarez Fonseca dos Reis Junior
Matheus Andrade Sartori
Information technology
Ricardo Bellucci
Jhones Alves do Nascimento
Matheus Lourenço

Education
Simone Lopes de Lira ·
production coordinator
Thiago Gil de Oliveira Virava ·
content coordinator
André Leitão
Danilo Pera
Diana Dobránszky
Giovanna Endrigo
Regiane Ishii
Renato Lopes
35th Bienal de São Paulo – Audiovisual Beatriz Teles
choreographies of the impossible Maxi Bruno Felipe Tavares Corrêa
Mit Arte · AV advisory Caroline de Alencar Goncalves
Curatorship Eduardo André
Diane Lima AV content and photographic Gal Rodrigues
Grada Kilomba documentation Gladys UJU Balbino Agbanusi
Hélio Menezes Bruno Fernandes Gustavo Albanese Pose Ribeiro da
Manuel Borja-Villel Danilo Komniski Fonseca
Freddy Leal Hellen Nicolau
Sylvia Monasterios · Leo Eloy Henrique Camargo Vidigal
curatorial assistance Levi Fanan Larissa Morales
Tarcisio Almeida · Maria Giovana de Lira Pereira
curatorial assistance Carriers Marina Akemi Fukumoto
Alves Tegam Rafael Santos Silva
Matilde Outeiro · Millenium Rafael Tae Hyun Kim
curatorial assistance 2022 Tuca Palhares de Macedo
Cleaning
Curatorial Council MF Produção e Eventos e Education · mediation
Omar Berrada Serviços Ltda. Ana Krein
Sandra Benites Anali Dupré
Sol Henaro Conservation Andre Pereira de Almeida
Thomas Jean Lax Alice Gontijo Ânella Fyama de Sousa Barbosa
Camila Marchiori Bruno Costa dos Santos
Architecture and Exhibition Design Carolina Lewandowski Caio de Sousa Feitosa
Vão – Authorship Daniel Mussi Camila Aparecida Padilha Gomes
Anna Juni Luanda Andrade Caroline Luz
Enk te Winkel Patrícia Reis Cristina Alejandra Mena Bastidas
Gustavo Delonero Pollynne Santana Dandara Kuntê
Dani Silva
Team Design Dilma Ângela da Silva
Luiza Souza Tamara Lichtenstein · Fauston Henrique Della Flora
Gabriela Rochitte design assistance Zandona
Luisa Barone Gabri Gregório Floriano
Editorial Giuliana Takahira
Visual Identity Cristina Fino · editorial coordination Iberê Terra de Souza Oliveira
Nontsikelelo Mutiti Igor de Albuquerque · Jacob Alves Bezerra Junior
research and content Janaina Eleuterio
Accessibility Consulting Mariana Leme · editorial assistance Jhow Carvalho
Mais Diferenças Pérola Mathias · research and content Júlia Iwanaga
Kennedy Maciel da Silva
Acoustic Consulting Education Leonel Vicente Mendes
João Miguel Torres Galindo Bruna de Jesus Silva · advisory Lia Cazumi Yokoyama Emi
Tailicie Paloma Paranhos do Lua
Advertising Agency Nascimento · advisory Luis Carlos Batista
DOJO Guilherme Batista Leite · auxiliary Luiz Fernando Dias Diogo
Maria Eduarda Sacramento de Sousa Malu Bandeira
Advisor for Public Program · auxiliary Maria Trindade
Dora Silveira Corrêa Mario Tadeo Urzagaste Galarza
Education · internship Mira Lima
Ambulance and Medical Station Amira Rodrigues Varteresian Mohamed de Azambuja de Ávila
Premium Serviços Médicos Ltda. Ana Beatriz de Andrade Natália Dias da Mota Santos
Cangussu Lima Nivea Matias Silva
Assembly Ana Beatriz Nascimento Pazetto Pietra de Ofa Cunha Serra
Gala Art Installation Beatriz Soares Rodrigues Rafaella Canuto

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Ricarda Wapichana Transportation Logistics
Roberta Uiop Luiz Santório · International
Rose Mara Kielela Nilson Lopes · National
Selva Campos
Sonia Cristina Guirado Cardoso Website
Stephanie Oliveira da Silva Namibia Chroma and Fluxo
Tui Xavier Isnard
Vinícius Quintas Massimino
Yurungai

Electrical Distribution
AGR Elétrica Ltda.

Exhibition Management
Danilo Lorena Garcia
Sergio Faria Lima · assistance

External Area Development

Movediça + Junta · Architecture
Sagaz Esportes · Production

Firefighter
Local Serviços Especializados Ltda.
– ME

Insurance
Geco corretora de seguros
Chubb
Liberty

International Guest Relations

Janaina Fainer

Internet wi-fi
ITS Online

Light Design
Fernanda Carvalho
Emília Ramos
Luana Alves
Cristina Souto

Press Office
Index · National Press Office
Sutton PR · International Press Office

Scenography
Cinestand
Metro Cenografia

Security
Prevenção Vigilância e Segurança
Ltda.
 Cleusa Garfinkel Luísa Matsushita
acknowledgements Dalton Paula Luiza Adas
Dandara Queiroz Mabel Tapia
Daniel Rangel Mami Kataoka
Daniella Conceição Mattos Araújo Manuel B. Burbano
Danielle Freire Manuela Gómez
David de Jesus Nascimento Mara e Marcio Fainziliber
Djamila Ribeiro Marcelo Expósito
Douglas Rodrigues Márcia e Marcus Martins
Eduardo F. Costantini Marco Antonio Nakata
Eduardo Guzman Cordero Marco Túlio e Vanessa Gomes
Elielton Ribeiro Margareth Menezes
Elisa Salazar y Jaime Soubrie Margherita Belcredi
Emilio Payán Mari Stokler
Emily Epelbaum-Bush María Amalia García
Eskil Lam María Amalia León de Jorge
individual Facundo Guerra Maria Aparecida Weiss
Fernanda Simon Maria Carolina Casati
Adele Nelson Florencia Malbran Maria Elena Ortiz
Agar Ledo Francis Djiwornu Maria Lucia Veríssimo
Alba Sagols Françoise Vergès Maria Luisa Marinho
Alberto Cruz Gabril Planella Maria Luiza Meneses
Alice Olausson Gabriel Calparsoro Maria Prata
Alicia Pinteño Garry Trudeau Marie-Ann Yemsi
Aline Torres Geni Núñez Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt
Almudena Díez García Geraldo Sena Mario Cader-Frech
Amanda Carneiro Gilson Rodrigues Marjolaine Calipel
Ana Carolina Ralston Gustavo and Cristina Penna Marta Rincón
Ana Hikari Hacco de Ridder Max Levai
Ana Longoni Henda Ducados Mercedes Vilardell
Ana Roman Henilton Parente de Menezes Mel Duarte
Ana Tomé Henry Jackman Michelle Louise
Andrea Meneghelli Hilde Koch-Ockier & Rudy Koch-Ockier Miguel López
Anielle Franco Holly Bynoe Mira Bernabeu
Annabelle Birchenough Igi Ayedun Monique du Plessis
Annouchka de Andrade Irene Larraza Aizpurua Naine Terena
Antoine Frerot Iris Fabre Natalia Delgado
Aquiles Coelho Silva Isaac Rudman Nesrine Miloudi
Astrid Fontenelle Isaac Silva Nicola Liucci-Goutinkov Pompidou
Audrey Hörmann Isabel de Naverán Nicola Wohlfarth
Augusto Luitgards Isabel Izquierdo Noëlig Le Roux
Barbara Alves Janaron Uhãy Pataxó O'Neil Lawrence
Beatriz Martínez Hijazo Jardis Volpe Pamela Joyner
Benedita Aparecida da Silva Javier Mora Patrice Pauc
Betty Rudman João Fernandes Paula Alves de Souza
Bruce Brouwn João Paulo Quintella Paulo Borges
Bruno Duarte Johanna Stein Paulo Petrarca
Camila and Francisco Horta Jorge Fernández Philip Berg
Calixto Neto José Andrés Torres Mora Philippe Gellman
Carina Kurta José Antonio Sánchez Rachel Maia
Carla Guagliardi José Carlos Ferreira Rafael García Horrillo
Carlos Vogt José Paulo Agrello Rania Moussa Morin
Carmen Accaputo Juan Manuel Casado Raphaële Bianchi
Carmen Silva Julia Borja Regina Casé
Carmo Jonhson Juliana de Arruda Sampaio Regina Pereira
Carolina González Julie Ludwig Renan Quinalha
Caroline Bourgeois Justo Navarro Ricardo Resende
Caroline Thompson & Jean-Pierre Weill Kananda Eller Rita Carreira
Cecilia Sicupira Kathleen Fuld Rodrigo Toledo
Cécile Zoonens Kevin David Roger Buergel
Chantal Wong Kim Dang Roland Groenenboom
Charlene Vollenhoven Laís Franklin Rolando Ignacio Bulacios
Charles Esche Léa Chikhani Rongomai Kapiri-Marama
Chema González Leon Macedo Weiss Rosario Peiró
Christophe Cherix Letícia Velozo Ruli Moretti
Chia Lee Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Ryan Lynch
Cintia Delgado Lorraine Leu Sabina Sabolovic
Claudia Marchetti Lourdes Fernández Sabrina Fidalgo
Luanda Vieira Saidiya Hartman
Luciano Zubillaga Sam Krack
Lucimery Ribeiro Sandra Birmaher
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Santiago Herrero Amigo Conselho de Defesa do Patrimônio Mendes Wood DM
Sasha-Kay Nicole Histórico, Arqueológico, Artístico e Michel Rein Brussels
Sepake Angiama Turístico do Estado de São Paulo – Ministério da Cultura
Simone Leigh Condephaat Ministério da Educação
Soledad Liaño Conselho Municipal de Preservação Ministério da Igualdade Racial
Sônia Guajajara do Patrimônio Histórico, Cultural e Ministério das Relações Exteriores
Sonia Sassi Ambiental da Cidade de São Paulo – Ministerio de Culturas, Descolonización y
Stefano Carta Conpresp Despatriarcalización de Bolivia
Stephanie Ribeiro Consulado General y Centro de Promoción Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el
Stuart Bernstein de la República Argentina en San Pablo Patrimonio – Gobierno de Chile
Sueli Carneiro Consulado Geral da Bolívia em São Paulo Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de
Suely Rolnik Consulado Geral da França em São Paulo Bolivia
Teresa Carvalho Consulado Geral da República Dominicana Ministério do Meio Ambiente
Teresa Velázquez em São Paulo Ministério do Turismo
Thai de Melo Consulado Geral da República Federal da Ministério dos Direitos Humanos e da
Thais Blucher Alemanha em São Paulo Cidadania
Thiago Baron Consulado Geral do Reino dos Países Ministério dos Povos Indígenas
Tony Webster Baixos em São Paulo Mitre Galeria
Valeria Intrieri Contemporary & Creative MO.CO. Esba
Vasif Kortoun Growth Art Center Museo de Teruel
Victoria Fernández-Layos Cultura Museo del Estanquillo
Vivi Villanova E. Righi Collection Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Yann Mazéas Edições Globo Condé Nast Museo Nacional de la Estampa
Yina Jiménez Suriel Editora Abril Museu Afro Brasil
Yolanda Romero Embaixada da Bolívia no Brasil Museu Amazônico - Universidade Federal
Yvette Mutumba Embaixada do Brasil em La Paz do Amazonas (UFAM)
Zoe B. Martínez Ensatt Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte
Escola Superior de Propaganda e Contemporânea – Coleção PCRJ
institutions Marketing Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro –MAR
Estadão Museu de Arte Osório Cesar
1 Mira Madrid Etxepare Basque Institute New Local Space – NLS
A Gentil Carioca Fábricas de Cultura P·P·O·W
Acervo Centro Cultural São Paulo Folha de São Paulo Peter Freeman, Inc.
Agência Nacional do Cinema – Ancine Fonds Kervahut / Collection Laurent Fiévet Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo
Agência Solano Trindade Fundação Nacional de Artes – Funarte Pinault Colletion
Alexandra Mollof Fine Art Fundação Roberto Marinho Practicing Refusal Collective
Arario Gallery Fundación Cultural Banco Central de R/E Collection
Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia Bolivia Record
Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst Fundación Kutxa Rede TV
Arte1 Fundación Mapfre Samdani Art Foundation
ARTINGENIUM Galeria Simões Assis Santu Mofokeng Foundation
Aruac Filmes Galerie Christophe Gaillard Scott Mueller Collection
Banco de España Galerie Imane Farès Secretaria de Economia Criativa e
Banco Itaú S.A Globo Fomento Cultural do Governo Federal
Band Governo do Estado Plurinacional Secretaria de Formação, Livro e Leitura do
Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS da Bolivia Governo Federal
Benson Latin American Studies and Hutukara Associação Yanomami Secretaria Especial de Cultura do
Collections, The University of Texas at Imec Governo Federal
Austin Infoglobo Secretaria Estadual de Educação de
Brooklyn Museum Instituto Arte na Escola São Paulo
Catriona Jeffries Instituto Brasileiro de Museus – Ibram Secretaria Municipal de Educação de
CBN Instituto do Patrimonio Histórico e São Paulo
Ceija Stojka International Fund Artístico Nacional – Iphan Sertão Negro Ateliê e Escola de Artes
Central Galeria Instituto Guimarães Rosa Sharjah Art Foundation
Centre Pompidou – Musée national Instituto Inhotim Sprüth Magers Gallery
d’art moderne Instituto Prebisteriano Mackenzie Terremoto
Centro de Documentação Cultural Jan Mot The Charles White Archives
“Alexandre Eulalio" JCDecaux The Elizabeth Catlett Mora Family
Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC Joven Pan Living Trust
(DiGAV, UNAM) Konrad Fischer Galerie The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust
Centro de Educação Tecnológica Centro Kunstinstituut Melly The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Paula Souza, Governo do Estado de KW Contemporary Art Tumurun Museum Collection
São Paulo Light Cone (Paris) Van Abbemuseum
Cineteca di Bologna LUMA Arles Villa Arson
CNN Malba – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano
Colección Art Situacions de Buenos Aires
Colección Carla Barbero Marcelle Alix, Paris
Colección Mariano Yera Areyhold Marcus Meier Collection
Colección Patricio Supervielle Mario Cader Collection
Collection Antoine de Galbert, Paris Matthew Marks Gallery
Collection Prignitz, Berlin Meio e Mensagem
master sponsorship

sponsorship
official agency support

international support

media support

cultural
partnership realization
image credits
aida harika yanomami, edmar
tokorino yanomami and roseane
yariana yanomami
[left]
Photo: Roseane Yariana Yanomami
[all images] Courtesy: Aruac Filmes
amador e jr. segurança
patrimonial ltda.
[right] Photo: Mônica Coster
amos gitaï
Collection: Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía, Madri
Gift: Amos Gitaï, 2015
Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
anna boghiguian
Collection: E. Righi
anne-marie schneider
[left] Photo: Vincent Everarts
[all images] Courtesy of the artist and
Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels
archivo de la memoria trans (amt)
Collection: Archivo de la
Memoria Trans
arthur bispo do rosário
Photo: Hugo Denizart
Courtesy: PCRJ/SMS/IMAS-JM/
Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte
Contemporânea
aurora cursino dos santos
Collection: Museu de Arte Osório
Cesar, Franco da Rocha
Photo: Everton Ballardin / Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo
348
349
ayrson heráclito and tiganá santana
Photo: Leo Monteiro / Fundação Bienal
de São Paulo
bouchra ouizguen
© Compagnie O; Production
Association Rokya / Association
Originale; Co-production MuCEM /
Festival de Marseille
carmézia emiliano
Photo: Abreu Mubarac
Courtesy: Central Galeria, São Paulo
castiel vitorino brasileiro
Photo of Untitled (Marrakesh):
Rodrigo Jesus
ceija stojka
[left – right]
Pinault Collection, Paris. Photo:
Rebecca Fanuele
Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy:
Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris
Collection: Marcus Meier
Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy:
Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris
Collection: Antoine de Galbert, Paris
Photo: Diego Cestellano Cano
citra sasmita
Photo: Yeo Workshop
colectivo ayllu
[right] Edition of 10 copies, produced
in collaboration with Australian
Print Workshop
Collection: Museo Reina Sofía e
CA2M, Madrid
cozinha ocupação 9 de julho – mstc
Photo: Edouard Fraipont
daniel lie
Commissioned by Berlin Atonal
Photo: Savannah van der Niet
Studio Dan Lie project manager: Ruli
Moretti
daniel lind-ramos
Photo: Field Studios Photography
Courtesy of the artist and The Ranch,
Montauk
dayanita singh
© Dayanita Singh
Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street
Gallery, London
deborah anzinger
Photo: Constance Mensh
denilson baniwa
Photo: Jamille Pinheiro
denise ferreira da silva
Photo: Alex Woodward
diego araúja and laís machado
Commissioned and co-produced
by Sesc São Paulo and SAVVY
Contemporary
duane linklater
Courtesy of the artist and Art Gallery
of Hamilton
edgar calel
Photo: Julio Calel
Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos
Ultravioleta
elda cerrato
Collection: Archivo Elda Cerrato
(ECET)
Photo: Luciano Zubillaga
elena asins
Collection: Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Gift of the artist, 2012
Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
ellen gallagher and edgar cleijne
Collection of the artists
Choreography/performance: Harry
Alexander, Julie Cunningham, Werner
Hirsch, Nach, Joy Alpuerto Ritter and
Aaliyah Tanisha
Courtesy: Ellen de Bruijne Projects,
Amsterdam, and Marcelle Alix, Paris
emanoel araujo
Courtesy: Simões de Assis, São Paulo /
Curitiba
eustáquio neves
[left] Collection: Museu Afro Brasil,
São Paulo, and collection of the artist
[right] Collecton: Ivory Press, London,
and collection of the artist
francisco toledo
Collection: “Visualidades y
Movilización Social”, Centro de
Documentación Arkheia, Museo
Universitario Arte Contemporáneo,
MUAC (DiGAV-UNAM), Mexico City
Gift: Amigos del Instituto de Artes
Gráficas Oaxaca, IAGO
[installation view] Photo: Oliver
Santana
gabriel gentil tukano juan van der hamen y léon
Collection: Museu Amazônico - UFAM, Collection: Kutxa Fundazioa,
Manaus San Sebastián
Photo: Juantxo Egaña
george herriman
[all images] Collection: Garry Trudeau, judith scott
New York Collection and photo: Creative Growth
Art Center, Oakland
gloria anzaldúa
Collection: The Nettie Lee Benson kapwani kiwanga
Latin American Collection Courtesy of the artist, Gucci and
Courtesy: The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Goodman Gallery, Cape Town,
Literary Trust & Benson Latin American Johannesburg, London / Galerie Poggi,
Collection, LLILAS Benson Latin Paris / Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin
American Studies and Collections, The
University of Texas at Austin katherine dunham
Collection: Library of Congress,
guadalupe maravilla Washington, D.C.
Photo: Maxwell Runko Courtesy: Marie-Christine
Courtesy: Guadalupe Maravilla and Dunham Pratt
P·P·O·W, New York
kidlat tahimik
igshaan adams [left] Image: Kabunyan de Guia
[left] [right] Image: Kabunyan de Guia and
Photo: Annik Wetter Nona Garcia
Courtesy of the artist and Kunsthalle
Zürich, © Igshaan Adams luana vitra
[right above] Photo: Victor Galvão
Private collection
Photo: Kyle Morland luiz de abreu
Courtesy of the artist and blank Photo: Gil Grossi / Instituto Itaú
projects, Cape Town © Igshaan Adams Cultural, São Paulo
[right below]
Courtesy of the artist and The Art malinche
Institute of Chicago © Igshaan Adams Collection:The Nettie Lee Benson
Latin American Collection, LLILAS
jesús ruiz durand Benson Latin American Studies and
Collection: Museo Nacional Centro de Collections, The University of Texas
Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid at Austin
Long-term loan of Fundación Museo Exhibition copy
Reina Sofía, 2017
Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo marilyn boror bor
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Photo: José Oquendo
Courtesy of the artist and
jorge ibalta José Oquendo
Produced with the support of
Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid marlon riggs
Photo: Signifyin’ Works
josé guadalupe posada
Collection: Museo Nacional de la maya deren
Estampa, Cidade do México © All rights reserved by the artists
Courtesy: Light Cone
melchor maría mercado pauline boudry / renate lorenz
Collection: Archivo y Biblioteca [all images]
Nacionales de Bolivia Courtesy: Ellen de Bruijne Projects,
Amsterdã e Marcelle Alix, Paris
morzaniel ɨramari choreography/performance: Harry
Courtesy: Aruac Filmes Alexander, Julie Cunningham, Werner
Hirsch, Nach, Joy Alpuerto Ritter,
mounira al solh Aaliyah Tanisha (Les Gayrillères);
Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch,
Gallery Beirut / Hamburg Latifa Laâbissi, Marbles Jumbo
Radio, Nach (Moving Backwards);
nadal walcot Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch,
Private collection Joy Alpuerto Ritter, Aaliyah Thanisha
(No) Time)
nadir bouhmouch and
soumeya ait ahmed quilombo cafundó
[left] Photo: Soumeya Ait Ahmed & Courtesy: CEDAE - Centro de
Nadir Bouhmouch Documentação Cultural Alexandre
[right] Photo: Basma Rkioui Eulálio, Universidade Estadual de
Campinas
niño de elche
Photo: Juan Carlos Quindós raquel lima
Creation: Raquel Lima
patricia gómez and Direction: Lubanzadyo Mpemba and
maria jesús gonzález Raquel Lima
[wall] Photo: Patricia Gómez & María
Jesús González ricardo aleixo
[stills] Photo: Fran Condor Photo: Rodrigo Lopes de Barros
rommulo vieira conceição
Commissioned by Instituto Inhotim,
Brumadinho
Photo: Rafael Muniz
rosana paulino
Photo: Ricardo Paulino
rubem valentim
Courtesy: Instituto Rubem Valentim,
São Paulo
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351
rubiane maia
[left] Photo: Fenia Kotsopoulou
sammy baloji
Photo: Martin Argyroglo
santu mofokeng
Collection: Santu Mofokeng
Foundation © Santu Mofokeng
Foundation
Courtesy: Lunetta Bartz, MAKER,
Johannesburg
sarah maldoror
[left] © Suzanne Lipinska
[right] © Bildtjänst H. Nicolaisen
[all images] Courtesy: Annouchka de
Andrade & Henda Ducados
sauna lésbica by malu avelar with ana
paula mathias, anna turra, bárbara
esmenia and marta supernova
Photo: Marina Lima
senga nengudi
Photo: Adam Avila
© Senga Nengudi, 2023
Courtesy: Sprüth Magers and Thomas
Erben Gallery, New York
sidney amaral
Collection: Banco Itaú, São Paulo
Photo: João Liberato
sonia gomes
[right] Photo: Bruno Leão
[all images] Courtesy of the artist and
Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New
York, Brussels
stanley brouwn
in compliance with the artist’s wish, no
biographical data, no images, nor text
are reproduced.
this participation is supported by the
Consulado Geral do Reino dos Países
Baixos em São Paulo.
stella do patrocínio
Do Patrocínio’s nephew personal
archive, granted to the researcher
Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias
taller 4 rojo
Collection: Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Gift: Fundación Proyecto Bachué (José
Darío Gutiérrez and María Victoria
Turbay), 2021
Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
taller de gráfica popular
charles white: Collection: The Charles
White Archives
elizabeth catlett: Collection: The
Elizabeth Catlett Mora Family
Living Trust
john woodrow wilson: Collection:
Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop
Miles Fund, 1996.47.3 © John Wilson /
AUTVIS, Brasil, 2023
leopoldo méndez: Collection: Carlos
Monsiváis, Museo del Estanquillo,
Mexico City
margaret taylor goss burroughs:
Collection Prignitz, Berlin
Photo © Prignitz
taller nn
Collection: Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Long-term loan of the Fundación
Museo Reina Sofía, 2017
Gift: Mirko Lauer Holoubek and Juan
Carlos Verme, Lima, Peru
Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
tejal shah
Courtesy of the artist, Barbara Gross
Galerie, Munich, and Project 88,
Bombay
torkwase dyson
[left] Photo: Damian Griffiths
[right above and below] Photo:
Rich Lee
[all images] Courtesy: Pace Gallery,
London
trinh t. minh-ha
Body Art and Land Art: Jean-Paul
Bourdier
© Moongift Films
ubirajara ferreira braga
Collection: Museu de Arte Osório
Cesar, Franco da Rocha
Photo: Everton Ballardin / Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo
ventura profana
[left] Composition: Ventura Profana,
podeserdesligado, Rainha F., Davi
de Jesus do Nascimento, Davi
Nascimento, Vedroso, Antoine Golay
and Carlos Queirozi
[right] Commissioned by Instituto
Moreira Salles, São Paulo
Collection: Pinacoteca de São Paulo
wifredo lam
[left] Collection: Museo de Arte Latino
Americano de Buenos Aires; Fundación
Costantini 43.10
[right] Collection: Eduardo F.
Costantini
[all images] © Lam, Wifredo/ AUTVIS,
Brasil, 2023
will rawls
Photo: Liz Ligon
Commissioned by High Line, New York
yto barrada
Production Manager Yto Barrada
Studio: Ragini Bhow
publication credits Edited by
Diane Lima
Grada Kilomba
Hélio Menezes
Manuel Borja-Villel
Sylvia Monasterios ·
curatorial assistance
Tarcisio Almeida ·
curatorial assistance
Editorial coordination
Cristina Fino
Communication team of Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo
Editorial assistance
Mariana Leme
Graphic design and layout
Communication team of Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo
Tamara Lichtenstein · assistant

Copyediting and proofreading

Sandra Brazil
Tatiana Allegro

Translation
Ana Laura Borro
Bruna Barros and Jess Oliveira
Georgia Fleury Reynolds
Giaanmaria Senia
Mariana Nacif Mendes
Philip Somervell

Graphic production
Márcia Signorini
Communication team of Fundação
Bienal de São Paulo

Font families
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35th Bienal de São Paulo : choreographies of the impossible : catalogue −
São Paulo : Bienal de São Paulo, 2023. © Publication Copyright: Fundação Bienal de
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ISBN 978-85-85298-86-9 Images and texts reproduced in this publi-
cation were granted by permission from the
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23-166964CDD-709.8161. without the permission of the Bienal de São
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This catalogue was published in Sept. 2023,
Eliane de Freitas Leite  Bibliotecária CRB 8/8415 as part of the project of the 35th Bienal de
São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible.
 The Ministry of Culture, São Paulo State Government,
through the Secretary of Culture, Creative Economy
and Industry, the Municipal Secretary of Culture,
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and Itaú present
978-85-85298-86-9