We have arrived. After the storm, salt cures the skin
I drink a gallon of lavender
And float, bringing a way to us make us again the breath of life
Look and see
Are we not an act of creation?
I draw my existence everyday
My outline is the ocean
And it is in the silence of your vastness
In the ashe of the word
That I name you
Body-time
That which between today and tomorrow
Guards and gives birth
Trans-creates. Transcends.
I call for people-crossroads, I resignify
The vital element of what I manifest:
It is time to carve out the gestures
To become pregnant with voices
To pair the times
To be tongue and language
Prayer.
To animate the desire and to be someone’s passage
Explode architectures
Expand your art
Perform the beautiful
Be Trans
To be rite,
To be trace,
To be river
Light, technology, resistance
Song, image, communication
I dive in you, body-archive
And turn your memories into paths
To my new creation.
One of the tracks created through experiment and research by music producer Mahal Pitar, from the work AfricaDeus – O Repercutir da Música Negra by Naná Vasconcelos, launched in LP at AfroTranscendence 2016, in collaboration with Harmonipan Studio.
If there is a common thread which crosses, in infinitesimal time, the existence of every black body, it is the quest or need to resignify and give new meaning to their own being.
In face of the symbolic violence poured into their image and the suppression of their culture and cosmogony, recreating social imaginary, producing affectations and circulating values through art manifest is, for many, a constant practice of living.
Utilizing their own human condition of giving meaning to the world as a possibility for liberation, the motion of this black body crosses through history reinventing itself, intending to make it possible for the subjects to move, and with them, the gaze of those who watch.
Pairing the times, they bring a knew well of knowledge. Epistemologies that call out strategies that dance and make the body an archive to fracture the known structures of the institutional west, branded by a cluster of built architectures as a mean of exclusion. All molds that besiege our gaze and conditions us to techno-aesthetic-scientific notions where perfection is born in the Casa-Grande.
If the goal is to re-populate aesthetics, it is also to question it. The goal to liberate esthesis is to unmake the word, to blur the image, to expand the body, to expose the construction and to poke the educational catechism financed by what you fear. It is to darken your eyesight, to understand the asymmetry of our chants. The dialogical and controversial operation that, by carrying two senses, uses the systems of the oppressor to express their faith, to speak freedom, to sing the uprisings. The syncretism of language and its transcendental characteristic, which eats, prays, dances, plays and actualizes in the present, past and future in a single expression. It is the Afrographies of Memory, the orations and what we learned from those who come before and those who were already here. [1]
Understanding that all aesthetics is governed by ethics, it is these values that come to be seen in this performance of knowledge that comes to life in the contemporary black artistic manifestations of the country. It is what the work paints, the mouth screams and what frequents the rhythm. It is what images move, what the light projects, the appearance sustains and what writes the line.
The primers of the foundations, organizations, institutions, corporations, and all other basements sow in the chain of all their management a structuring racism that barks and whistles at the door, the blackness and their ways of being. It is the effect of meaning, the semiosis of oppression that comes to fruition when we do not see ourselves, we do not recognize ourselves, we are not programmed to be programming and we turn around out of fear, or contestation to this project of domination.
Rooted in the foundations of this imposing construction, is the virus that engenders the body, the colonial unconscious: it is the patterns, the models, the “Giseles” that live in every cultural space, movie theater, publishers, auditoriums and galleries. These are the blond eyes of the curators. That may not bear that name but that carries the responsibility of the decision. For who heals, heals what? What is curation if you do not take it from other sensitive narratives to assemble and announce a whole speech? How are the voices delegated, how are power relations managed, and what institutional criteria are invested in this role?
We are in that which echoes in the squares, crossroads, terreiros, streets of the internet, autonomous zones and independent spaces. Tracing what is out of line, creating a curve in front of the healer-police-teachers. Shields of whiteness, cognitive bankruptcy. The look that heals, does not heal, gets sick. The spaces do not welcome, expurgate.
It is necessary to descend and implode the structure because the Black-Manifest brings everything from the inside. To receive black art is to recognize the privileges of supremacy. Now fighting, now taking away everything that is center, not being reaction, contrary or answer. To be protagonist and himself, poetry. The black-enunciator dismounts the thought, remakes the structure, builds wingspan, and removes the patina from the usury concrete of the corner building.
To think of curation, institutional structural racism and the production of knowledge is not the research of AfroTranscendence 2016, but it is, above all, what gives us life. Moving the Body-Time to the main page and bringing to the discussion what makes us invisible, is to recognize that it is in these spaces that the contracts and the regimes that make do-to-be, to do-to-see work. That is why the healing is here, and it is here that the text recreates what the word curation means to us.
[1] MARTINS, Leda Maria. Afrografias da Memória. O Reinado do Rosário do Jatobá. Belo Horizonte, Mazza Ed., 1997.
Curator and Creative Director: Diane Lima
Project Manager: Hanayrá Negreiros
Creative Team: Nando Cordeiro, Alê Gama, Neomísia Silvestre
Photographer: Alile Dara Onawale
Special Thanks: Lorena Vicini, Cynthia Lang, Chike C. Nwoffiah, Alê Gama, Mahal Pita, Tarcisio Almeida, Yasmin Thayná, Danúsia Maria, Juliana Luna, Camila Melo, Martin Giraldo, Fernando Velazquez, Gabriela Pacheco, Fernanda Júlia, Red Bull Amaphiko, Red Bull Station e Goethe Institute.
09h
Welcome to the Immersed and introductions
13h
Food as a space for meeting and exchange of knowledge
14h30 Experience
Memory, Corporations and Resonances with Benjamin Abras
17h Dialogues
Digging knowledge: archeology, research and patrimony with Paty Marinho
Canjerê patrimonial: the dimensions (i)materials of the symbolic with Alê Gama
11h to 11h30
Opening
11h30 to 13h
Lecture 1 – Makota Valdina Pinto
14h30 to 16h
Lecture 2 – Ayrson Heraclitus
14h30 to 16h
Lecture 1 – Fernanda Júlia
16h to 17h30
Lecture 2 – Jaime Lauriano
20h
Videoconference – Grada Kilomba
14h30
Lecture – Nego Bispo
16h
Silicon Valley African Film Festival: exhibition of 5 short films followed by conversation with Chike C. Nwoffiah and Yasmin Thayná
18h30
A performance in words, a speech in song
Mahal Pita + Release AfricaDeus by Naná Vasconcelos
20h
Collective presentation – AfroTrans Laboratory