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.

WHERE DOES THIS LIFE FIT, THAT NEEDS TO MAKE ART TO BE LIFE?

HOW TO BREAK THE ARCHITECTURES?

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?

IN FACE OF THE ABSENCES OF BLACK PRODUCTION IN THE GREAT CIRCUITS, CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE FIGURE OF THE CURATOR OR THE CURATOR’S OFFICE AS A DEVICE THAT INTENSIFIES THIS INVISIBILIZATION?

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.

FOR WHICH MAIN ROOM IS READY TO SEE THE PAIN OF LAMENT? WHICH NOBLE AUDITORIUM IS WILLING TO HEAR THE SONG TO THE DIVINE? WHAT LIBRARY WANTS TO SCRATCH THEIR PAGES WITH THE KITCHEN TALES? WHO WANTS TO BE TAKEN TO THE PAST AS THE PROJECTED MOVEMENT OF THE CROSSING PICTURE? WHAT STAGE WANTS TO SEE THE MYTH OF RACIAL MISCONNECTION AND THE EUGENISM OF LOBATO AND NINA? WHAT VERNISSAGE WILL WANT TO LOSE THEIR STATUS OF HAVING “BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ONLY”? WHICH ELEVATOR? WHAT DOOR ALLOWS WHITE CLOTHES DIRTIED BY DENDÊ ON THE FIFTH DAY?

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.

DREDITS:

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.