35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023) – Guide

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

choreographies of the impossible

choreographies

Every two years, the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion becomes a stage for the most relevant works and themes in the art world at the time. Visitors walking among the paintings, sculptures, drawings, research, installations, and so many other languages in constant transformation, and realized by artists from the most diverse settings, can imagine the effort that goes into each part of the exhibition. The task of orchestrating a show on the scale of the Bienal de São Paulo, and with the degree of excellence that it demands, is only possible thanks to the collective work of professionals from the most varied specializations.

Everything begins with the choice of a curatorial proposal, which is always new, always innovative. From that moment, the preparations begin, only ending when the exhibition closes. The endless meetings and difficult decisions, messages exchanged and contracts needing signing, schedules and their multiple revisions, budget and

fundraising, and strengthening ties with public authorities and private initiatives in a network of sponsors, supporters, and partnerships. Everything needs to be negotiated with transparency and designed in a way that respects the conservation of the pavilion itself – a jewel of modern architecture – as well as 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, working alongside suppliers of the most varied trades, arranging 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 visitors interested in creating new connections between their experiences and the art exhibited in the show. The communication 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 the space, and tie together texts and images. In keeping with the financial and administrative health of the event, together, these teams provide the environment needed to host the Bienal.

The installations happen with tight deadlines, and each step in this phase must be studied and measured beforehand. First, the walls are erected and the architecture starts to take shape. The pavilion is overtaken by construction workers, wood, plaster, and iron. Once the building

has been prepared, it is time to welcome the artworks and the boxes they are packaged in, which are unpacked so the installers can mount the works with care and precision. In an ocean of details and finishings, the text panels are mounted, the lights turn on, visitor guides take their places, and another Bienal opens its doors.

For the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, the curatorial collective formed of Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel, selected over a hundred participants who, in incalculable ways, choreographed the impossible. The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo is proud to hold this exhibition and, in its own way, to play a part in this impossible choreography, orchestrated by collective work.

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,

producers, 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 important to highlight the impeccable educational activity of the Bienal. Each of its editions creates the necessary conditions to reach new audiences and foster the critical knowledge of new visitors of all ages. With a permanent education team, the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo develops free courses, facilitation initiatives and training programs for educators and facilitators, in addition to producing educational publications, essential working tools for artistic-pedagogical 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,

represented 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!

In its 35-year history, Itaú Cultural (IC) has played a fundamental role in supporting art and culture in its most diverse languages and manifestations. This is achieved through research, content production, mapping, incentives, and dissemination, but also through partnerships with agents who are aligned with our values, such as the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

Support for the Bienal de São Paulo – an important space of encounter and exchange between artists, curators, critics, and the public – reaffirms IC’s commitment to promoting the visual arts and their transformative role. Within this area, the organization is coordinating various actions, both physical and virtual exhibitions, as well as educational activities.

Among recent exhibitions, Um século de agora [A Century From Now] presented an overview of art and culture currently produced in Brazil, jointly curated by Júlia Rebouças, Luciara Ribeiro, and Naine Terena. Urban art also

had its space, with Além das ruas: histórias do graffiti [Beyond the Streets: Graffiti Stories], running until the end of July. On itaucultural.org.br, the public can find the virtual exhibitions 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 interactive 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 ar ts.

Instituto Cultural Vale is delighted to be a part of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the Impossible, and its educational program, which is exploring new formats and approaches this year.

Given the curatorial proposal to create a “space for experimentation, open to the dances of the unimaginable”, as defined by the curators, we have joined this initiative that connects art and education, expands access to culture and brings students, teachers and families closer to interdisciplinary experiences.

With a joint, horizontal and diverse curatorship, the Bienal – the largest contemporary art exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere – invites us to think of art as an exercise in dialogue, as an opening to new narratives and as a space for learning.

It is, in this regard, also connected to the purpose of the Instituto Cultural Vale: to expand opportunities for learning, reflecting, developing new visions and sharing ar t, culture and education inside and outside museums throughout Brazil.

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 captivating 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 innovation and new ideas extends to our longstanding support of arts, which we believe are a valuable way to engage citizens and strengthen communities.

Through our funding, we help increase access to culture and empower artists and cultural organizations to reach broader audiences.

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 elaborations 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 meetings, 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 institutional 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.

choreographies of theimpossible

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, training, 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 exchanges, ranging from the list of participants and groups and spaces – which offered us examples of alternative management to current approaches – to researchers and

learning practices 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 guide, this spiral principle radiates through the selection of works and all the other structures that organize a biennial, such as the architectural and exhibition design, the education and facilitation 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

choreographies of the impossible

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 interventions in the building

produce, such as the inversion 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 formative work carried out by Fundação Bienal’s education team, especially 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 educa-

tional 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 educational procedures are devices of liberation and freedom, if not a calling in which artistic, intellectual and political practices become fundamental 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, as well as 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 the construction of formative processes, research and the strengthening of 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, for example, Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho, which is present at the 35th Bienal both as a participant and as responsible for food. 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.

min tanaka and françois pain

morzaniel ɨramari

nontsikelelo mutiti

pauline boudry / renate lorenz

sauna lésbica by malu avelar with ana paula mathias, anna turra, bárbara esmenia and marta supernova

stanley brouwn

torkwase dyson

will rawls

ahlam shibli

aida harika yanomami, edmar

tokorino yanomami and

roseane yariana yanomami

amos gitaï

bouchra ouizguen

carmézia emiliano

castiel vitorino brasileiro

citra sasmita

daniel lie

dayanita singh

deborah anzinger

denise ferreira da silva

diego araúja and laís machado

ellen gallagher and edgar cleijne

flo6x8

frente 3 de fevereiro

gabriel gentil tukano

geraldine javier

igshaan adams

ilze wolff

julien creuzet

kapwani kiwanga

leilah weinraub

luana vitra

mahku

marilyn boror bor

marlon riggs

morzaniel ɨramari

mounira al solh

nadir bouhmouch and soumeya ait ahmed

nikau hindin

niño de elche

pauline boudry / renate lorenz

quilombo cafundó

raquel lima

rolando castellón

rommulo vieira conceição

rosa gauditano

rubiane maia

sidney amaral

tadáskía

tejal shah

trinh t. minh-ha

yto barrada

zumví arquivo afro fotográfico

ellen gallagher

eustáquio neves

francisco toledo

george herriman

gloria anzaldúa

grupo de investigación en arte y política (giap)

guadalupe maravilla

januário jano

jesús ruiz durand

jorge ribalta

josé guadalupe posada

juan van der hamen y león

judith scott

kamal aljafari

m’barek bouhchichi

malinche

manuel chavajay

melchor maría mercado

nadal walcot

patricia gómez and maría jesús gonzález

philip rizk

rosana paulino

rubem valentim

rubiane maia

sammy baloji

santu mofokeng

sarah maldoror

senga nengudi

sidney amaral

simone leigh and madeleine hunt-ehrlich

sonia gomes

stanley brouwn

stella do patrocínio

taller 4 rojo

taller de gráfica popular

taller nn

the living and the dead ensemble

trinh t. minh-ha

ubirajara ferreira braga

wifredo lam

xica manicongo

amador e jr. segurança patrimonial ltda.

davi pontes and wallace ferreira

ricardo aleixo

ventura profana

ahlam shibli

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 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 alAqsa 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 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 time reverse this assumption. She confirms it insofar as the subject of the series is the regime of images and the visual culture of martyrdom 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 photography itself, threatening it with the loss of its absenting qualities.

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 testimony 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 punctum, that is, that detail that breaks the relationship between the viewer and the intentionality of the photographer. There are at least two images/details that punctu-

ated 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; consequently, 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 necropolitical present.

aida harika yanomami, edmar tokorino yanomami and roseane yariana yanomami

Yuri u xëatima thë, 2023 Fishing with Timbó. Video still. Video, color, sound; 10’

In 2023, we witnessed open attacks and genocide against the Yanomami people. The threats 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 powerful, dynamic, and assertive.

Yuri u xëatima thë [Fishing with Timbó] and Thuë pihi kuuwio [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 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 involv-

ing a single character, blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. In Thuë 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 impor tant 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 shamans 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 powerful weapons through which life and our possibility of a future pulsate.

pérola mathias

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

aline motta

A água é uma máquina do tempo, 2023 Water is a Time Machine. Video still

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 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 possible 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 significations 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

amador e jr. segurança patrimonial ltda.

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

Artificial intelligence will soon knock us off our feet, but for now we can 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. performance 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, biennials, and the like. Sometimes you will see them standing right in front of a work, stalling its appreciation (Sem título, 2016) [Untitled, 2016]; in others, you can find them immersed in books (Ler, 2023) [Read, 2023], staring downwards (Chão [Floor], 2023) or even with eyes tightly closed during working hours (Vigilante [Watchman], 2016). All in order to serve you better, ladies and gentlemen.

In these performances, the weapons used to defend the heritage 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: institutional 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 remembering that this unusual phenomenon 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 understood the joke.

igor de albuquerque

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

amos gitaï

“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 star ted 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 completed 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 government then confiscated the house and rented it under an “absentee” law to an Algerian Jewish immigrant couple. At the time of the filming an Israeli professor of economy 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 refugee camp and use stones from the mountains of Hebron. The architectural site of the House, therefore, become at the same time a microcosm of the IsraeliPalestinian 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.

ana pi and taata kwa nkisi mutá imê

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

– edward kamau brathwaite

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 teaching 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 everyday 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 specta-

tor, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces.”2 It is an embodied, poetic rumination on pathways across beaches and cobbled streets, entering and emitting from institutional collections 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 emanates 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.

this participation is supported by: Institut français.

“The unity is submarine…”

anna boghiguian

Woven Winds. The Making of an Economy–Costly Commodities, 2016 Pencil and watercolor on paper, 18 pieces, 41,8 × 29,5 cm (each)

Anna Boghiguian’s work is a polyphonic narrative that unfolds through drawings, paintings, dioramas, installations and texts. It is, at the same time, an astonishing 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 an Economy – Costly Commodities (2016-2022), in which, through drawings, texts, collages and self-supporting cutouts, the artist recounts the genesis and development 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, 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 replaced indigenous forms of cultivation 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) landed in the United States to contribute to the formation of the great wealth of that nation that, as the Armenian 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, desecrating their “sacred” representations: a hallucinated and ironic dream in which the artist moves her own poetic attack on absolute power and its incarnations.

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 imaginary of Anne-Marie Schneider.

The ar tist explains that, while creating, she works with consciousness 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 characters or in disturbing relationships, 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 surrounds them “as an unstable

complex 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.3

beatriz martínez hijazo

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

this participation is supported by: Institut français.

archivo de la memoria trans (amt)

The Archivo de la Memoria Trans [Trans Memory Archive] (AMT) seeks to protect, construct, and recover memories of the trans community through photographs, videos, and newspaper and magazine clippings. Created in Argentina and with a collection of approximately fifteen thousand pieces, the archive exists and grows daily through donations. Challenging prevailing narratives, the AMT serves as

Fondo Documental [Fonds]

Marcela Soldavini – La

Rompecoche, c. 1985 Photography

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 suffered 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 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 vir tual space. Before long, this objective expanded and soon transformed into a collective effort to construct a common memory.

The AMT is hugely significant as a place of memory and preservation, 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 identity 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, protection, 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 installation, these documents become windows into lives from a past that echoes strongly today. Each photograph holds a memory, and the mural transforms into a monument to struggle.

translated from Portuguese by georgia fleury reynolds

arthur bispo do rosário

the gaze that wishes to un-decree the ugliness assigned to madness, to madnesses, needs to be everything 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.

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 condemned to hiddenness, thus assigning 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 cubicles where the sailor, the boxer, the lame, was detained for being considered 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 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, dramatical, question. and as we move in our flesh, free for now from the last judgment, through the expographed, 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 overlook madness, when can we call it art? maybe it matters to say that the embroiderer 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 separated from his cloaks, his banners, every cloth and vitrine he embroidered, 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 sorrow? 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. it’s a sorrow with many names: sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, oppression, abuse, disrespect, dehumanization… 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 herself happy future. the art of escaping the destinies programmed for the end. for subjection. for violence. for sorrow.

right before the turn of the century, 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: including 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? professions, subjections: wife, whore, maid. flaws: mad.

but this old Aurora, as her paintings 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 considered, “amoral psychopath”, is able to predict herself happy future.

& i dream along.

translated from Portuguese by jess oliveira and bruna barros

ayrson heráclito e tiganá santana

Ayrson Heráclito and Tiganá Santana

Agô!

Permission is asked to enter the sacred forest.

Populated by material lives, inanimate 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 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 ancestors, 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 cele-

brate 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 mysterious 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 themselves: will they learn that all life is sacred?

Agô. The blessing. Olorum Modupé.

luciana brito

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

benvenuto chavajay

Camino/en la grieta a Xibalbá, 2023

Path/of the entrance of Xibalba. Video still. 2 channel videoinstallation; 6’, 7’

I have been given the floor to speak about Benvenuto Chavajay 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 action disturbs us. However, in the Mayan world, people who let themselves fall upside down dancing have much more to do with fertility and the celebration of dignified life.

Benvenuto Chavajay 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 existences invisible, turning humans, animals and spirits into pure merchandise (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 Chavajay 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.

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, memories 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. The Corbeaux [Crows] choir is constituted by women of different ages and backgrounds, some of whom have been par t 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 collaboration 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 dance, while avoiding the exoticization 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 privileged 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 collective that, in its imperfect simultaneity, 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.

translated from spanish by ana laura borro

cabello/ carceller

Una voz para Erauso. Un epílogo para un tiempo trans, 2021-2022 A Voice for Erauso. An Epilogue for a Trans Time. Video still. 4k video transferred to HD, color, sound; 28’15’’. Courtesy of the artists

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] (2021-2022), the artists bring the complex biography of 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-binary 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 hagiography, the protagonists tension the narrative and expose its dark areas: Erauso’s confessed racism, his participation in the Mapuche genocide, 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 conflicting identities is constructed and deconstructed.”2

In a historically dense queer gesture, Cabello/Carceller coreographs dissident counter-images on the margins. Whether at a glance or through connotations, these footnotes reveal elusive, discontinuous, 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 subjectivities that lie ahead.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

carlos bunga

Reflejo, 2015

Reflexion. Installation view. Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (2015)

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 ar t and installation. But the real reason lies in the gravitational singularity of the bodies in question. For approximately two decades, Bunga has been building and destroying a work whose evanescent axes insist on messing 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 possible 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 structures using cardboard and tape as suppor t 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 disassembly 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 narrating and retelling the Universe? Bunga’s steps – his dance – describe, if not answers, the courage to keep moving in the face of those three fundamental questions of our everlasting big bang: Who? From where? To where?

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

this participation is supported by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Arte.

carmézia emiliano

The vibrant colors of Carmézia

Emiliano’s paintings bring to life the daily existence of the Macuxi peoples, 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 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 protagonists in most of Carmézia’s work, which ultimately displays their role and per formance in all areas of Macuxi life, whether weaving, preparing beiju, harvesting, producing 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. 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 opening to imagination that the artist’s work provokes is a powerful political 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 Blackness? 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 to the repertoire of what the artist defines as modernity’s mythology about race. Studying the implications 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, 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 consider biotic and abiotic.

The ethical interventions demanded by Black and Indigenous arts are activated by the summoning of the memory and soul of the elements that compose the installation space. There is also an architectural 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 executing the scene in which the psychophysiological differences attributed to dark bodies justify the modern narrative of racial superiority. 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.

ceija stojka

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 persecution and genocide were the raw material of her work, composed of drawings, paintings, and writings that are impressive for their intensity and extraordinary poetics. 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” painting, drawing, and writing was an act of radical rupture with her tradition. Connected, the three intersect and intertwine, without merging completely.

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 protagonists. In her landscapes, the gazes of the pursuers and the killers flicker like prefig-

urations of the unnameable. 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 There is something of Dante’s Inferno. A great beauty transcends its “no savoir-faire” in quality.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

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 patriarchy and colonialism in her country’s culture. The traditional style was used by the older Indonesian peoples – in the 15th to 18th centuries – to represent calendars, and especially the supposedly heroic deeds of the traditional male elites, 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 populate 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 protagonism of mythological women, muses, goddesses, creatures half-human, halfbeast, half-tree, Sasmita finds possible forms through which impossible perspectives finally come to life. If this was not possible in traditional Kamasan art, millennia later the ar tist retells the story through art.

luciana brito

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

colectivo ayllu

Colectivo Ayllu, whose practice engages in collective modes of creation and criticism, and in the production of alternative epistemes to colonial modes of thought, proposes a collaborative investigation around love. At the 35th Bienal, on panels collectively created and manufactured by artists who are members of the collective – composed of Alex Aguirre Sanchez, Leticia/Kimy Rojas Miranda, 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 materials 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 subjectified (and racialized, and gendered) body, aiming at the resumption of a sensibility that does not distinguish 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

this participation is supported by: Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada de España en Brasil.

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 – MSTC [Kitchen of the 9 de Julho Occupation– MSTC] has been operating since 2017 through a wide multidisciplinary network, with redistribution policies, zero waste, and a deep concern for food security. It is a space that goes beyond the preparation 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 regularly 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 relegated 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 rela-

tionships 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 movements and social organizations, but also with the artistic class, becoming an important cultural center and an active meeting place for activists, intellectuals, artists, and political leaders. This new angle strengthens the MSTC’s connections 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 important for the 35th Bienal, which is inspired by the Kitchen and its always collective, horizontal form of organization, dreaming the impossible, creating bridges within the framework of im/possibilities.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

daniel lie

Non-Negotiable Condition, 2021 Installation view, Metabolic Rift, Berlin (2021)

On a visit to Daniel Lie’s studio in 2017, I sensed a strong aroma permeating 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 investigation focused on the effects of time and the action of microorganisms, such as fungi and bacteria, in the transmutation of organic matter. Witnessing the changes in the materiality of those elements, and following diverse natural cycles, enabled Lie to reflect on the complexities of interspecific relationships and their role in the generation and maintenance of life.

Lie has broadened their notions of temporality and has endeavored to find forms of collaboration that break the hierarchical notion that places the human species at the top of the evolutionary scale. Since then, they have been developing “installations-entities”: large sculptures of organic materials, the result of the process of degradation/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 methods to create harmonious ecosystems, 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 relationships between those present. Outres is the result of the maturation 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 present in the environment.

translated from Portuguese by philip

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, familiar with his always-open studio, bring him items they find interesting, 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 traditional vejigante masks made from coconut shells. In this way, Lind-Ramos’ practice is a kind of testament to the history and significance of Loíza, a foregrounding of Puerto Rico’s much-overwritten but nonetheless constitutive blackness. “To take care of objects is to take care of memory,” Lind-Ramos tells us. He preserves the memory in these graters, brooms, calabash gourds, and cymbals; 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 materials 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 Dr. Kellie Jones has argued that “the aesthetic of assemblage”

is one of “linkage and connection.”1 She further 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.

davi pontes and wallace ferreira

Delirar o racial, 2021 Racial Delirium. Video still. Video, color, sound

To speak of the output of Davi 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 elaboration of their common experiences and research related to dance and the experience of the Black dissident body in the world. Among the works produced, such as Mata leão, morto vivo [Chokehold, Living Dead] (2020), Delirar o racial [Racial Delirium] (2021), and the trilogy Repertório [Repertoire] (2018 – ongoing), the duo uses mimesis, repetition, and the rhythmic marking 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 deviations from the violence programmed by the State and by institutions that ensure order through repression. With references to martial ar ts and capoeira, with the onto-epistemological critique of modern philosophy and the history of dance, they take the act of performative and visual creation as a possibility for activating and resignifying the collective mnemonic archives

about these corporealities. If the Black body at rest is suspicious and when in movement 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 grandiose events, repetition reinforces the expectation of the future and uncertainty breaks with predictability 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-choreography, 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

dayanita singh

The bringing together of photography 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. There are artists, however –and this is the case of Dayanita Singh – whose 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 Dance Museum, 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 community 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 precision, 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 collaboration between Singh and Ahmed, by bypassing ethnographic unidirectionality (the “I” seeing/describing/producing the “other”), allows something formidable to happen: the still image evokes and performs the uncapturable movement of transition.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

deborah anzinger

I have always thought of Deborah Anzinger’s work as essentially about syntax. That is, the structure of language, both verbal and visual. Her work asks us to think about the relationships that produce 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 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 unfurling. Anzinger’s work is always forcing opposites together, destabilizing 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 unmistakable 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 attentive to the ways

that Blackness is often excised from, or suppressed into subservience in representations of the region. The painting disrupts the kind of palette we associate with the Caribbean – cheerful sky blues, the signature bluegreen of the Caribbean Sea, and verdant greens – with scrawllike drawings of breasts, that ultimate 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 qualities, 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 inhospitable conditions healing things grow, and even in places of awe-inspiring beauty violence lurks.

denilson baniwa

Colheita maldita, 2022

Cursed Harvest.

Digital photography

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 transformations of the environment, the experience of indigenous time is generally based on mythical foundations 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 education. It is from an understanding of education as a non-linear, procedural, and collective process that Denilson Baniwa has, in recent years, been investigating ways of introducing 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 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 permanece, 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 contact, rescuing the image of cultivating 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 procedures that allow the passage from the field of representation to that of experience, and reveals the possibility 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

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

A series of pyramids are scattered around the Bienal Pavilion, occasionally taking on new forms. Each is a tetrahedron, a Platonic solid representing fire and composing 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. In its capacity for radical transformation and in the resignification 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 collectivities and imaginations can emerge, vibrating at ethically similar 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 ontological separa-

tion between humankind and the other presences that inhabit the world.

When the structures of inseparability – 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 structures 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.

translated from Portuguese by georgia fleury reynolds

diego araúja and laís machado

Studies for Sumidouro n. 1, 2022

Palha da costa and sisal curtains in aluminum rails controlled by Arduino

“Quero me acabar no sumidô.”

[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 disappear as an opportunity to embark on a temporality in which the lambá – the disgrace of enslaved labor and its centuries-long enchainement – 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 to the ethical call of the collaborative 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 material of liturgical, architectural, and handicraft purposes. Defined by the artists as an installation-performer, the phantasmagoria that is performed does not appear as a surrealist bid to reveal the unconscious, 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 totalizing, 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 platform 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

duane linklater

they have piled the stone / as they promised / without syrup, 2023 Exhibition view, Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023)

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 implications present in one of its facets: the representations of dominated spaces produced by artists commissioned by colonizers. In the ever-present relationship between art and society, in these portrayals we can see, before our eyes, the vast documentation of the processes of domination together with the symbolic and applied change to the uses of territories. I am not referring to every type of landscape, but to those that most genuinely 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 experience 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 appropri-

ates elements of modern 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 legacies of school systems1 for indigenous 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 children who attended the Shingwauk Indian Residential School (which operated from 1873 to 1970). In addition to being required to provide 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 developed 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 par ts, 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 (2023) 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

edgar calel

The jaguar is prominent in Mesoamerican cultures and appears in various kinds of representations. 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 communications and connections between the ancestors and the living.

In Xar – Sueño de Obsidiana (2020), produced with Brazilian 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 originally used by the indigenous people 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 “practicing 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 São Paulo is a large immersive drawing on canvas of a Guarani house surrounded by embroidered Yucca plants. The drawing is an architectural image and simultaneously a representation of indigenous epistemology – a map of “practicing community” around a bonfire while sharing in storytelling, 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 population of approximately 700 people live in the Jaraguá district on the outskirts of São Paulo.

elda cerrato

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

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 hallucinations, and esoteric projections.

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 (1866-1949), 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 biochemistry (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, assembly, 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 taking 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 decenter and interweave that encourages us to continue searching for ways to work out the enigma that she bequeathed to us.

elena asins

detail of Untitled (Offset Variations), 1975

Offset print on paper, 75 × 836 cm

In the late 1960s, Elena Asins (1940-2015) began drawing structures that unfold silently on a two-dimensional surface; at times the Spanish artist developed a modulated element 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 – discovers 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 relationship of structural similarity with cer tain compositional developments 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 super-

fluous in Asins’ work, as its signs lack a consensual code; its disciplined structures, developed with rigour, allow them to be translated 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 simple, 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 unpublished 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.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

this participation is supported by: Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada de España en Brasil.

ellen gallagher and edgar cleijne

Highway Gothic, 2017-2019

Installation view. Cyanotype, 70mm film and textile banners, cyanotype light boxes, 16mm film and cyanotype film projections, sound

We are living in the Anthropocene – 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 par t of the predatory and accelerated transformations 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 experience the Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne works that, in the midst of racial and environmental 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, they created the multimedia installation 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, ecological impact, black displacement, and the paradigms of Eurocentric art in a process that involves Afrofabulation1 and Afrofuturism combined with paintings, cyanotypes, film and

sound installations (the music is mnemonic and countercultural), and theoretical works on the African diaspora, such as The Black Atlantic by writer Paul Gilroy.2 Through aquatic aesthetics, 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 important 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

emanoel araujo

Emanoel Araujo (1940-2022) was a Brazilian artist and curator, renowned for his numerous contributions to the strengthening of Afro-Brazilian history and ar t. From a family of goldsmiths, Araujo had a diversified education, learning woodworking techniques which led him to refine, among other formal and aesthetic aspects, his practice as an engraver and sculptor.

Araujo began his career in Santo Amaro (in the state of Bahia) as a typographer and developed skills in engraving and sculpture 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 AfroBrazilian cultures into his works. His sculptures often allude to ships, masks, and symbolic representations of the cosmogony of African and AfroBrazilian religions.

In the work exhibited at the 35th Bienal, a monumental relief, one can see the way the ar tist 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 sculptures – 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 (1922-1991), 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 administrator. He ran exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, showing works by African and AfroBrazilian 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 contemporary 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 observing and researching the rites and festivities of the remaining Black communities makes him a remarkable restorer of memories. The series Arturos (1993-1994) and the diptychs Encomendador de almas [Comissioner of Souls] (2006-2007), presented at the 35th Bienal, document a comprehensive view of the sacred, of hereditary education and of the daily life of these communities. Thanks to his knowledge of chemical processes, acquired through his technical training, Neves manually interferes with the negatives of photographs to Untitled, from the series Arturos, 1993-1995 Photography on paper, Fine Art print

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.

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 brotherhoods in colonial Brazil. In the first photo, there is a group of adults with children in the center, all elegantly 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 encomendador 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 hierarchy 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 per form “a reality that cannot be named,” as described by the authorial voice of the 35th Bienal’s educational publication.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.

translated from Portuguese by mariana nacif mendes

Bankia, pulmones y branquias. Bankia sale a bolsa 2, 2012 Bankia, lungs and gills. Bankia goes public 2. Video stills

Only a short time after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the “activist-ar tistic-situationist-performative-folkloric-nonviolent” collective flo6x8 emerged in the city of Seville, Spain, temporarily occupying multiples bank branches through dance and flamenco singing, 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 responsibility 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 anticipated some of its political innovations: 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 uncertainty in which the public begins to doubt, to pay attention, in which the transgression penetrates much deeper into the body, until it hurts.

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 – 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 cosmologies 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 creative expression and social engagement emerges with Papalotes de los desaparecidos [Kites of the disappeared] (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 indigenous high school students from the Normal Rural

Raúl Isidro Burgos School, in Ayotzinapa, were kidnapped 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 contexts, seeking to break the silence established by government institutions. 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.

frente 3 de fevereiro

ONDE ESTÃO OS NEGROS?

Where are the Black People?

Campeonato Brasileiro, Corinthians x Ponte Preta, Moisés Lucarelli stadium, Campinas, August 14th, 2005

ZUMBI SOMOS NÓS

Zumbi are we

Campeonato Brasileiro, Corinthians x Internacional, Pacaembu stadium, São Paulo, November 20th, 2005

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 that unites these two formulations, putting the world that produced them in check. these two formulations 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, moving between image, music, per formance, 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 impossible, using voice cloning and deep fake technol-

ogies against its own ends, the collective creates a complex sonic-imagetic environment, reanimating the movements, gestures 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 technological spell to avenge black life in its ungovernable performance of infinite resurrection.

abigail campos leal

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

gabriel gentil tukano

Desenho / n. 18, c. 1970

Drawing / n. 18. Graphite and ballpoint pen on paper, 21 × 29,7 cm

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 invisible. 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.

Here the body of the world is in gestation, transmuting and updating itself in each and every gaze that spies the presence, the writing, 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 beginnings 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 infer tile, infantile, wornout, poisonous, and cadaverous 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

Krazy Kat

Original drawing for newspaper

full page, May 8, 1917

Ink on paper, 55,8 × 48,2 cm

“[...] 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.”

In these words, George Herriman (1880-1944) reflected on the inscrutable 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 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 committing them.

Everything in Krazy Kat seems to want to overcome traditional impositions: the inversion of roles between its main trio of characters, the non-binary nature of its protagonist,

the continuous experimentation 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 multitude 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 mixedrace 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.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

geraldine javier

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 installations 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 suspended cloud, the threaded pictures of unlikely vegetables hang along mirrors. The fleeting reflections of spectators in the small mirrors further insist on an undifferentiated humanity, challenging its deeply rooted antagonism with the natural world.

The painterly effects resulting in free floating compositions recall cosmic arrangements that perfectly 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 horizon. Even though she has defined herself as an artist who does

not tackle political things, the overall impression is that of an affirmative practice that avoids mourning and blaming.

Vis a vis processes of degradation, 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 grammar for a regenerative future. Against the fate of destruction she opposes a politics of care that no longer resembles past forms of politics. Whereas her paintings come across as an individual practice, her installations involve a communal activity that reveals uneven sensibilities in the treatment of materials, an expression of interdependent life-forms and intergenerational cooperation.

gloria anzaldúa

The significance of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work lies in the radical nature of her contributions to critical thinking in decolonial, feminist, and sexuality studies, above all in including geography as a category of social difference. A teacher, writer, and activist, Anzaldúa condemns and questions the violence inflicted on people born in or inhabiting border territories and cultures, especially women “of color”1 in the third world.

“Transparencies for Gigs”, drawing 13, undated Ink on paper, 21,6 × 27,9 cm

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 drawing is the phrase, “O proibido [The Forbidden].” The scene immediately recalls the most famous serpent scene in Western Christian history. 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 ar tistic 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 immigration officers are told to toss immigrant babies and children found at the border between Texas and Mexico into the river. While policies 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

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 aesthetics and autonomy, and since 2017 it also organizes residencies for artists and academics in Chiapas.

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 of National Liberation. Digital photography

The group’s focus of interest is the poetics that arise from social movements with indigenous roots. The militant research has focused on the devices that constitute the aesthetic 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 structure, but also of the autonomous praxis of its communities.

The EZLN is an indigenous guerrilla movement with a high global impact, and in deep consonance with ancestral uses and customs it defines communally the originality that distinguishes it: spokesmanship, communiqués, clothing, actions, words, and works of ar t configure an imagery that works as a weapon of mass seduction.

For the Zapatistas, aesthetics and poetics play an organic role within the revolutionary politics of the movement. A fantastic example 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 surprise 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 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 resistance and disseminate the practice of Autonomy, centered around the Caracoles, the Good-Government Councils, and the construction of this other possible world: embroidery, painting, dances, and militia actions. Because up there in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast, whales have been dancing for a long time.3

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

guadalupe maravilla

One of the narratives of Latin America today is the problem of migration. The most visible example 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 Triangle of Central America, comprising 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 crossing. 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 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 children’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, miscegenation, syncretism, perseverance and forms of historical survival.

At the center of this epic journey, the artist places largescale sculptures entitled Disease Throwers (2019-ongoing). Their strange and organic shapes are assembled with moldable materials and musical instruments that, with a specific vibration, generate therapeutic 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 possibility of celebrating a collective ritual to heal traumas and conditions of the body.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro this

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 alchemical process, which means putrefaction 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 transmutation of coloniality.

Whether the colonial plantation, parliament hall, the railway, or other legacies of colonialism, the enclosures of coloniality are as systematic and interconnected. Mahama’s work sees possibilities in the material conditions 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 questions of labor, extraction, production, exploitation, and justice. The materials of his practice are the unextraordinary 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 NonOrientable Nkansa II, Mahama together with several collaborators produced hundreds of wooden “shoe-maker boxes” from scrap 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 monumentally 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 elements related to the history of production and the crisis of industrialization in colonial territories. The objects

include abandoned train seats and railway sleepers, government 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 transmuted to become a location for collective black work, cultural production, 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.

igshaan adams

Kicking Dust, 2022

Installation view, Kunsthalle Zürich (2022)

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 everyday life of the nonwhite 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, inequality, and poverty. Sharply demarcated urban lines weaken, bend, become sinuous, and defy straight, rigid lines imposed by the Apartheid regime and its reminiscences 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 sides of the city inspire Desire Lines (2022), a work that represents the shortcuts created by underprivileged workers who defy the harshness of urban layouts. Tapestry, a traditional South African craft, is the art through which Adams materializes these alternative paths, rivers, structures through which the city is (un)organized.

This tapestry is composed of ordinary objects, colored beads, 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 poverty 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 impossible forms.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

ilze wolff

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 relationships followed by a process of revealing the unexpected and the uncanny among the residue, detritus, depleted conditions, exhausted resources, and overlooked details 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 previously 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 commissioned by the Anglo American company which mines platinum, copper, 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 center was approximately 6,000 people 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 statement 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; photographic history, architectural representations, and elements of the area’s natural ecology, Wolff’s installation reveals a “choreography 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.

inaicyra falcão

Ayán – Símbolo do Fogo, undated Symbol of Fire

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 ancestrality, as motor and inspiration, and the choreographies of her world – broad, transnational, and diasporic – break with the rigidity of academia and art. From her poetic voice, other sounds could emerge, but what blooms is an ancestral 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 explosion provoked by the need for movement, is present, even in sacred deities. Therefore, for the artist, all bodies are endowed with memories, ancestral inscriptions, which reveal themselves in the body consciousness forged in tradition. This movement is cultural, collective memory, but, above all, it results from our personal histories and from crossings that inhabit the bodies of black people of the diaspora. Personal freedom, therefore, depends on

this body being in movement. From this perspective, education would be another path to autonomy, but, at this point, through dance. The recognition of each individual story, the embracing of conscious or dormant memories, would be part of this learning, which runs counter to the knowledge of repetitions, of what is considered harmonious 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 transformation 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

januário jano

Baptism, 2019

Edition 1/3 + 2 AP. Inkjet on 100% cotton fine art paper rag. 50 × 44 × 2 cm (20 pieces)

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 contemplation is dissolved: the white clothes are memories of the civilizing impositions of the Portuguese colonizers on Angolans. The fabric, 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, photography, 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 considering 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 reason, 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 countrywoman of his: “surviving our history is akin to surviving in an unforgiving city” – said Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, as he might have said himself.¹

igor de albuquerque

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

jesús ruiz durand

Between 1969-1974, Jesús Ruiz Durand produced a series of posters to publicize the Agrarian Reform initiated by the government of General Velasco

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

Alvarado in Peru. Under the notion of pop achorado – an expression that means “rebellious, insolent, indignant, belligerent, vulgar, choleric, insurgent, insubordinate” – this graphic style took the pulse of an indigenous population that broke up with the slavish submission that, for centuries, had made the Peruvian plantation 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 Quechuaspeaking 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 offset in CMYK process. Experimenting with dots and patterns, he invested an outline of phosphorescence, vitality and optimism to the indigenous bodies that seemed to set foot outside the waiting room of

history, incinerating the symbolic and material bases of servitude and dispossession 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 reverberations, Ruiz Durand made the face of one of the leaders of the fiercest Andean insurgency of the 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 yellowish contours that envelop the peasant 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 continuation of the anti-colonial war by other means,

was and is an instant of danger. This flickering light anticipated, 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

jorge ribalta

Seville, Emporium of the Indies (detail), from the series Faute d’argent (Eight Short Pieces), 2016-2020 Lack of Money. Gelatin silver prints

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 manifestation 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 “documentary idea”, which runs through all of Ribalta’s work, whether as a photographer, theoretician-researcher or curator, as he argues that photography 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 imperial-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 geography 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 geographical 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 transformed into coins, ingots and grains.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

josé guadalupe posada

Calavera oaxaqueña, calaveras rotas y garbanceras, undated Oaxacan Skeleton, broken Skeletons and Garbanceras Skeletons.

Zincography, 14,6 × 25,5 cm

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 eternalize the encounter: stone, paper, scissors, pencils, inks, chisel... In the case of José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), lithography was chosen, because only then could his engravings become viral in prints, reprints, and reappropriations that 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 calaveras [skeletons] draw energy from the cheap pages for which they were intended and are part 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 celebration of death and cultural resistance 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 century in the context of an appreciation 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 published in many pro working class newspapers, but his affiliation with revolutionary ideals is not settled. 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, culminating 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

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

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 immortalized 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 lieutenant nun”, was born as a woman in 1592 and defied gender norms in the 17th century. Until not so long ago, many scholars, probably influenced by the reading of Erauso’s biography, considered the painting to be par t 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 prefixed 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 particularity 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 masculine” of his time, Van Der Hamen’s composition of the character unwittingly contravenes the painting’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 interpretations, 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

Untitled, 1993 Fabric and found objects, 91,4 x 50,8 x 25,4 cm

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 everyday items.

Sometimes, her colorful compositions are open structures, which reveal the myriad of material extensions that underlie its interior. At other times, their threads are entangled in compact and labyrinthine frameworks, whose entrails can only be revealed through radiographic 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 arguments sought support outside the ar tistic element, in recourse to her elliptical biography or in the reduction of her practice to preconceived classifications. However, precisely because they are inscrutable, her works – between the magical and the

everyday, 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.

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 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 figures, 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 endless chain of reference that conjures the “part and crowd” of Pan-Africanist thought and experience. His work reminds us that much is shared across the African diaspora, 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 Wara Cuba’s Yemaya? Brazil’s Yemoja? 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 peaceful 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 associate, argue with a friend. Pleasures beyond what you can name await.

kamal aljafari

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, this may sound like a paradoxical statement. 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, Palestinian people have been doubly 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 brilliant 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 background because they happened to walk by when a scene was being shot. Armed with a trust in low resolution imagery, he uses montage and image manipulation as cine-choreographic tools to bring these silent ghosts back to the foreground, to make

spectral representation 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 experiments with the installation format, using juxtaposition, montage and visual effects to critically re-appropriate historical footage looted from the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut by the Israeli army in 1982.

kapwani kiwanga

pink-blue, 2017 Baker-Miller pink paint, white paint, white fluorescent lights, blue fluorescent lights. Installation view, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2018)

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 installations, as well as through deep study, her art firstly confounds the rigid foundations of the modern-colonial world, especially its perverse binary logic. by shaking the binary rigidity of these structures, such as truth/fiction, for example, Kiwanga activates not only a fertile work of destitution as decolonization, but, above all, invites us to imagine ways that are radically other of conceiving and involving ourselves – 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 institutions – such as prisons and psychiatric institutions – and the impact of punitive design and architecture, and constant vigilance, on our carcasses. The installation brings to light the mechanisms that silently shape, regulate and predict modes of sociability. The color pink, especially Baker-Miller Pink, is used to calm aggressive instincts (rehabilitation or policy of con-

trol?), 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 confusion, 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 (entranceexit, rectilinear-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 pinkblue 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 anthropologist and dancer made it possible to imbue the black body with other meanings, to fissure colonial 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 groundbreaking 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 technique and training school that are now key legacies.

Rigorous in her creations and ideas, she linked elements of European classical ballet and Caribbean ritual dances, building a technique with lines, isolations, and undulations, as well as varieties of tempos and rhythms that were broader than the concert dance forms of the first half of the 20th century. By pointing to similarities, she also allowed differences 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 rituals, 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 recreate 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 conceptual 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 intercultural 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 mentioning 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 choreographies 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 multidimensional way to the fields of arts, education, and the anti-racist struggle, intertwining artistic and academic spheres in a pertinent and necessary way.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

Better known as an independent filmmaker, Kidlat Tahimik is the author of massive installations too. His complex and gigantic scenographies unfold an indigenous storytelling confronting imperialism and colonial narratives. Mostly concerned about the extermination and destruction of genuine mythological figures, he recreates the cultural clashes with an epic overtone. The multiple stories and the many scenes that will be shaped through wooden sculptures seem to come out of the mind of a Hollywood scriptwriter. In the final representation, real historical names often mingle with fiction characters by collapsing time, well established periods and distant geographies.

For the 35th Bienal de Sao Paulo installation, Kidlat Tahimik proposes 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 circumnavigation journey in which the invasion triggers a necropolitics 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 missiles 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 ninenteenth century exhibitions held by the colonial enterprise.

By messing up with the chronotopes inherited from modern discourses, the same ones that made plunder and extractivism legitimate forms of planetary government, 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, blending 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 entering the junkyard left behind by all imperial regimes.

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 interviews 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 consecutive Western conception by evoking temporalities and spatialities that intertwine past, present, and future, Weinraub presents a 72-minutes-long research-work disassembled in more than 400 hours of footage, flyers, and numerous photographs produced when the artist worked as a photographer and videolady 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, visualities, and temporalities, is a document in which many layers intersect, such as the indagations about what is work? and its connection

to the individual 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 unsuspecting, 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.

copque translated from Portuguese by bruna barros and jess oliveira

luana vitra

Production documentation of the work commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 35th Bienal

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 extractive economies that still promote the degradation of local ecosystems. 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 galleries, 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 prevails.” At the center of the installation, one notices that some of them are grouped and positioned diagonally towards each other. For Vitra, this composition creates a path that spatializes the meanings and possibilities that each grouping carries. 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

luiz de abreu

Luiz de Abreu’s research on dance and performance presents the Black body in a state of denunciation. The videos that comprise the 35th Bienal are documents of Brazil from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. In them, the artist confronts the experience of a racism that resisted collective and institutional elaboration, but with poignant effects of racial subjugation on economic, sociopolitical, and subjective levels. The choreographies 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 decomposed 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 unbearable 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 contemporary, has apprehended since the umbanda terreiros.

m’barek bouhchichi

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

The question of race is surprisingly absent from North African ar t 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 artisanal labor, most particularly in the 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 reiterations 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 creatively 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 communities 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 engraving 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, AfroBrazilian, and African American poets – like a score for an alternative dance of emancipation that does away with national boundaries as it stages conversations between Black hands on both sides of the Atlantic. With this work, the artist pursues his unlearning of Western art hierarchies while gesturing toward a world structured not by reaction to oppression, but by an active, poetic weaving of relations across languages and geographies.

acelino sales tuin

Nahene Wakame, 2022

Acrylic on canvas, 163,5 × 260 cm

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 establishing a unique iconography whose formal solutions can be swiftly identified. Characterized by the presence of human and non-human 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 proportion, and canonical technique, to commit itself solely to the forces of miração, the visionary experiences stimulated by the ingestion of ayahuasca during nixi pae rituals. The paintings may also present translations of mythical narratives and ancestral stories, described in the ritual chants, whose shared aspect is the living presence of the entities of nature and the relationship of continuity between them. The result of these procedures is a combination of forms and colors, which rekindles the problem of movement in painting, shifting it from the terrain of illustration to that of inner expe-

rience (which Ibã calls ‘spiritual ar t’), 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 surface, granting the story autonomy and assuring its free manifestation. In the perimeter of miração, there are no hierarchies between the represented 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, transforming it into a spiritual experience.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

malinche

Polychrome

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 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 mysterious image, we are summoned to witness the unnameable: the deafening noise of muskets, children crying before the corpse of their bloodied parents, huts set on fire, young women being raped by Spaniards, looting, destruction, 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 sabotage 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

manuel chavajay

Lake Atitlán laps the shores of several villages in Sololá department, 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 surprising place, his work explores it as a 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 cliché. We notice this in Oq Ximtali (20172021), 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 ar tist 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 confusion.

Oq Ximtali, in Tzutuhil, means “they have us tied up” or “we are tied up”. This action explores or recovers the community dynamics 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 interspecies relationships.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

marilyn boror bor

Monumento vivo, 2021 Living Monument. Performance documentation, Bienal Sur, Ciudad de Guatemala (2021)

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 hegemonic perceptions and the view of a public conditioned by stereotypes 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 particular, 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 indigenous artist is to rescue cosmogonies that have been invisibilized and fragmented over the centuries.

marlon riggs

Since being reappraised by researchers, curators, and distributors,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 integral to a history of forms in the arts, particularly in film.

Riggs engages with an anti-silencing filmmaking practice, attributing to self-expression such a value hitherto seen.

Voice and rhythm are the main formal strategies of his work. It is no accident that poetry, with its infinite possibilities of sonic and elliptical arrangements, constitutes an unmistakable feature of his films.

Tongues Untied (1989) inaugurates the most inventive phase of Riggs’s career and combines the stylistic traits we usually associate with his work. Like many of his subsequent films, Tongues Untied transitions 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 under-

stand him, it would be useful to observe him as a creator in dialogue with a number of artistically brilliant and intellectually 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 experience and part of Americanness. Invested with a reconciliation of identities, his films sought a settling of scores toward a possible redemption 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

maya deren

Meditation on Violence, 1948 Film still. HD digital black and white film, sound (from original 16mm); 12’25’’

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; the elusive fluidity of the movement 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 autonomous 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 montage, slow motion, frozen frames, the use of different lenses, backwards movement, dissociation of image and sound. And that double experience, of acting and registering, 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 possession rituals that so fascinated her (and that she herself practiced) 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 weightlessness that is only achieved thanks to training and corporeal intelligence. The result is a film that can be considered perfect in its formal construction. Perfect in its precariousness: 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 depersonalization of the dancer and the camera 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 distanced 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.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

melchor maría mercado

Untitled (Los pecados capitales), 19th century

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

Although it was first shown almost a century later in 1991, the Álbum de paisajes, tipos humanos y costumbres [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 traditional historiography and the prevailing neoclassical taste, Melchor María Mercado created other ways of “narrating the nation.”

The hundreds of watercolours that constitute the work trace a genealogy 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, architecture and nature, the artist also points out the fragility of political power (which he experienced first-hand) and satirizes the corruption of the colonial elites.

In this way, in addition to an early attempt to unfold an Andean memory and episteme, the fractures and ambivalences that marked the period are also discernible: the marginalization of certain identities or social classes and a persistent colonial domination 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 discursive sparkle. The sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who studied the practice of her compatriot in detail, spoke of the homeland as a handful 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.

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

min tanaka and françois pain

Min Tanaka à La Borde, 1986

A person dressed in rags walks 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 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 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 hierarchical 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 predetermined functions. Throughout his career, Tanaka has developed a practice that is impossible to classify. 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.

translated from Portuguese by georgia fleury reynolds

morzaniel iramari

We are in front of Watorikɨ – the house of the spirits – a rocky presence that non-indigenous people try to translate into the words mountain of the wind. But from now on, we will listen to the Yanomami language, 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 intimately 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 discourse, 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 colonization 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 proposes visions of this sameother-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

Sama’/Ma’as – (توت-توت) – (Berry/Horn), 2014

Double-sided patchwork textile curtain. 273 × 278 cm

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 reconnects all those individuals who have acquired a diasporic status away from their homeland. Through those encounters, a demotic language that bears the traces of biographical experiences emerges as raw 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, gathering 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 representatives 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 per formative and iterative –, as if a precarious life were a life to be experienced throughout mutating and heterogeneous identities. The longing for the collective and a Feminist agency often redeems the dramatic consequences brought by wars and exiles.

nadal walcot

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 millionth 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 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 exploitation 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 grandmother 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 energetic 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 historical 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 reaching only the powerful.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

nadir bouhmouch and soumeya ait ahmed

Every project by Soumeya Ait

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 “universality.” For them, such categories only serve to homogenize cultural production. On the contrary, they foreground specific, local traditions 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 engine of their Awal project, which investigates ways of documenting traditional oral arts and decolonizing contemporary practices in the Atlas and Southeastern regions of Morocco.

Amussu

(2019), a fea-

ture-length film directed by Bouhmouch, portrays 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 political 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 community 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 technology in which orality produces horizontal mechanisms for popular decision-making, conflict resolution, artistic creation, knowledge exchange and agricultural production – all at once.”1

nikau hindin

Nikau Hindin applying the final wai tohu (embossed texture) to the aute fibre

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 transmission 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.

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 transformation of the material quality of the bark into fabric takes place.

Both the bark and the material 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 movements, 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 memory, and to exercise respect for the cycles and patterns of nature, in a balance between water and time.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

niño de elche

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)

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 NationalCatholic 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 absolute, and this purpose mobilized him towards the production of a total cinema, which he called “mecamistics,” 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 reinterpreted to capture his own obsessions: the water from the fountains, original sin, the atomic bomb, the experience of time without history, Granada as a melting pot of cultures, 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 listening 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

experience, 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 electronics. 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 disappears from the stage, but it manifests itself in the multitude of voices that make up the scriptpalimpsest, 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-spectacular 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 contribute to the invisibility.

josé antonio sánchez

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

this participation is supported by: Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada de España en Brasil.

nontsikelelo mutiti

T(H)READ postcard, 2023 Digital print

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 permanences and rereadings gave birth to an AfroAmerican culture, attracting 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 diaspora that carry not only political 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 considered by the artist a technique loaded with cultural meanings of intense political power.

The weave of braids that adorn the Oris of Black people, especially 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 connection with the African continent, whether in the streets of Brazil, the United States, England, France, Colombia, Cuba, or throughout the African continent. Thus, an appropriation occurred that transformed

into ar tistic-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 recurrent 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 products were part of a political vocabulary. As fluid as the threads that cross the space between the teeth of the comb, for Mutiti, are the African and Afro-diasporic imagination and creative capacity.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

patricia gómez and maría jesús gonzález

1. our artists’ projects and interventions start from conflicting and residual spaces: gentrified neighborhoods, 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.

Please don’t paint the wall. CHARLIE-I. 1-d. CIE El Matorral, Fuerteventura, 2014 Mural print on canvas

3. reading in the oblivion of these margins – in the degradation of these social residues – implies writing, from the ruins of silence, the core of a memory that is a superposition of texts.

4. the Nouadhibou migrant detention center in Mauritania, created 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.

5. the proposal of María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez is basically in line with this physical reality. In fact, in this and other projects, they follow traditional artistic-technical guidelines: printmaking, engraving, removing murals, photography, 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 subject that activates us and challenges us ethically.

6. the subject of this would seem to be narratively concerned with memory 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 documentary rescue, but on making us experience 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 ethical subjects.

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 / renate lorenz

(No) Time,

Walls, floors, fabrics, blinds, and glass. Light and smoke. Dark and opaque, matte, shiny, transparent or semi-reflective surfaces. Black boxes cropped by the frame of the camera’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 revealing its turning points. The end is the beginning is the end is the beginning. So is the choreographic displacement of these pieces: multidirectional. Exercises to throw off the gaze that, conditioned to linearity, 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 presented by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz experiment with space-temporalities not measurable by Newtonian physics. The progressive, hierarchical linearity (something is always behind, or below, or in the past) that governs the modern view on matter collapses.

Both the movement of the performers and the visual and filmic elements of the works are governed by paradoxes that are foundational in the lives of minorities: the congruence between hypervisibility 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-locatable and, therefore, uncapturable; where one can, finally freed from the bonds of time, imagine other worlds.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

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 (18741939) discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, which would spark a worldwide movement of Egyptomania. Following disagreements with local elites the British expedition is forced to abandon the site. The tomb, like all things ancient Egyptian had served the British’s claim to greatness. Following the tomb’s closing, it is 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 accompanying text Rizk asks some key questions, “How 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 (19392021), 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 exhibition features a musical recording 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 session 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 chronological and spatial linearity, reorganizing a hegemonic narrative from a decolonial perspective.

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 musician, a top accordion player, the host of the best parties, a storyteller, responsible for preserving and passing 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 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 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 newspaper 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.

The news has a wide repercussion, attracting researchers,

anthropologists, 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 strategy greatly helped Cafundó in this process of resistance and survival.2

cintia delgado, one of the community leaders, in a conversation with sylvia monasterios

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

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 eternal cycle. It is not possible to interrupt the time that is running, but Lima finds ways to cross it, shape it with her voice, and decipher it with her body in movement.

Rasura, 2021

The word “erasure” (rasura) is used beyond its semantics, holding 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” (apagamento), 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 bodies, 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 slavery, whose consequences continue to have repercussions on the fate of Black populations, is carefully elaborated in the words with which the artist performatically-poetically-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 intersectionality, which is a path, a movement and which gives new possibilities to historical times.

pérola mathias

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

ricardo aleixo

Ricardo Aleixo: Afro-atlântico, 2023 Afro-Atlantic. Film still.

Director: Rodrigo Lopes de Barros

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 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, connects 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 wander 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 individual, 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 carries 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.”

rolando castellón

Dossier – Inventário abreviado, 1960-2010

Short Inventory. Artist’s book

“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, 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 undervalued elements taken to his studio, the effects of the climate, abandonment, darkness, the presence of vermin and the cycles of plants are the dynamics that he uses to shape performance strategies.

Given the impossibility of reducing 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 exhibition space are deposited only fragments 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-Columbian history and contemporaneity. 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 physical 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 reintroduce them into a symbolic and ritualistic regime.

rommulo vieira conceição

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 foothold. In A natureza do espaço: Técnica e tempo. Razão e emoção [The Nature of Space: Technique and Time. Reason

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 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 everyday 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 creativity 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 experiences and their implicit critiques of the confla-

tion of capitalism, colonialism, and power. In his sculptural installation for the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, Conceição constructs walls of building materials 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 GrecoRoman Doric columns support 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 mobility which offers the possibility of encounters as well as the construction and redesign of values.

rosa gauditano

Vidas proibidas, from the series Lésbicas, 1979 Forbidden Lives, from the series Lesbians. Gelatin silver print

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 society. Repression was, explicitly and predominantly, directed against “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 counterpoint, lesbians created resistance movements. And one such action was the upkeep of places of socialization, 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 celebrating lesbian bodies for two months at Ferro’s Bar, in São Paulo. These are records marked by a strong proximity 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 family configurations, and aesthetically 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, recreating 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 demonstration 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

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 objectivation and sexual appropriation of the body guides behaviors and constructs identities that are always harmful. They naturalize, reduce, and fix these bodies within a relationship of domination that crosses race, gender, and class, subjecting Black women to positions of great social vulnerability.

In an act of protest that pervades 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 educator, researcher, and interpreter of Brazilian culture, with a doctorate in visual ar ts, 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 subverts the colonial certainties that run through us.

The ar tist’s body also carries time. A transformative time that interrupts violence and disturbs the calm of the river, reshaping memories and weaving other narratives and mythologies. In the 2019 series Búfala, Senhora das plantas e Jatobá [Buffalow, Lady of the Plants and Jatobá], in questioning the construction of a subjectivity that does not consider the Black female, Paulino constructs other archetypes and reclaims expropriated psyches and affections, revealing the closeness of these women with nature, their bodies merging with plants and animals, planting roots, growing

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 example in the series Mulheres-Mangue [Mangrove-Women] (20222023), the grandmother of the grandmothers in the series Jatobá, which, with her aerial and connected roots – no longer necessary 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.

translated from Portuguese by georgia fleury reynolds

rubem valentim

The artist Rubem Valentim (1922-1991) combined elements of modernism and geometric abstraction 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 symbols and motifs inspired by religious rituals, originating from the cosmogony 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 sculptures 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 purpose, and laid the foundations for his radical aesthetic contribution to Brazilian and international art tradition. 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 celebration 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 metaphysical. The temple is an act that cleaves time, it is like an arrow that never delays.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

rubiane maia

Insistently throwing a series of stones towards the ocean, investigating 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 memories from the sonic capacity to access immemorial times, sanding wood to excavate texts present in the skin itself, are some (among the many) gestures that lend structure to the conceptual and transdisciplinary texture of Rubiane Maia.

Speirein, 2021 Spies. Performance documentation, PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK, London

What is at play in the situations proposed by the artist, whose work is guided by a hybrid between performance,

images, and writing, is always the construction 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 memories], is made actual through a performative action, it ceases to be a memory or a ghost to become a collective perception, a constellation.1

In this sense, the body, in the contexts evoked by Maia, extrapolates (or even refuses) the biological-historical-Western conceptions attributed to it, becoming a set of forces in a state of differentiation capable of mobilizing new landscapes, 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 stories, 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 transgenerational memories linked to gender and race issues. The artist elaborates through gesture and collaboration with other performers (always intersected by issues common to her history inscribed by migration, motherhood, and diasporic thinking) a text-body methodology that aims to “metabolize complex or indigestible memories in small doses of healing and freedom.”2

tarcisio almeida

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

sammy baloji

Hobé’s Art Nouveau Forest and Its Lines of Color, 2021 Exhibition view, Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021)

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 enormous wealth by intertwining its destiny 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, incorporating 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 mention that architecture and objects often made use of materials from the Congolese colony: copper, ivory, and wood. It is this connection 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 these ancient practices.”1 The colonial 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 accompanied 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, extractivism and economics.

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 provinces of Gauteng, North West, and 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 conceptual 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, a formulation that theorist Achille Mbembe considers “a story that

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 rendering 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 generated photographically.

Straddling multiple moments in time, the piece took root during the fledgling years of

acquires its coherence through the ability to craft links between the beginning and the end.”1

sarah maldoror

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 institutionalized narratives to compose each of her works: whether written or cinematographic, which add up to more than twenty productions between documentaries and feature films. Different facets of pan-African 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 population through actions in their daily lives and not merely as a military 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 servant characters, with the foundation 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 confrontations, 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 by

avelar with ana paula mathias, anna turra, bárbara esmenia and marta supernova

malu avelar Sauna lésbica, 2019

Lesbian Sauna

View from the Festival do Valongo, Santos (2019)

When asked about Sauna lésbica [Lesbian Sauna], Malu Avelar promptly answers that it is not possible to think about her work without understanding her body and the place where she came from. Reviewing questions that pervade her identity markers, Malu highlights the ways in which she reacts to a territory that structually brutalizes, most of the time in a silent way, everything that is different from it. “Structured on a binary model of gender, this town forces people with other(ed) identities to live in a permanent state of alert and vulnerability.”1 This act of silently inhabiting imminent death, her questioning about gay saunas – “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 her body were factors that led the artist to create this work.

This artwork – whose first edition took place in 2019, at Valongo Festival, in Santos, São Paulo – is relational, installative, and unapologetically presents a neon sign with the words: Sauna lésbica. It is crucial to remember that lesbianity long lived on policies of forgetting and silencing, and has been reclaimed in a collective and political 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 imagination, 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.

translated from Portuguese by bruna barros and jess oliveira

senga nengudi

Masked Taping, 1978-1979

Contact sheet, gelatin silver print

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 choreographies 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 surrounded what was recognized as African-American art, and her gesture demanded that the arts environments be affected by what was presented outside the limits established by the categories of representation.

Nengudi invests in collective practices, engagement strategies, territorially situated aesthetic interventions and in what she defines as abstracted reflections of used bodies. 1 In her research into ephemeral materials that are deeply rooted in everyday use, such as the second-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 dimension of the rite, and one perceives the Masked Taping triptych as the presentification of a trace of ancestral memory, the artist dancing to embody a transcultural heritage. In Warp Trance, the profound implication of the material used with the social field persists; this time, it is the machine that dances and operates the modification of matter. 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 dimensions, as a kind of sensual reflection on time.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

sidney amaral

O estrangeiro, 2011

The Foreigner. Acrylic on canvas, 210 × 138 cm

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-ideological project, ended up galvanizing work that highlighted a complexity that is often withheld from daily proletarian life. This is why elements of classical literature and art are sometimes reinterpreted in his plastic narratives and incorporated 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 speculated 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 characteristic 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 disparate 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

simone leigh and madeleine hunt-ehrlich

Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich have been working together for years as part of a loose group of largely Black, women artists, scholars and other cultural producers, several of whom make an appearance 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 formerly enslaved women in 1867. That involvement led to HuntEhrlich’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 HuntEhrlich overlay beautifully rendered shots of the tools and processes of Leigh’s trade, with haunting vocalizations and narration drawn from Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy1 and Zora NealeHurston’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 featured in this exhibition, and canonical 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 ongoing exploration of Black women’s interiority and archives; her work on Martinican anti-colonial, feminist Suzanne RoussiCésaire, 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 RhodesPitts, another long-time co-conspirator, 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.

sonia gomes

“An invisible and tonic thread

Patiently weaves the net Of our millenary resistance”

– conceição evaristo1

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 torsion, 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 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, par ty blouse, school uniform, tablecloth, 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’ trademark – 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

stanley brouwn

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 operates 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, eugenics, 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: 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 middle 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-grandmother’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 syncopating 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

tadáskía

Ave preta mística, 2022

Mystical Black Bird

Pencil, colored pencil, oil pastel and spray on paper, 65 × 50 cm

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 collective exercise.

The work is divided into bilingual 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 elements 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 sculptures 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 deteriorating; 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell T

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 consolidated the armed conflict in the country.

Agresión del imperialismo a los pueblos, A la agresión del imperialismo: guerra popular, Vietnam nos señala el caminho, 1971-1972 Imperialism’s Aggression Against Peoples, to Imperialism’s Aggression: People’s War, Vietnam Shows Us the Way. Woodcut on paper, 100 × 216,6 cm

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, documenting 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 analytical distance, but was elaborated from the bodily experience of having walked with the communities that were soon brought into its images. Posters such as A la huelga 100 a la huelga 1000 [100 to 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 country. 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 historical continuity.

The emblematic photo serigraph trilogy Agresión del imperialismo a los pueblos, A la agresión del imperialismo, 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 solidarity with the popular resistance in Vietnam, but also with other processes 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 massacre. 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

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 committed to struggles and social justice, denouncing situations in which peasants and workers lived, and especially resisting and questioning messages, effects or practices linked to prevailing fascism.

“I am black, a woman, a sculptor, 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”

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 members came

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 ar tist.

The TGP promoted instead organizational resources of a collective nature through meetings and assemblies, as can be seen in the photographs. In them they discussed what to represent, how to form the group of volunteers who would produce the image, taking care that the agent in charge was recognized, and at the same time, the collective exercise through the TGP’s distinctive seal/logo.

In March 1938 the TGP approved a document which contained its interests and

objectives, a kind of manifesto or statement in which they agreed to work in lithography, metal and wood printmaking and linoleum.

This workshop is created in order to stimulate the production graph in order to benefit the interests of the people of Mexico, and for that objective is proposed to bring together the largest number of artists through the method of collective production.1

Although this document was not published, years later, in March 1945, they published their Declaration of Principles in which they reaffirmed themselves as a center of collective work for functional 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 members were artists such as Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins, Luis Arenal

and Adolfo Mexiac and 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 depatriarchalizing of history, is being revalued and situated.

Given the great artistic performance and the profuse political activity of the TGP, various foreign artists (mainly American) temporarily joined the workshop to contribute their work to the production of socio-political prints; these artists were called guest artists and some of them were: John Wilson, Hannes Meyer, Lena Bergner, Charles White, Eleanor Coen, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, Rini Templeton, Elizabeth Catlett, among others. These links consolidated the international character of the TGP and in a way stimulated the development of other related projects such as Workshops of Graphic Art in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.2

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 violence, principally AfricanAmerican and indigenous people. By 1946 Catlett won a Julius Rosenwald Fund grant and began work on a series inspired by the working 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 understanding 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 gender. One of her emblematic series is The Black Woman (1946), composed 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, producing 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).

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 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 dissemination of social graphic art, especially in defense of the rights of AfricanAmericans. 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-slavery 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.

In the case of John Woodrow Wilson (1922-2015), the AfricanAmerican 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, where he found a collective context of widely distributed image production through printmaking. At the TGP he coincided and produced concomitantly with Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White, with whom he shared an interest in making 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 (proportionally diminished) before three white judges who loom menacingly over him, making visible the unequal and vertical treatment to which they were subjected. During his production 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 ar ts, co-founded the Sur Side Community Art Center (1939), which included a gallery and studio space for

African American artists, 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.

Regarding the participation of the Mexican artist Leopoldo Méndez (1902-1969), considered one of the most impor tant 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 Workers.

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

Méndez’s artistic production took shape when he joined the Estridentismo movement, and his work promoted leftist and post-revolutionary ideals that allowed him to generate a broad visual vocabulary linked to the socio-political history of Mexico, but also to criticize and denounce the violence promoted by fascist projects in Europe.

These works – which are pioneering for the conformation of other subjectivities – far from

operating on an exclusively retinal level, contributed to the insertion of other subjects of representation continually reviled in the tradition of artistic representation or, alternatively, repositioned and framed them in a dignified way and in another aesthetic-political-symbolic order that we can read today from a proto-decolonial perspective.

The validity of the TGP – in a present 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

NN Perú (Carpeta negra), 1988

NN Peru (Black Folder)

Screen print and photocopy on paper, 43 x 30 cm

Printed in Lima in 1988, Carpeta negra [Black Folder], by art

collective 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 chromatic 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 reference 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 revolution and the anonymous bodies of the massacres, are marked by 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 interrelation 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?

translated from Spanish by ana laura borro

tejal shah

Between the Waves, 2012 Video stills. 5 channel video Installation, color & black and white, multi-channel sound; 85’25’’

Tejal Shah’s installation Between the Waves evokes landscapes that seem to be simultaneously extraterrestrial 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 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: intricately. Colors, textures, and sounds of this equally raw and imagined universe are not differentiated or organized by taxonomic hierarchies. In this sensory horizontalization, a central element of modern and universalizing discourses is betrayed: the subject that produces itself as human through the separation, 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 penetrative 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 ar tificial flowers, bath sponges, and other colorful objects carefully deposited at the bottom of a pool, with the per formers 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

the living and the dead ensemble

A spiral is the image that opens 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 movement of approach/departure, from inward/outward, without beginning or end. In the films and installations of this collective, creating is a matter of traveling, displacement – 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 multichannel 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 revolutionaries 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 imagination that is utopian, urgent, and timeless.

In this sinuosity, the voices – of ghosts, revolutionaries, and members of the collective – overlap in images multiplied on simultaneous screens or in sounds that are echoed by the members of the group that are on a stage. In this amalgam proposed by the creations, raps, speeches, narratives of Black revolts, a cacophonous chorus 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 continuous 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

Force Multiplier 1 (Bird and Lava), 2020 Graphite, acrylic, and ink on paper, 27,9 × 35,6 cm

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, disobedience, and oppositional groupings […] Liberty is a practice […] liber ty is what must be exercised.” However, the exercise of liberty understood in relationship to space, time, and being leads to an understanding

that liberation is a spatial practice. Key to this understanding is the interrogation of situated conditions and the relationships of power to space, the body to autonomy, and subjectivity to perception.

European perspectival construction is predicated upon a subject in the guise of the Vitruvian ideal “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 challenges the notion of universalism and the ideal subject whose gaze surveilles, objectifies, and seeks to subsume the world within European epistemology and colonialism.

In her work exploring the architectural 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-emancipatory spaces of the garret or crate? Or under the Medieval architecture 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 plantations 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.

Bodies of the Desert, 2005 Video,

From the most elementary unit of film – the gaze – towards the unknown until the final consequences, 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 literary 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 individuals 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 scientific 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 (according to the theoretical texts of Minh-ha

herself). Thus, they feed 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 context of this planet, whose rhythm and dance — through the in-between place that Minh-ha founded – no longer allows any disinterested contemplation.

ubirajara ferreira braga

Autorretrato, 1987

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

“the most fruitful plastic artist in the colony”: almost 3 thousand paintings.

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. 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 thousand paintings. in these etymo-geographic twists, something resides between Ògún, the blacksmith (as in the painter’s surname;2 God of the forge, of survival 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, seeking 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.

translated from Portuguese by bruna barros and jess oliveira

ventura profana

It is a late afternoon on a sunny Sunday. In a residential neighborhood, 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, daughters, 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 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 figure 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

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 photographs, she creates visualities and life performances that build new imaginaries about religion and faith. In these imaginaries, existences that escape the traditional controls of gender and sexuality are possible. The existences to which the artist refers are the transvestilities, 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 elaborates 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 interventions in the order of discourse, by replacing Lord with the transvestite, the artist places this mode of existence as a central and disruptive element of traditional thought, elaborating a discourse without Lord, weaving a critique of neo-Pentecostal 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.

translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

wifredo lam

Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (19021982) 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-species femme-cheval, as seen in Mujer sentada [Seated woman] (1949). In his art Lam

centers Black culture through visual synecdoche on Santería (also known as Regla de Ocha and Lucumí), an Africandiasporic religion largely based on Yoruba beliefs and traditions, peppered with aspects of Catholicism. Titles such as Le Sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour [Dark Malembo, God of the Crossroads] (1943) 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 representational codes: hybrid figures 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 painterly 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

passages 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 vegetal and that he visually translates not only as hybrid beings but also through their entwinement with the surroundings through the interpenetration of figure and ground. His purposeful entanglement of oppositions also suggest how different entities might interlock in nonhierarchical ways to be mutually transformative. 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.

will rawls

The artistic practice of choreographer, 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, in an open choreography under construction. PELE is the version for the Bienal de São Paulo’s audience of Uncle Rebus, a performance previously 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 folklorist 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 dialect of Southern Blacks at the time.

By manipulating the available letters, the performers are at the same time spelling aloud parts of the text, destabilizing the author’s fictionalized dialects, exploring the limits of linguistic normativity and written discourse.

In the version of the performance for the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, a different text will serve as the basis for the activation of the work. We can expect the formation of both familiar and unusual words. The invitation is to open up and recognize different accents and stresses, for the collective and interactive formation of words that generate thought.

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 transatlantic slavery is the record of a disappearance. 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. the damage has already been done. we are too late.

is a result of erasure processes, typical of transatlantic slavery archives. Therefore, her presentation here is also an absence.

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 reportedly disturbed by Xica’s radically free gender and sexuality performativity, 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 mem-

ory. the memory that even oblivion is never absolute. the memory of unpredictability, in which what should have been annihilated resurfaces 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 component 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

Model for Untitled (Casablanca Unit Blocks-with Bettina), 2023 Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 35th Bienal

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, displays a grammar of natural shapes adapted from Montessori molded trays. Conversely, educational play is an ideal framework for artistic experimentation – the joy of making and breaking rules. The video Tree Identification for Beginners (2017) tells the story of the artist’s mother’s first trip to the USA – and larger stories of the Cold war and civil rights activism – through a captivating 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 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 tackled with humor. See the levity of her posters’ wordplay (“I am not exotic I am exhausted”; “Sheikh Spear is Arab”…) or the

satirical 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 domination. 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 introduction 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.

zumví arquivo afro fotográfico

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

What does it mean to constitute a 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 well as personal documents, posters, postcards, and various documents) 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 of the twentieth century. Engaging various photographic perspectives, these pictures grasp the pain and pride, love and insistent possibility 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 representations, 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 community of quilombos that resisted the Portuguese and Dutch for a full century (15951695). Through the ongoing efforts of Lázaro Roberto and his nephew José Carlos, Zumvi’s spirit of self-determination 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.

ahlam shibli

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 Contemporani de Barcelona (macba) / Jeu de Paume / Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves / Hatje Cantz, 2013, p. 16.

aline motta

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: 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 Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 2016, 18 (1): p. 171.

ana pi and taata kwa nkisi mutá imê

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.

anne-marie schneider

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.

archivo de la memoria trans (amt)

1/ See Memorias reveladas, by Quentin Worthington (France, 2019, 23’), documentary on the creation of the amt

aurora cursino dos santos

1/ The few and uncertain biographical data about Aurora Cursino dos Santos are in her paintings 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.

cabello/carceller

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.]

ceija stojka

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 language. [e.n.]

2/ Walter Benjamin, “On the concept of history –Thesis V” (1940).

daniel lind-ramos

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.

dayanita singh

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-mona-ahmed/. Accessed: May 26, 2023.

diego araúja and laís machado

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 repertoire 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 diamond 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

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, acculturated and colonized.

elda cerrato

1/ Elda Cerrato, La memoria en los bordes: entrevista, dibujos. Buenos Aires: Nobuko, 2011, p. 7.

elena asins

1/ Javier Maderuelo, “Menhir dos”, in Elena Asins: Menhir dos. Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1995.

ellen gallagher and edgar cleijne

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.

eustáquio neves

1/ Reference to the phrase “a reality that I cannot 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

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.]

francisco toledo

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).

george herriman

1/ Segregationist laws that were in effect in several southern states of the United States between the years 1877 and 1965. [e.n.]

gloria anzaldúa

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 orientados a empurrar crianças e bebês em rio na fronteira como México”, O Globo, 20 jul. 2023. Available at: oglobo. globo.com/mundo/noticia/2023/07/20/agentesda-imigracao-dos-eua-sao-orientados-a- empurrarcriancas-e-bebes-em-rio-na-fronteira-com-o-mexico. ghtml. Accessed: Jul. 2023.

5/ Anzaldúa, 2016, op. cit., p. 55.

grupo de investigación en arte y política (giap)

1/ The Zapatistas had been in media silence since 2008, away from cameras and microphones, establishing the foundations of autonomous Good Government.

2/ The March of Silence had no speeches or proclamations. Only the day after a communiqué 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 resurging. / 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/.

igshaan adams

1/ Areas created during Apartheid to confine black and mixed-race people.

ilze wolff

1/ Architecture SA, Spring 1980, p. 13.

januário jano

1/ Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, "Morrer de Nostalgia" in Revista Quatro cinco um, São Paulo, jun. 2023, p. 8.

jesús ruiz durand

1/ Pongos were the peasants and indigenous people who worked as servants on the plantations 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 Blanco-1969”, in Hugo Blanco (ed.), La verdadera historia de la Reforma Agraria. Lima: Ediciones Lucha Indígena, 2009.

julien creuzet

1/ Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

2/ See Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: the Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

kamal aljafari

1/ The Arabic term Nakba means “catastrophe” or “disaster” in English, and refers to the Palestinian 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.]

luiz de abreu

1/ According to an interview given to Rádio França Internacional Brasil, on the program RFI Convida Luiz de Abreu, on March 13th, 2020. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ALs1cTW0Q&ab_ channel=RFIBrasil. Accessed: May 2023.

malinche

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/collection/achl/id/1609/. Accessed: Jul. 2023.

marlon riggs

1/ Among them are Bruno F. Duarte, Cornelius Moore, Louis Massiah, and Rhea L. Combs, in addition to my own work as a curator and professor.

min tanaka and françois pain

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.

nadir bouhmouch and soumeya ait ahmed

1/ Nadir Bouhmouch & Soumeya Ait Ahmed, from the proposal submitted to the 35th Bienal.

quilombo cafundó

1/ Cupópia is a language spoken in the Quilombo Cafundó in Salto de Pirapora, São Paulo, Brazil. The language combines the structure of Portuguese with words of African origin, especially Quimbundo.

2/ Mr. Otávio was also the one who filed a usucaption process, which secured the permanence of the quilombolas in Gleba A (the community’s remaining 7.5 bushels).

rosa gauditano

1/ Here we have chosen to keep the spelling of the period.

rosana paulino

1/ “Trabalho servil,” in the original Portuguese, 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.]

rubiane maia

1/ Notes on the artist’s practice. See more at: www rubianemaia.com/

2/ Ibid.

sammy baloji

1/ Portfolio of the artist. Available at: imanefares. com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/if-sammybalojiportfolio-eng-1.pdf. Accessed: July 2023.

santu mofokeng

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.

notes

sauna lésbica by malu avelar along with ana paula mathias, anna turra, bárbara esmenia and marta supernova

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/. Accessed: Jun. 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

1/ This definition is found in “Statement On Nylon Mesh Works,” 1997, published in Senga Nengudi –Topologies. Exhibition catalog. Munich; São Paulo: Lenbachhaus; MASP, 2020, p. 117.

simone leigh and madeleine hunt-ehrlich

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

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

In compliance with the artist’s wish, no biographical data, no images, nor text are reproduced.

This participation is supported by: Netherlands Consulate-General in São Paulo.

stella do patrocínio

1/ A reference to Grada Kilomba, Ilusões vol. I – Narciso e Eco. In Grada Kilomba: Desobediências poéticas. Exhibition catalog. São Paulo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2019.

2/ CD2_01. Third part of testimonies/interviews/ 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/handle/123456789/6465. Accessed: Jun. 2, 2023.

3/ A pun between the words “Black” and “Portuguese”. Reference to Lélia González, “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira”. Revista Ciências Sociais Hoje, Anpocs, pp. 223-44, 1984.

taller de gráfica popular

1/ Humberto Musacchio, El Taller de Gráfica Popular. Mexico: FCE, 2007, 25.

2/ Alberto Hijar Serrano, Catálogo TGP 80 años. Taller de Gráfica Popular. Mexico City: Museo Nacional de la Revolucion, 2017, p. 39; Humberto Musacchio, op. cit., 30-60.

3/ Dina Comisarenco Mirkin, “Negro woman y la postmemoria de la esclavitud en Elizabeth Catlett.”. La Ventana – Revista de estudios de género, v. 6, n. 54, pp. 110-42, 2021.

tejal shah

1/ On the notions of contrassexuality and prosthesis, see Paul B. Preciado, Manifesto contrassexual. 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.

ubirajara ferreira braga

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

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

1/ The edition presented at the 35th Bienal is: André Breton, Fata Morgana. Illustrated by Wifredo Lam. Buenos Aires: Éditions des Lettres Françaises, 1942.

zumví arquivo afrofotográfico

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.

curatorial team

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 literature 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 important people in the contemporary art world.

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 international 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 international 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).

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 experimentation. He reflects on these and other themes in his latest book: Campos magnéticos: Escritos de arte y Política (2020).

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), anthropologist-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 master’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).

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 university (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 transformations 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 intersections 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, archivist, 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 essayist. 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 expresionismo (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 exhibitions 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 oitocentista (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-diasporic 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 studies 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 curator of the exhibition Travessias do moderno em Mauá.

miro spinelli is an artist and researcher. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at New York University (NYU) (USA) and works in the overlapping between performance, writing, visual arts, and theory. His artistic and intellectual 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.

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 residencies 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 exhibition 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 intergenerational 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 contemporary 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 interdisciplinares (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 curator for several institutions (Museo Reina Sofía, Artium Museoa) and is a researcher in national/ international projects, 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 contemporary 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 experiments and modes of creation based on liberation, freedom, and cognitive justice from the field of visual arts.

tatiana nascimento is an artist and researcher in sexual-dissident Black poetics. She published, among others books, Palavra preta (2021), Lundu (2016), Oriki de amor selvagem (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).

fundação bienal de são paulo

Founder

Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho · 1898 –1977 chairman emeritus

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

Members

Alberto Emmanuel Whitaker

Alfredo Egydio Setubal

Ana Helena Godoy Pereira de Almeida Pires

Angelo Andrea Matarazzo

Antonio Henrique Cunha Bueno

Beatriz Yunes Guarita

Camila Appel

Carlos Alberto Frederico

Carlos Augusto Calil

Carlos Jereissati

Claudio Thomaz Lobo Sonder

Daniela Montingelli Villela

Danilo Santos de Miranda

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

Joaquim de Arruda Falcão Neto

José Olympio da Veiga Pereira (on leave)

Kelly de Amorim

Ligia Fonseca Ferreira

Lucio Gomes Machado

Luis Terepins

Maguy Etlin

Manoela Queiroz Bacelar

Marcelo Mattos Araujo (on leave)

Miguel Wady Chaia

Neide Helena de Moraes

Octavio Manoel Rodrigues de Barros

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

International Advisory Board

Maguy Etlin · president

Pedro Aranha Corrêa do Lago · vice president

Andrea de Botton Dreesmann and Quinten Dreesmann

Barbara Sobel

Catherine Petitgas

Frances Reynolds

Mariana A. Teixeira de Carvalho

Mélanie Berghmans

Miwa Taguchi-Sugiyama

Paula Macedo Weiss and Daniel Weiss

Sandra Hegedüs

Board of directors

José Olympio da Veiga Pereira · president

Marcelo Mattos Araujo · first vice president

Andrea Pinheiro · second vice president

Ana Paula Martinez

Daniel Sonder

Francisco J. Pinheiro Guimarães

Luiz Lara

Maria Rita Drummond

fundação bienal de são paulo

Team

Superintendencies

Antonio Thomaz Lessa Garcia · chief operating officer

Felipe Isola · chief projects officer

Joaquim Millan · chief projects officer

Caroline Carrion · chief communications officer

Executive Superintendency

Giovanna Querido

Marcella Batista

Institutional Relations and Partnerships

Irina Cypel · manager

Deborah Moreira

Laura Caldas

Marjorie Faria

Raquel Silva

Viviane Teixeira

Projects Superintendency

Production

Dorinha Santos · production coordinator

Ariel Rosa Grininger

Bernard Lemos Tjabbes

Camila Cadette Ferreira

Camilla Ayla

Carolina da Costa Angelo

Manoel Borba

Nuno Holanda de Sá do Espírito Santo

Tatiana Oliveira de Farias

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

Communications Superintendency

Ana Elisa de Carvalho Price · coordinator – design

Adriano Campos

Eduardo Lirani

Felipe de Melo Gomes

Francisco Belle Bresolin

Julia Bolliger Murari

Luciana Araujo Marques

Marina Fonseca

Rafael Falasco

Bienal Archive

Ana Luiza de Oliveira Mattos · manager

Laís Barbudo Carrasco · manager

Amanda Pereira Siqueira

Ana Helena Grizotto Custódio

Anna Beatriz Corrêa Bortoletto

Antonio Paulo Carretta

Daniel Malva Ribeiro

Kleber Costa Timoteo

Marcele Souto Yakabi

Melânie Vargas de Araujo

Pedro Ivo Trasferetti von Ah

Raquel Coelho Moliterno

Sheila Virginia Rocha de Oliveira Castro

Leandro Melo · conservation advisor

Aila Passeto Castro de Sousa · intern

Fernanda Lustosa · intern

Júlia Maia Lisboa · intern

Julia Schettini Alves · intern

Milena Ondichiatti Bessan · intern

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

35th bienal de são paulo –choreographies of the impossble

Curatorship

Diane Lima

Grada Kilomba

Hélio Menezes

Manuel Borja-Villel

Sylvia Monasterios · curatorial assistance

Tarcisio Almeida · curatorial assistance

Matilde Outeiro · curatorial assistance 2022

Curatorial Council

Omar Berrada

Sandra Benites

Sol Henaro

Thomas Jean Lax

Architecture and Exhibition Design

Vão – Authorship:

Anna Juni

Enk te Winkel

Gustavo Delonero

Team:

Luiza Souza

Gabriela Rochitte

Luisa Barone

Visual Identity

Nontsikelelo Mutiti

Accessibility Consulting

Mais Diferenças

Acoustic Consulting

João Miguel Torres Galindo

Advertising Agency

DOJO

Advisor for Public Program

Dora Silveira Corrêa

Ambulance and Medical Station

Premium Serviços Médicos Ltda.

Assembly

Gala Art Installation

Audiovisual

Maxi

Mit Arte · AV advisory

AV content and photographic documentation

Bruno Fernandes

Danilo Komniski

Freddy Leal

Leo Eloy

Levi Fanan

Carriers

Alves Tegam

Millenium

Cleaning

MF Produção e Eventos e Serviços Ltda.

Conservation

Alice Gontijo

Camila Marchiori

Carolina Lewandowski

Daniel Mussi

Luanda Andrade

Patrícia Reis

Pollynne Santana

Design

Tamara Lichtenstein · design assistance

Editorial

Cristina Fino · editorial coordination

Igor de Albuquerque · research and content

Mariana Leme · editorial assistance

Pérola Mathias · research and content

Education

Bruna de Jesus Silva · advisory

Tailicie Paloma Paranhos do Nascimento · advisory

Guilherme Batista Leite · auxiliary

Maria Eduarda Sacramento de Sousa · auxiliary

Education · internship

Amira Rodrigues Varteresian

Ana Beatriz de Andrade Cangussu Lima

Ana Beatriz Nascimento Pazetto

Beatriz Soares Rodrigues

Beatriz Teles

Bruno Felipe Tavares Corrêa

Caroline de Alencar Goncalves

Eduardo André

Gal Rodrigues

Gladys UJU Balbino Agbanusi

Gustavo Albanese Pose Ribeiro da Fonseca

Hellen Nicolau

Henrique Camargo Vidigal

Larissa Morales

Maria Giovana de Lira Pereira

Marina Akemi Fukumoto

Rafael Santos Silva

Rafael Tae Hyun Kim

Tuca Palhares de Macedo

Education · mediation

Ana Krein

Anali Dupré

Andre Pereira de Almeida

Ânella Fyama de Sousa Barbosa

Bruno Costa dos Santos

Caio de Sousa Feitosa

Camila Aparecida Padilha Gomes

Caroline Luz

Cristina Alejandra Mena Bastidas

Dandara Kuntê

Dani Silva

Dilma Ângela da Silva

Fauston Henrique Della Flora Zandona

Gabri Gregório Floriano

Giuliana Takahira

Iberê Terra de Souza Oliveira

Jacob Alves Bezerra Junior

Janaina Eleuterio

Jhow Carvalho

Júlia Iwanaga

Kennedy Maciel da Silva

Leonel Vicente Mendes

Lia Cazumi Yokoyama Emi

Lua

Luis Carlos Batista

Luiz Fernando Dias Diogo

Malu Bandeira

Maria Trindade

Mario Tadeo Urzagaste Galarza

Mira Lima

Mohamed de Azambuja de Ávila

Natália Dias da Mota Santos

Nivea Matias Silva

Pietra de Ofa Cunha Serra

Rafaella Canuto

Ricarda Wapichana

Roberta Uiop

Rose Mara Kielela

Selva Campos

Sonia Cristina Guirado Cardoso

Stephanie Oliveira da Silva

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.

Transportation Logistics

Luiz Santório · International

Nilson Lopes · National

Website

Namibia Chroma and Fluxo

acknowledge ments

Chia Lee

Christophe Cherix

Cintia Delgado

Claudia Marchetti

Cleusa Garfinkel

Dalton Paula

Dandara Queiroz

Daniel Rangel

Daniella Conceição Mattos Araújo

Danielle Freire

David de Jesus Nascimento

Djamila Ribeiro

Douglas Rodrigues

Eduardo F. Costantini

Eduardo Guzman Cordero

Adele Nelson

Agar Ledo

Alba Sagols

Alberto Cruz

Alice Olausson

Alicia Pinteño

Aline Torres

Almudena Díez García

Amanda Carneiro

Ana Carolina Ralston

Ana Hikari

Ana Longoni

Ana Roman

Ana Tomé

Andrea Meneghelli

Anielle Franco

Annabelle Birchenough

Annouchka de Andrade

Antoine Frerot

Aquiles Coelho Silva

Astrid Fontenelle

Audrey Hörmann

Augusto Luitgards

Barbara Alves

Beatriz Martínez Hijazo

Benedita Aparecida da Silva

Betty Rudman

Bruce Brouwn

Bruno Duarte

Calixto Neto

Camila e Francisco Horta

Carina Kurta

Carla Guagliardi

Carlos Vogt

Carmen Accaputo

Carmen Silva

Carmo Jonhson

Carolina González

Caroline Bourgeois

Caroline Thompson & Jean-Pierre Weill

Cecilia Sicupira

Cécile Zoonens

Chantal Wong

Charlene Vollenhoven

Charles Esche

Chema González

Elielton Ribeiro

Elisa Salazar y Jaime Soubrie

Emilio Payán

Emily Epelbaum-Bush

Eskil Lam

Facundo Guerra

Fernanda Simon

Florencia Malbran

Francis Djiwornu

Françoise Vergès

Gabril Planella

Gabriel Calparsoro

Garry Trudeau

Geni Núñez

Geraldo Sena

Gilson Rodrigues

Gustavo e Cristina Penna

Hacco de Ridder

Henda Ducados

Henilton Parente de Menezes

Henry Jackman

Hilde Koch-Ockier & Rudy Koch-Ockier

Holly Bynoe

Igi Ayedun

Irene Larraza Aizpurua

Iris Fabre

Isaac Rudman

Isaac Silva

Isabel de Naverán

Isabel Izquierdo

Janaron Uhãy Pataxó

Jardis Volpe

Javier Mora

João Fernandes

João Paulo Quintella

Johanna Stein

Jorge Fernández

José Andrés Torres Mora

José Antonio Sánchez

José Carlos Ferreira

José Paulo Agrello

Juan Manuel Casado

Julia Borja

Juliana de Arruda Sampaio

Julie Ludwig

Justo Navarro

Kananda Eller

Kathleen Fuld

Kevin David

Kim Dang

Laís Franklin

Léa Chikhani

Leon Macedo Weiss

Letícia Velozo

Lluís Alexandre Casanovas

Luanda Vieira

Luciano Zubillaga

Luísa Matsushita

Luiza Adas

Lorraine Leu

Lourdes Fernández

Lucimery Ribeiro

Mabel Tapia

Mami Kataoka

Manuel B. Burbano

Manuela Gómez

Mara e Marcio Fainziliber

Marcelo Expósito

Márcia e Marcus Martins

Marco Antonio Nakata

Marco Túlio e Vanessa Gomes

Margareth Menezes

Margherita Belcredi

Mari Stokler

María Amalia García

María Amalia León de Jorge

Maria Aparecida Weiss

Maria Carolina Casati

Maria Elena Ortiz

Maria Lucia Veríssimo

Maria Luisa Marinho

Maria Luiza Meneses

Maria Prata

Marie-Ann Yemsi

Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt

Mario Cader-Frech

Marjolaine Calipel

Marta Rincón

Max Levai

Mel Duarte

Mercedes Vilardell

Michelle Louise

Miguel López

Mira Bernabeu

Monique du Plessis

Naine Terena

Natalia Delgado

Nesrine Miloudi

Nicola Liucci-Goutinkov Pompidou

Nicola Wohlfarth

Noëlig Le Roux

O'neil Lawrence

Pamela Joyner

Patrice Pauc

Paula Alves de Souza

Paulo Borges

Paulo Petrarca

Philip Berg

Philippe Gellman

Rachel Maia

Rafael García Horrillo

Rania Moussa Morin

Raphaële Bianchi

Regina Casé

Regina Pereira

Renan Quinalha

Ricardo Resende

Rita Carreira

Rodrigo Toledo

Roger Buergel

Roland Groenenboom

Rolando Ignacio Bulacios

Rongomai Kapiri-Marama

Rosario Peiró

Ruli Moretti

Ryan Lynch

Sabina Sabolovic

Sabrina Fidalgo

Saidiya Hartman

Sam Krack

Sandra Birmaher

Santiago Herrero Amigo

Sasha-Kay Nicole

Sepake Angiama

Simone Leigh

Soledad Liaño

Sônia Guajajara

Sonia Sassi

Stefano Carta

Stephanie Ribeiro

Stuart Bernstein

Sueli Carneiro

Suely Rolnik

Teresa Carvalho

Teresa Velázquez

Thai de Melo

Thais Blucher

Thiago Baron

Tony Webster

Valeria Intrieri

Vasif Kortoun

Victoria Fernández-Layos

Vivi Villanova

Yann Mazéas

Yina Jiménez Suriel

Yolanda Romero

Yvette Mutumba

Zoe B. Martínez

acknowledge ments institutions

1 Mira Madrid

A Gentil Carioca

Acervo Centro Cultural São Paulo

Agência Nacional do Cinema – Ancine

Agência Solano Trindade

Alexandra Mollof Fine Art

Arario Gallery

Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia

Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst

Arte1

ARTINGENIUM

Aruac Filmes

Banco de España

Banco Itaú S.A

Band

Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS

Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, The University of Texas at Austin

Brooklyn Museum

Catriona Jeffries

CBN

Ceija Stojka International Fund

Central Galeria

Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne

Centro de Documentação Cultural “Alexandre Eulalio"

Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC (DiGAV, UNAM)

Centro de Educação Tecnológica Centro Paula Souza, Governo do Estado de São Paulo

Cinemateca di Bologna

CNN

Colección Art Situacions

Colección Carla Barbero

Colección Mariano Yera Areyhold

Colección Patricio Supervielle

Collection Antoine de Galbert, Paris

Collection Prignitz, Berlin

Conselho de Defesa do Patrimônio Histórico, Arqueológico, Artístico e Turístico do Estado de São Paulo – Condephaat

Conselho Municipal de Preservação do Patrimônio Histórico, Cultural e Ambiental da Cidade de São Paulo – Conpresp

Consulado General y Centro de Promoción de la República Argentina en San Pablo

Consulado Geral da Bolívia em São Paulo

Consulado Geral da França em São Paulo

Consulado Geral da República Dominicana

Consulado Geral da República Federal da Alemanha em São Paulo

Consulado Geral do Reino dos Países Baixos em São Paulo

Contemporary & Creative Growth Art Center

Cultura

E. Righi Collection

Edições Globo Condé Nast

Editora Abril

Embaixada da Bolívia no Brasil

Embaixada do Brasil em La Paz

Ensatt

Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing

Estadão

Etxepare Basque Institute

Fábricas de Cultura

Folha de S.Paulo

Fonds Kervahut / Collection Laurent Fiévet

Fundação Nacional de Artes – Funarte

Fundação Roberto Marinho

Fundación Cultural Banco Central de Bolivia

Fundación Kutxa

Fundación Mapfre

Galeria Simões Assis

Galerie Christophe Gaillard

Galerie Imane Farès

Globo

Governo do Estado Plurinacional da Bolívia

Hutukara Associação Yanomami

Imec

Infoglobo

Instituto Arte na Escola

Instituto Brasileiro de Museus – Ibram

Instituto do Patrimonio Histórico e Artístico

Nacional – Iphan

Instituto Guimarães Rosa

Instituto Inhotim

Instituto Prebisteriano Mackenzie

Jan Mot

JCDecaux

Joven Pan

Konrad Fischer Galerie

Kunstinstituut Melly

KW Contemporary Art

Light Cone (Paris)

LUMA Arles

Malba – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

Marcelle Alix, Paris

Marcus Meier Collection

Mario Cader Collection

Matthew Marks Gallery

Meio e Mensagem

Mendes Wood DM

Michel Rein Brussels

Ministério da Cultura

Ministério da Educação

Ministério da Igualdade Racial

Ministério das Relações Exteriores

Ministerio de Culturas, Descolonización y Despatriarcalización de Bolivia

Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el

Patrimonio – Gobierno de Chile

Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Bolivia

Ministério do Meio Ambiente

Ministério do Turismo

Ministério dos Direitos Humanos e da Cidadania

Ministério dos Povos Indígenas

Mitre Galeria

MO.CO. Esba

Museo de Teruel

Museo del Estanquillo

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Museo Nacional de la Estampa

Museu Afro Brasil

Museu Amazônico - Universidade Federal do Amazonas (UFAM)

Museu Bispo do Rosário Arte Contemporânea –Coleção PCRJ

Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro – MAR

Museu de Arte Osório Cesar

National Center for Art Research, Japan

New Local Space – NLS

P·P·O·W Gallery

Peter Freeman, Inc.

Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo

Pinault Colletion

Practicing Refusal Collective

R/E Collection

Record

Rede TV

Samdani Art Foundation

Santu Mofokeng Foundation

Scott Mueller Collection

Secretaria de Economia Criativa e Fomento Cultural do Governo Federal

Secretaria de Formação, Livro e Leitura do Governo Federal

Secretaria Especial de Cultura do Governo Federal

Secretaria Estadual de Educação de São Paulo

Secretaria Municipal de Educação de São Paulo

Sertão Negro Ateliê e Escola de Artes

Sharjah Art Foundation

Sprüth Magers Gallery

Terremoto

The Charles White Archives

The Elizabeth Catlett Mora Family Living Trust

The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Tumurun Museum Collection

Van Abbemuseum

Villa Arson

image credits

aida harika yanomami, edmar tokorino

yanomami and roseane yariana yanomami

Courtesy: Aruac Filmes

amos gitaï

Collection: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina

Sofía, Madrid

Gift: Amos Gitaï, 2015

Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

anna boghiguian

Collection: E. Righi

Courtesy of the artist

anne-marie schneider

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

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: Rodrigo Jesus

Courtesy of the artist

ceija stojka

Collection: Marcus Meier

citra sasmita

Photo: Yeo Workshop

colectivo ayllu

Edition of 10 copies, produced in collaboration with Australian Print Workshop

Collection: Museo Reina Sofía and CA2M, Madrid

cozinha ocupação 9 de julho – mstc

Photo: Edouard Fraipont

daniel lie

Photo: Savannah van der Niet

Studio Dan Lie project manager: Ruli Moretti

Commissioned by Berlin Atonal

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

Courtesy of the artist

denilson baniwa

Photo: Jamille Pinheiro

Courtesy of the artist

denise ferreira da silva

Photo: Alex Woodward

diego araúja and laís machado

Commissioned and co-produced by Sesc São Paulo and SAVVY Contemporary

Courtesy of the artists

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

Collection: Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, and collection of the artist

francisco toledo

Collection: “Visualidades y Movilización Social”, Centro de Documentación Arkheia, Museo

Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC (DiGAVUNAM), Mexico City

Gift: Amigos del Instituto de Artes Gráficas

Oaxaca, IAGO

gabriel gentil tukano

Collection: Museu Amazônico - UFAM, Manaus

george herriman

Collection: Garry Trudeau, New York

gloria anzaldúa

Collection: The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection

Courtesy: The Gloria E. Anzaldúa Literary Trust & Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS Benson

Latin American Studies and Collections, The University of Texas at Austin

guadalupe maravilla

Photo: Maxwell Runko

Courtesy: Guadalupe Maravilla and P·P·O·W, New York

igshaan adams

Photo: Annik Wetter

Courtesy of the artist and Kunsthalle Zürich, © Igshaan Adams

jesús ruiz durand

Collection: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina

Sofía, Madrid

Long-term loan of Fundación Museo Reina

Sofía, 2017

Photo: Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

jorge ribalta

Produced with the support of Fundación

MAPFRE, Madrid

josé guadalupe posada

Collection: Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Cidade do México

juan van der hamen y león

Collection: Kutxa Fundazioa, San Sebastián

Photo: Juantxo Egaña

judith scott

Collection and photo: Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland

kapwani kiwanga

Courtesy of the artist, Gucci and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London / Galerie Poggi, Paris / Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin

image credits

katherine dunham

Collection: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Courtesy: Marie-Christine Dunham Pratt

kidlat tahimik

Image: Kabunyan de Guia and Nona Garcia

luana vitra

Photo: Victor Galvão

luiz de abreu

Photo: Gil Grossi / Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo

malinche

Collection:The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, The University of Texas at Austin

Exhibition copy

marilyn boror bor

Photo: José Oquendo

Courtesy of the artist and José Oquendo

marlon riggs

Photo: Signifyin' Works

maya deren

© All rights reserved by the artists

Courtesy: Light Cone

melchor maría mercado

Collection: Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia

morzaniel ɨramari

Courtesy: Aruac Filmes

mounira al solh

Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Beirut / Hamburg

nadal walcot

Private collection

nadir bouhmouch and soumeya ait ahmed

Photo: Soumeya Ait Ahmed & Nadir Bouhmouch

Courtesy of the artists

niño de elche

Photo: Juan Carlos Quindós

patricia gómez and maria jesús gonzález

Photo: Patricia Gómez & Maria Jesús González

pauline boudry / renate lorenz

Courtesy: Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Marcelle Alix, Paris

[choreography/performance]: Julie Cunningham, Werner Hirsch, Joy Alpuerto Ritter, Aaliyah Thanisha

quilombo cafundó

Courtesy: CEDAE - Centro de Documentação Cultural Alexandre Eulálio, Universidade Estadual de Campinas

raquel lima

Creation: Raquel Lima

Direction: Lubanzadyo Mpemba and Raquel Lima

ricardo aleixo

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

rubiane maia

Photo: Fenia Kotsopoulou

sammy baloji

Photo: Martin Argyroglo

santu mofokeng

Collection: Santu Mofokeng Foundation © Santu Mofokeng Foundation

Courtesy: Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg

sarah maldoror

© Suzanne Lipinska

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

Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, New York, Brussels

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 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, Bombaim

torkwase dyson

Photo: Rich Lee

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

Commissioned by Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo

Collection: Pinacoteca de São Paulo

wifredo lam

Collection: Eduardo F. Costantini

© Lam, Wifredo/ AUTVIS, Brasil, 2023

will rawls

Photo: Liz Ligon

Commissioned by High Line, New York

yto barrada

Courtesy of the artist

Production Manager, Yto Barrada Studio: Ragini Bhow

master sponsorship

media support

cultural partnership

realization

publication credits

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

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

LL Circular

Bagatela

Printing

Ipsis

Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP) (Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brasil)

35th Bienal de São Paulo : choreographies of the impossible: guide. -- São Paulo : Bienal de São Paulo, 2023.

Vários autores.

ISBN 978-85-85298-84-5

1. Arte - São Paulo (SP) - Exposições

2. Bienal de São Paulo (SP)

23-166961

CDD-709.8161 .

Índices para catálogo sistemático:

1. Bienais de arte : São Paulo : Cidade 709.8161

2. São Paulo : Cidade : Bienais de arte 709.8161

Eliane de Freitas Leite - Bibliotecária - CRB 8/8415

© Publication Copyright: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. All rights reserved.

Images and texts reproduced in this publication were granted by permission from the artists, photographers, writers or their legal representatives, and are protected by law and licence agreements. Any use is prohibited without the permission of the Bienal de São Paulo, the artists and the photographers. All efforts have been made to find the copyright owners of materials reproduced here. We will be happy to correct any omission in case it comes to our knowledge.

This guide was published in September 2023, as part of the project of the 35th Bienal de São Paulo – choreographies of the impossible.

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

978-85-85298-84-5