Source: an online event, ‘Anti-Racist Art in the UK and Latin America: A Conversation’ (11 November 2020), featuring Daiara Tukano, an Indigenous Tukano artist and activist from Brazil, who had previously collaborated in a project directed by Lúcia Sá and Felipe Milanez (both members of the CARLA project team); Liliana Angulo, a Black artist and activist from Colombia and an adviser to the CARLA project; SuAndi, a Black artist and activist from the UK; and Ekua Bayunu, a Black artist and activist from the UK. This line-up was designed to enable the exploration of differences and similarities between experiences of and ideas about racism in Latin America and the UK, from the perspectives of Black and Indigenous artists. The discussion was in English and was chaired by Peter Wade with logistical assistance from Jamille Pinheiro Dias. The whole two-hour event can be accessed on CARLA’s YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/live/HOPwGVBNMXM.
Question: What does it mean to be anti-racist through art or as an artist?
It can mean challenging (and exploring) stereotypes:
Liliana: I have been working mainly with images so I work with the history of art in Colombia and colonial representations. Most of my initial work was about stereotypes and how Black people have been represented in Colombian art and also in images in general. … When I started doing this work, I was working on the word ‘negro’ and how we relate to that word, because in Colombia the relationship with that word is very complex. We have learned to embrace it in order to fight in the struggle but also obviously it has all this background of colonisation and slavery and all that, so at the time I was dealing with that in order to understand it. So I used it [the word, the image] on my own body and it was very ambivalent. For me, all these works are very painful, because of how we have learned to live with racism. But for some people it was kind of funny, so it was very ambivalent.
Suandi: I think there’s a very arrogant knowledge about who we are as people by the majority white side of society. There’s now an intellectual ignorance where people feel very confident to ask the most ridiculous questions.
Ekua: I have a whole body of work that was around trying to turn stereotypes on their head in terms of a personal thing that I try to live as honestly as I can. … Stereotypes exist within misinformation and ignorance, but they are powerful and they do impact on people and my responsibility as an artist is actually just to celebrate my truth.
Daiara: One time somebody asked me if I was a cannibal, if my nation eats people. It was in the federal congress in Brasilia: somebody in the federal congress asked me if I eat people. And another time someone else asked me if I was really an Indigenous person or an Indian – I love this word here – because I was wearing glasses or because I was using a cell phone. There is this really stupid misconception that Indigenous people are supposed to be in isolation in the middle of the forest, wearing no clothes and dying of malaria. We deal with every stupidity of racism and the best way I found is just celebrating who I am and my culture and my people and I don’t have time to waste with stupid people, you know. And the misconceptions and prejudices about Indigenous nations are so lame that I prefer to use my energy celebrating who we are and how wonderful we are in our diversity, in our history, identity, territories … by reaffirming my space and my life. I am just trying to live and breathe and in this breath share what I believe and how I believe we can value and restore the energy of life that we deserve to have as human peoples.
It can involve quite explicit actions linked to social movement organising:
Liliana: I started traveling and working with a lot of women’s organisations and organisations in the Black movement in Colombia, so in that sense I started organising and using art practice to deal with issues in different communities and territories. Recently I have been working with a community in the south of Colombia, Buenaventura, which is the main port in Colombia, and one of their leaders was killed. In Colombia, many leaders have been killed over the decades, but recently, after the peace process involving one of the longest-lasting guerrilla forces in history, this issue has been growing. And people who are defending their territory are in danger and this leader was killed; it also happened because he was defending the territory in an area that has big macro-economic development projects for the port. So we worked on his archive – the archive he had created in order to defend the territory – and with the leaders and the community we continue that work.
The art world in general can be a site of struggle:
Suandi: I realised just what a powerful voice it [art] was and in a way – and I don’t want anybody to think I am naive – I also learned what institutional racism was, even though we didn’t call it that then. So the arts for me have always been a battlefield but the same time it’s been a hugely wonderful supportive experience.
And the art world can be seen as just one domain in a wider social landscape:
Daiara: I believe we’re talking about racism all the time, because we are facing racism all the time. We are facing the story and the narratives of colonisation and trying to dismantle it a little bit, with all the weapons that are available and all the technologies that we can. And art is just one of those spaces, which is also a space for fighting over politics, for fighting over power, and for being present. Reaffirming our Indigenous identities is an act of rebellion in the face of all the discourse of colonisation that tries to make us part of the past or death. We are alive now, we are here, we are as contemporary as everybody and we have a very powerful memory. We are originary peoples, we are defending our rights, our territories, our epistemologies, our way of approaching existence; and we are defending our own truth.
This connects to a wider sense that anti-racism can be immanent in the simple act of being as a Black or Indigenous person or artist. SuAndi observed that ‘speaking personally not all the art I make is made to tackle racism; I think as artists we make art because we want something inspired’. And Liliana added that a constant explicit focus on racism and being explicitly anti-racist could be ‘tiring’ and that working with communities could address such issues in a different way: ‘In recent years I kind of got tired of racism and I just focus on the world with the communities and so, yeah, that means the projects are made with them and we work together.’
Ekua questioned what it meant to ‘practice’ anti-racism through art:
It feels to me that it’s possible that we don’t ‘practice’ our anti-racism. There’s something weird about that statement. We live constantly with racism as an oppressive force – and as women we live in the intersection of gender-based oppression. … For me, it’s like anything I produce, because of who I am, is Black art, you know. And some people object and they say there is no such term but I think I’m really attached to it because I want to value and celebrate it. I can’t imagine that I ever pick up and go ‘at this moment I’m not fighting racism and at this moment I am fighting racism’. … We need to look at fighting racism as a much more global concept. I mean the anti-racist action of just self-care, of love, of being, of the joy of dance, of just breathing and holding your grandfather or your granddaughter … these are anti-racist actions as far as I’m concerned.
For Daiara, anti-racism means contesting violence and violation, in a context in which ‘every time that an Indigenous anything appears, it is the target of many attacks’ and in which the ‘saying that a good Indian is a dead Indian [is one that] we deal with all the time’. Yet that process of contestation can take forms that go beyond denunciation and can attempt to ‘counter colonialism’ by reaffirming ‘another way of relating to the universe’, which avoids ‘anthropocentric thinking’. In Daiara’s view, although she identifies as an artist on her website (www.daiaratukano.com/en),
I am not an art creator. I am not an artist. It’s not about what I create, but it’s how I relate to creation and let creation go through me and how I can be a channel to something that is much larger than me. So that is a different relation to the universe, to the cosmos and how we approach and understand what is the function and the nature of art itself. So maybe questioning and decolonisation and counter-colonisation is, for me at least, all about also questioning the end of anthropocentric thinking.
Question: What does it imply to work in the institutions that control the art world?
On the one hand, it is seen as necessary to interact with institutions in a critical way, which may also mean engaging with them:
Daiara: If we are talking about anti-racist art, maybe it’s just reaffirming the idea that art is in itself a racist space and that it is marked by very racist institutions, like the academy, like the museums, the galleries … it is a space that has been created just to reaffirm white superiority. The museums are like the most representative spaces of colonialism. And the collections and the exotification of other cultures that are not European cultures, and the narratives that are set in the academy, are very racist. And this is still today a very important tool in promoting ethnocide and genocide. So by making a step into that space, reaffirming a different identity and a different discourse, a different relation to society and a different historical discourse, is by itself a rebellion and is by itself an anti-racist move.
Liliana: I agree in that the academy, museums, archives and botanical gardens are all institutions that are that were created by colonialism and are at the base of what we understand as culture and as art, knowledge, science and all that. So in that sense I think most of the work that we do has to do with undermining the power behind those concepts.
Liliana recounts an experience with a museum collection in the city of Medellín, in which the only item relating to a Black person was a bill of sale for an enslaved person. In that sense the collection was an expression of racism: ‘I mean everything is validated by Colombian art history and there were many representations of Black people made by white artists and in very subtle ways those representations maintain the oppression because they use art to represent oppression and the people being oppressed’. In that same experience, in which she was also working with local community organisations, they came across work by a Black artist, Rodrigo Barrientos (1931–2013), who was little known in Colombia and had migrated to Europe.
Liliana: It was an experience for everybody to understand how the power of the museum works and how you can relate to that. So we have worked with archives, because in Colombia it is terrible that there is no memory of our ancestors, because memory is obviously written by the people in power, so Black painters were completely erased from art history in Colombia. So in that sense the archives give an opportunity to find that memory and do a process of reparation using art.
SuAndi says that
We fight racism just by producing work that we understand and we hope the audience will look at and question and ponder and wonder but we definitely need to have comrades to do that and some of those comrades are in the arts institutions.
On the other hand, artists perceive real threats and limitations:
Ekua: I’ve witnessed people who are still working within institutions and the damage it does to them – or what I perceive from the outside as damage.
Suandi: I know Black people employed by the institutions who have really, really suffered. It’s very difficult from the outside to give the support to somebody who’s on a staff team where they’re constantly being questioned about their ability, their judgments, their opinions. You just hope you can be there for them if they’re brave enough to say it’s really bad in here and I need help. And I don’t blame anybody that doesn’t feel they want to say that because it might make them seem as though they’re failing.
Liliana: It is really hard because in Colombia the way racism works is very tricky because it is part of our structure [as Black people]; I mean it’s completely institutionalised. So when you walk those corridors, you have your own mind saying that you probably don’t deserve to be there and all that, because it’s how we have been raised. And it’s also because of how people interact in these positions of power, so they all feel that they have the right to be in that seat and to look at you as if you don’t.
Tokenism is also seen as a major threat:
Liliana: I give lots of lectures at conferences and things but I think that’s sometimes about them wanting to have a token Black voice. For a long time, I had a struggle with tokenism: there was this practice of people calling me just to kind of validate some curatorial work or something. I’m not always sure they’re happy they did invite me to be that token Black voice because I might not always speak in the manner that they wanted me to speak in. But I think every opportunity to speak should be taken, and remember that when we do speak as individuals we represent all Black people, whether that’s right or wrong, so we have to be careful and consider what we say and what we do.
Ekua: I have had conversations with the big galleries in my city [Manchester], which scrambled to make statements in response to Black Lives Matter and to look at their programming, saying this is the time, the time is right, come and talk to us. … But from my perspective it was, like, I’m not interested [unless] we innovate and we come in as equals and you hand over some power to us within this space. I’m not coming in to shape or flavour or to make you more comfortable with your programming because it doesn’t create long-term change.
Ekua recognises the ‘powerful impact of just being in them [institutions]’ as a Black or Indigenous person, ‘just existing, just walking down the street in our body’, but says it is also necessary to consider ‘the work that we can do against the backdrop of the emotional toil that that takes’. She also wonders ‘about the sustainability of us working within those institutions without there being a real overhaul and [wonders] how much the visa can be very temporary’:
Having worked within those institutions, the changes that you can make can be incredibly temporary, because often we are not in positions of a great deal of power in terms of longevity of planning, longevity in terms of control. … It’s like we are constantly having to reinvent the battleground that we’re fighting on.
Sustainability is also an issue for Liliana:
The development project of this mayor [of Bogotá] is huge because it’s the first time there has been a little bit of affirmative action. To have an article in that document that says that ethnic groups have the right in Bogotá to have a space, to have the their own voices, to sit at the table, to agree budgets with the authorities of the city – that’s huge. But it has happened before that when people gain something, then somebody else gets into the city government and everything is erased. We have experienced that and it is very hard when you have worked for years to gain something and then everything is just erased by somebody – just very easy, in a second.
And insofar as working with institutions also means addressing audiences beyond Black and Indigenous communities, there are also potential problems to be managed:
Suandi: We are brave when we step out and we’re brave when we go to seminars and conferences and pitch our work, because the eyes that are assessing it do not look like our eyes. [But] I can’t give out the energy to a white audience that might be offended by it [my work], that is not my job. I’m not going to defend my work to a white audience because I think we’ve been forced into a defensive position for far too long as a Black community – and I mean that in the global sense of the word – and we do not have to apologise anymore.
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