Introduction

A fascination with aesthetic aspects and with the graceful movement of bodies has dominated our views of dance. Dance is characterised by a ‘regime of visuality’, in Rafael Palacios’s words, which pushes both spectators and dancers to share the enjoyable sensations linked to observing bodies that move with music.Footnote ¹ In the West, dance is often seen as entertainment, stirring something within us, transmitting energy or exuding transgressions. However, early anthropological approaches to the world of dance in non-Westernised societies demonstrated that, alongside music, dance was integrated into a broad system of social relations that supported religious and ritual practices (Boas Reference Boas1930; Chernoff Reference Chernoff1979; Hanna Reference Hanna1988; Robb Reference Robb1961). Dance was also central to collective celebratory expressions that reinforced processes of identity boundary construction.

Since the 1970s, dance has garnered interest in anthropology, leading to four basic approaches that remain today. The North American Boasian approach sought to record native dances and introduced philosophical concerns about movement, power and race. The folklorist approach, developed in Germany and France, was concerned with describing and formally classifying dance, but lacked a historical component. The linguistic approach to dance was characterised by formal descriptions of movement patterns. And finally, a more holistic approach included analysis from social anthropology, medical anthropology, cognitive science and cultural studies, exploring the connections between dance and factors such as ethnicity, sexuality, gender, body, migration, identity and transnationalism (Kringelbach and Skinner Reference Kringelbach, Skinner, Kringelbach and Skinner2014: 6–8). This approach views dance as an ‘embodiment of social life’ (Hughes-Freeland Reference Hughes-Freeland2008: 1) that is both aesthetic and political, both narrative and performative.

An ethnography of dance begins with the premise that dancers, choreographers, spectators and researchers inhabit aesthetic systems rooted in cultural conventions (Kaeppler Reference Kaeppler2000). Dance ethnography focuses on how participants name and describe movement and conceptualise dance and its purposes. It analyses the formation of ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2009), which produce effects on audiences and dancers, and it investigates the relationship between movement and embodied knowledge (Reed Reference Reed1998).

This chapter delves into dance in relation to ethno-racial elements, the representation of identity and the development of anti-racist agendas. The focus is on how the Colombian Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa Danzafro develops anti-racist narratives through a particular aesthetic and a political positioning that criticises racism’s impact on Black lives in Colombia. Among Sankofa’s anti-racist strategies are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people, emphasising the importance of ‘listening’ to the message of the dance, rather than highlighting the aesthetic visuality of the performance; ii) exploring how the embodied knowledge present in Afro-Colombian traditions can be used as a creative resource and a source of ‘Afro-referentiality’; and iii) combining traditional and contemporary Afro-Colombian rhythms and movements to create musicality and choreography within an anti-racist narrative framework. We will identify these strategies in a recent Sankofa Danzafro choreographic creation, Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel (Behind the South: Dances for Manuel [referring to Manuel Zapata Olivella], 2021).

We start by viewing dance as a ‘place of enunciation’, both political and aesthetic, which aims to break into the racialised social space of art and ideas of race, particularly concerning Black people in Colombia (see Chapter 1). In theories of enunciation, discourses are ways of intervening in the world through language (Van Dijk Reference Van Dijk2019). However, discursive meanings are not transparent; they depend on the context of communication, on extra-linguistic factors – social, ethnic-racial, political, emotional, and so on – and on the relationships among speakers and listeners. Therefore, discursive meanings exhibit a certain opacity (Benveniste Reference Benveniste1971). Our focus is on how Sankofa Danzafro’s dance moves between this opacity and the transparency of its messages. This interplay of opacity and transparency characterises anti-racist proposals based on dance, which also depend on the degree of engagement between the company and its audiences.

We approach Sankofa’s work from the perspective of what Jacques Rancière (Reference Rancière and Arditi2000) calls ‘artistic practices’ linked to political processes of the production of subjectivities that seek to destabilise established orders of the ‘sensible’ (that which is sensed and which makes sense) and its visibility in art and society (Rancière Reference Rancière2005). In terms of a ‘place of enunciation’, we argue that Sankofa’s work has a discursivity that is both performative and narrative (Austin Reference Austin1990), and is characterised by a bodily and spatial materiality (Butler Reference Butler1993), reflected in the spaces and acts of dancing. From a discursive perspective, performance contributes to the construction of affective atmospheres (Anderson Reference Anderson2009; Wetherell Reference Wetherell, Maxwell and Aggleton2013) in which the assemblage of bodies, movements and aesthetic elements generates anti-racist effects.

We reflect, first, on the role of movement and engagement in constituting the ‘affective atmospheres’ that produce an ‘anti-racist emotionality’. Next, we discuss different perspectives that shape the politics of the category ‘Afro’ in its relation to Afro-contemporary dance and anti-racism in the work of Sankofa Danzafro. Third, we describe the anti-racist strategies that guide the construction of Sankofa Danzafro’s narratives, focusing on the work Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel.

The Joyful Song of the Parrots: Bodies and Togetherness – An Anti-Racist Emotionality?

In the spring of 2021, following the most challenging period of the COVID-19 confinement, mobility began to be restored in Colombia. Although life had not returned to normal, people could now travel and see friends and family. Carlos Correa was able to accompany the dancers and director of Sankofa Danzafro as they left the city of Medellín for an artistic retreat in Tumaco, a town surrounded by tropical rainforest on the southern Pacific coast of Colombia. We went there to finalise the choreography and music for Detrás del sur. Over twenty-two days, the members of Sankofa formed, as dancers would say, ‘one body’ (see Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1

Sankofa Danzafro dancers in their rehearsal retreat in Tumaco, March 2021

(© Carlos Correa Angulo, by permission).

Sankofa’s dancers are young Afro-Colombians whose families come from rural areas of the Pacific and Caribbean regions of Colombia. Most of them have been directly or indirectly impacted by the armed conflict and violence in those territories, without this defining their identities. In fact, these events are rarely mentioned when the group is together (although some of Sankofa’s artistic creations tackle these themes, for instance, the 2018 piece Fecha límite [Deadline]).Footnote ² Some were born in the city of Medellín and others have migrated alone or with their families to the city in search of better opportunities or fleeing violence. Among the dancers, we can find stories with elements in common where family tragedies, structural violence in the region of origin and experiences of racism intermingle with personal entrepreneurial projects, attachment to certain musical styles and religious traditions (including a type of Afro-Catholicism particular to Colombia’s Pacific region). There is also lots of dancing, laughter and endless parties, with an abundant repertoire of Afro-urban rhythms and genres that they enjoy and reference in their personal dance explorations or with other companions. The most popular genres include salsa choque, exotic, popping, break dancing, funk, locking and krumping.Footnote ³

The dance performance Detrás del sur was inspired by the book Changó, el gran putas (Changó, the Biggest Badass, 1983) by Afro-Colombian intellectual and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella (see Chapter 1). The book narrates the genesis of Afro-descendant communities in the Americas. Not easily classified as a novel, Changó, el gran putas adopts an epic style that, in the words of the book’s prologue writer, Darío Henao, summarises 500 years of the history of Black people in the Americas by re-interpreting historical facts through ‘mythical realism’, a style that combines ‘imagination and myth to reconstruct the memory of Afro-American peoples using the Yoruba cosmology of the Bantu peoples of sub-Saharan Africa’ (Henao Reference Henao and Olivella2010: 12). Because it narrates this history using Afro religious, spiritual and epistemic frames of reference, the novel has recently been recognised by literary historiography in Colombia as an expression of the anti-racist work that Zapata Olivella developed over more than four decades. It makes extensive use of ‘Afro-referentiality’, one of the anti-racist strategies adopted by the Black movement in Colombia.Footnote ⁴

Rather than being an adaptation of Zapata Olivella’s book, Detrás del sur is an embodied and danced version of the book based on reflections provoked by its reading. Sankofa’s choreographer and dancers experienced an ‘affective connection’ with the book’s depictions of exodus, struggles, the geographies of pain, helplessness and the need to come together that are experienced by the book’s characters after being violently uprooted from their place of origin in Africa and forced to settle in the Americas. According to some writers on anti-racism (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2005; Eddo-Lodge Reference Eddo-Lodge2021), affective connection is what characterises the durability of a global Black community with an Afro-diasporic consciousness imbued with the trauma of enslavement and the struggle for freedom.

During the retreat’s working days, which lasted up to eight hours, Rafael Palacios organised several exercises of exploration and creation based on the book. Dancers, musicians, and others present experienced the creation of affective atmospheres, which were characterised by ambiguity and indeterminacy when people tried to describe their affective-emotional states (Anderson Reference Anderson2009). There was also a ‘non-conscious experience of intensity’ (Shouse Reference Shouse2005) that at times generated emotions connected to personal memories of painful events and everyday experiences of racism. Carlos Correa recorded the creation of these affective atmospheres in field notes:

The formation of affective atmospheres involves ‘ways of naming collective affects’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2009: 78), which have the ability to be transmitted from one body to another and between human and non-human entities (Brennan Reference Brennan2004). This transmission occurs in spaces charged with affective forces, as ‘currents’ emerging from ‘bodies affecting other bodies and yet exceeding the bodies they emerge from’ (Anderson Reference Anderson2009: 78). The analytical distinctions between affect, emotions and feelings are not entirely clear (Shouse Reference Shouse2005). In the ethnographic episode here, several elements converge that are part of the so-called affective turn characterised by an ‘interest in embodiment, emotions, and aesthetics … and the in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’ (Caze and Lloyd Reference Caze and Lloyd2011: 3).

Among dancers, musicians and Sankofa’s director, the conscious exploration of emotions leads on to the formation of narratives wrapped in an anti-racist emotionality. The allusion to events of everyday racism mingled with reflections on the uprootedness and exile of people in Changó, el gran putas brings about the establishment of an affective atmosphere charged with meaning, on the one hand, and affective ‘intensity’ on the other. We argue that the affective dimension of creating Detrás del sur has several phases in which each dancer first engages with the novel, then with their experiences of daily racism, next with other dancers and, finally, with the affective atmosphere formed by relations between human and non-human entities (dancers, birds, music, sound, movement, corporealities, space, territory, etc.).

Our argument, in line with Anderson (Reference Anderson2009: 79), is that dance is an ‘aesthetic object’ that displays an ‘affective quality’ with a gradation of ‘intensity’ specific to a given context. Dance works with emotionality and affectivity in the same way as with the tension between the subjective and the objective. There is a back-and-forth between two oppositions, ‘narrative/non-narrative and semiotic/asignifying’, with emotion being associated with narrative and signification, and affect with non-narrative and asignifying (Anderson Reference Anderson2009: 80). The dancers’ initial difficulty in expressing in words what they were experiencing with their bodies is illustrative of this tension between the narrative and the non-narrative, the verbal and the nonverbal, the cognitive and the bodily, emotion and sensation. We encounter these tensions when we investigate embodied phenomena of movement, such as dance, from the perspective of affectivity.

During the creation process of Detrás del sur, there were different intensities of engagement that formed affective atmospheres, configuring an Afro-referential anti-racist emotionality that emerged from the collective space generated by sharing experiences of racism. Sankofa Danzafro’s anti-racist strategy analyses the bodily sensations and emotions generated when the traumatic experiences of everyday racism are intentionally embodied. Knowing how racism is felt through movement, body memory and intersubjective experience is the first step in developing a dance-based anti-racist consciousness among the company’s members.

Engagement is a process charged with affectivity. In the process of creating Detrás del sur, there were different degrees of engagement that are configurations of anti-racist affectivity. The first register of engagement occurred with the reading of Manuel Zapata Olivella’s book, which situates the origins of Afro-descendants in the Americas in a collective experience of pain that is deeply emotional and leaves traces in the bodily memory. Second, there was an engagement with the characters in the book and their stories. These stories are characterised by the collective ‘trauma’ of enslavement and by collective struggles for freedom, adaptation and the creation of new conditions to live in a situation of domination. Trauma and tenacity, pain and bravery, mourning and courage are mixed together. These feelings can be defined, according to Eric Shouse (Reference Shouse2005), as sensations ‘that have been checked against previous experiences and labelled’, and that allow ‘making sense of the world from experience and not from representation’ (Besserer Alatorre Reference Besserer Alatorre2014: 13).

An intersubjective relationship and affective connection is formed between the Black dancers and fictional characters who share traumatic experiences of racial discrimination and a common struggle against domination and racism. This emotional identification is preceded by an experimentation with sensations, music and movements that create a spatialisation of affectivity. In this phase of engagement, the aesthetic-material interaction between dancers, music and movements involves movements that embody the sensations produced by racism, felt as the ‘curse’ that connects their own life experiences with those of historical fictional characters with whom they share a common origin. The work of exploring sensations through body and movement is what Shouse (Reference Shouse2005) calls ‘affect’, whose ‘abstractivity’ makes it transmissible in ways that feelings and emotions are not.

Now, one of the ways in which affect circulates and impacts on others is through assemblages of bodies (Anderson Reference Anderson2009; Massumi Reference Massumi1995). Dancers’ individual explorations lead into collective explorations of a shared sense of being part of a painful event that is both historical and contemporary. The interaction with the music and with elements of the environment such as the roar of the sea, birdsong and weeping contribute to an anti-racist emotionality that forms when individual sensations are made conscious as the dancers come together and can then be described in emotional terms – anger, pain, uncertainty, etc. This anti-racist emotionality makes conscious the painful emotions that racism provokes in the lives and histories of Black people and embodies them in order to remove their paralyzing force. To do conscious work with emotions through the body is to learn to control them. Racism works with a surreptitious emotionality, producing discriminatory events and racialisations that reproduce racial stereotypes and structural racism. When the Sankofa dancers in Detrás del sur choose to inhabit the place of the emotional pain that racism causes, as a historical and contemporary experience, they are undermining its manifestations and, consequently, dealing with the problem. Thus, examining how racism feels in the body is a way of confronting it from a conscious emotionality, which seeks to counteract racism by working with the body and its capacity to construct narrativity through dance.

The ‘Afro’ in Afro-Contemporary Dance and Anti-Racist Perspectives

The definition of ‘contemporary’ has been the subject of debates both within and outside the field of dance (Siegmund Reference Siegmund, Conde-Salazar and Martínez2003). When and where does the contemporary begin in dance? Does the contemporary refer to a temporal, technical or aesthetic notion?

According to Adeline Maxwell, the consensus is that contemporary dance emerged from a break with the aesthetic ideals and techniques of classical ballet, when Isadora Duncan, Lote Fuller and Ruth St. Denis in the USA, alongside Rudolf Von Laban, Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss in Germany, proposed various innovations – for example, dispensing with the pointe shoes in ballet, making movements on the floor – that led to new forms of dance, which ‘quickly moved from experimentation to academization’ (Maxwell Reference Maxwell and Maxwell2015: 23). Contemporary dance became institutionalised as a supposedly ‘universal’ dance with its own aesthetics and ways of creating narratives and rhythmic patterns.

Sankofa defines its project as ‘Afro-contemporary’.Footnote ⁶ Although it shares with contemporary dance a temporal frame that places it in ‘the now’, for Sankofa being contemporary entails challenging the racism experienced by Black people today. In Afro-contemporary dance, the ‘Afro’ is a contested field where notions of difference and particularity overlap. Eduardo Restrepo (Reference Restrepo2021: 21–22) identifies four meanings around the term Afro. First, Afro can subsume ‘Black’ by emphasising racialised aspects of difference. Second, Afro can refer to ancestry, kinship and a community of common origin. A third emphasis is on ‘traces of Africanness’ that might be identified in the transnational Afro-diasporic community. Finally, Afro refers to cultural traits characteristic of Black communities, without these necessarily being African in origin.

Behind the politics of naming and conceptualising such ideas as ‘Black’, ‘Afro’, ‘African origin’, ‘Afro-diasporic’, ‘African’, and ‘Afro-descendant’, there are both racialisation mechanisms and sensibilities that underlie political subjectivities (Lao-Montes Reference Laó-Montes2009). Some meanings of ‘Afro’ become dominant for certain contexts, while others quickly fall into disrepute or disuse, depending on the confluence of national and international actors, who may be internal or external to Afro-descendant mobilisations (Wade Reference Wade and Restrepo2013).

In the field of contemporary Afro dance, where Sankofa Danzafro is located, anti-racism is expressed primarily by the decision to be explicitly ‘Afro’ through the embodied practice of dance. This means that contemporary Afro dance seeks to be associated with affirmations of Afro identity at local and Afro-diasporic levels. Transnational ethnic affiliations play with the overlapping political meanings of Afro. Thus, for example, in the case of Sankofa Danzafro, at times the Afro is emphasised as belonging to an Afro-diasporic community, at other times there is an open affirmation of common ancestry, or the racialisation of a re-signified Blackness, or an ethnic affirmation that politicises ‘Black culture’. These moorings and displacements of the meaning of Afro in the positionings of Sankofa and its dancers are emphasised according to the contexts of interlocution, whether those are funding institutions (almost always state-owned) or festivals and tours with their diverse audiences.

The contemporary aspect of Afro-contemporary dance is framed by the intention to explore, based on the current conditions in which dance is performed, the traditions – the past – that influence its dramaturgy and narratives. As discussed at the conference ‘African Contemporary Dance? Questioning Issues of a Performance Aesthetic for a Developing and Independent Continent’, held as part of the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience festival (Durban, 2004), the term ‘Afro-contemporary’ seeks to establish a methodology for critically examining tradition and engaging it in a dialogue with the challenges faced by African societies (Douglas et al. Reference Douglas, Sichel, Liadi, Noël, Danster, Cuvilas and Linyekula2006: 107–112). In simpler terms, Afro-contemporary dance is seen as a creative technique.

The JOMBA! conference debates about Afro-contemporary dance, involving renowned African choreographers, are echoed in the ideas of Rafael Palacios. For Palacios, tradition is not an immutable flow coming from a static past. Rather, he conceives it as a dynamic space for the exploration and deep understanding of Afro-descendant cultures. In various conversations, Palacios has emphasised tradition as a ‘place to return to through investigation’.

This critical approach to the past is fundamental in Afro-contemporary dance and is of vital importance for Sankofa as a company. The word sankofa originates in the systems of thought of the Akan people of present-day Ghana: it means going back to the past, to the roots, as a way to understand the present and envision the future. Sankofa is symbolised by a bird whose feet are pointing forwards, while its head is turned backwards to grasp an egg with its beak. Thus, revisiting the past is a way of creating one’s own history, which is constructed from the perspective of Afro peoples in all their heterogeneity and uniqueness. The politics of history, which arises from examining the past, is an essential condition to face the problems that currently affect the Afro-diasporic community.

The director, choreographer and dancers must therefore investigate tradition, enquire into its meanings, contextualise its uses, and not simply ‘learn the technique’. The investigation of tradition is the first step in an anti-racist process of decolonising dances and bodies and liberating their potential. A critical examination of tradition leads to an awareness of the aestheticised racialisations that persist and are reproduced by Black people themselves in some of their dances, albeit with the aim of dismantling them, locating their origin and showing that they resulted from a process of domination that tamed subjectivity and shaped the expression of Black identities. From this anti-racist perspective, the expression ‘decolonising the body’ refers to exploring the forms of domestication of the body in Afro dances, a process that can be seen in various elements: these include body postures and clothing that express a relationship of submission (for example, typical costumes of Afro-Colombian dances in which female dancers wear aprons, dance with their heads bowed, assume a posture of servitude, etc.). The domestication of the body is also seen through the surveillance of sexuality, controlling dance as an incitement to sexual debauchery. This idea about dance justified many of the prohibitions of Black dances during and after the colonial period. From these mechanisms of control, the rhythmic capacities and potentials of Black bodies were diminished and subordinated through the imposition of forms of dance considered less ‘erotic’ and more ‘civilised’.

If the ‘Afro’ in Afro-contemporary dance implies an examination of the past, it also refers to techniques of creation and methodologies of dance research based in Africa. There is a genealogy that locates the origin of Afro-contemporary dance in the Mudra Afrique school, in Senegal, in the context of the struggles for the decolonisation of Africa and a unity based on the ‘common destiny’ of all Afro-descendants as proclaimed by Pan-Africanism (Adi Reference Adi2018; Shepperson Reference Shepperson1962). Under the premise that through knowledge of the past (one’s own history) and awareness of the present one could confront the challenges that the future would bring to African peoples, in 1977 Léopold Sédar Senghor and Maurice Béjart set about the task of founding the Centre Africain de Perfectionnement et de Recherche des Interprètes du Spectacle Mudra Afrique (African Performing Artists Centre for Development and Research, Mudra Afrique). Germaine Acogny, considered the mother of Afro-contemporary dance, originally from Benin, was appointed director of the Mudra Afrique school, becoming its most emblematic figure.Footnote ⁷

The Mudra Afrique school as led by Germaine Acogny around African dances can be defined as a postcolonial cultural production, whose intentions, in Acogny’s words, were to combat stereotypes about Afro bodies and ‘colonial ideologies reinforced by professional dance training institutions’ (Swanson Reference Swanson2019: 50). In her ethnography of Acogny’s École des Sables, Amy Swanson identified several principles taught there that give identity to Afro contemporary dance: the creation of a movement vocabulary by adopting a known dance structure, but endowing it with an African aesthetic; the inclusion of aesthetics influenced by the natural environment and the surrounding dancers; and the search for traditional knowledge to find routes to narrate the present (Swanson Reference Swanson2019: 50–54). The emphasis on dissociated movement, the transmission of a collective flow of energy when dancing, the undulation of the body, whose central axis is the spine, circular formations and diagonal steps are some of the elements that characterise Germaine Acogny’s technique and that are employed by Rafael Palacios in his dance training, along with variations that he has introduced.

The Mudra Afrique school and Germaine Acogny laid the foundation for many African dancers from Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Benin and Burkina Faso, among others, to enter the institutional system of African dance education with high standards of quality and training. Afro-contemporary dance arrived in Colombia in 1997, introduced by Rafael Palacios; he had had over five years of training in France and Africa, under Acogny herself and Irene Tassembedo, one of Acogny’s first disciples, who has her own school of Afro-contemporary dance in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. That same year Sankofa Danzafro was born in the city of Medellin, Colombia. By the mid 2000s, under the influence of Palacios, a handful of Afro-contemporary dance companies emerged on the national dance scene, with the main ones located in Medellín, Cartagena, Cali, Barranquilla and Bogotá. Among these, Sankofa Danzafro stands out for its explicit political commitment to the fight against stereotypes, which is at the genesis of Afro-contemporary dance from the Mudra School to the present day. The company’s main motto is ‘We dance not only to be seen, but to be heard’, emphasising the anti-racist character of their works.

Afro-contemporary dance quickly went from experimentation to standardisation after its entry into the market of global dance cultures, characterised by an exoticising fascination with everything defined as ‘African’, which turned Afro-contemporary dance into a commodity consumed mainly by the USA and Europe, and more recently by Latin America (Kringelbach and Skinner Reference Kringelbach, Skinner, Kringelbach and Skinner2014; Maxwell Reference Maxwell and Maxwell2015; Samuel Reference Samuel2011; Swanson Reference Swanson2019). Added to this is the danger Rafael Palacios warns against of the ‘emptying of meaning’, which, by decontextualising Afro-contemporary dance from the subjects and territories where it is practiced, not only loses sight of the political and contested epistemological meanings that are expressed through the dance, but also ignores the racism that Afro dancers face as racialised subjects in the world.

Sankofa’s Contemporary Afro-Colombian Dance and Anti-Racist Strategies in Detrás del Sur

During 2017, while Rafael Palacios was pursuing a master’s degree on epistemologies of the South in Ecuador, he directed La mentira complaciente (The Complacent Lie). This Afro-contemporary work focuses on how Black people have to ‘embody’ racialised social stereotypes about their sexuality, histories and identities in order to be integrated or ‘consumed’ in the art market and especially the field of dance. During the exploratory exercises, the director asked each dancer to experiment with an element that would be part of the dramaturgy of the work: the loincloth. Several of the dancers expressed their concern about having to wear a garment that has symbolised the barbarism that supposedly characterises Black populations. Palacios explained that he wanted them to become corporeally aware of what it means to wear/embody a stereotype that has for so long denigrated Afro populations. The aim was to awaken a degree of attention to corporeality and to the sensations – the autonomous manifestation of affectivity (Massumi Reference Massumi1995) – provoked by the sensation of having to wear a denigrating garment. The dancers would then have to combat those sensations using movement and dance channelled through ‘technique’ – that is, the dance knowledge they had already learned from traditional dances in their regions of origin – to transform them into something new, endowing them with ‘narrativity’, that is, with the ability to express contemporary human experience from a specific positionality (Torres Perdigón Reference Torres Perdigón2021).

This exercise of bringing attention to sensation allows us to analyse several constitutive aspects of Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance project: working with embodied knowledge in a conscious way; seeing movement as an expression of multiple materialities; co-producing spaces that can be both physical – movements in a place – and intersubjective – shared interior and imaginative space.

One of Sankofa’s dancers who has been dancing in the company for more than fifteen years said that he felt suffocated and overwhelmed when he first wore the loincloth. So he decided to turn to prior knowledge he had about a traditional dance, currulao, from his home region, Tumaco, a city on the Colombian Pacific coast. Among the genres of currulao, there was a work dance that was performed during the rice harvest. The dust from the rice caused the skin to itch and this gave rise to a type of dance that he learned as a child. While he was doing his dance explorations with the loincloth, he felt his own body remembering the movements and body sensations of the rice harvest dance. He began to make movements that connoted annoyance, irritability, discomfort. For example, to the rhythmic beat of male and female cununos (a type of conga drum), he would shake and brush invisible dust off his skin, scratch in desperation, pull at his sweaty clothes to remove them, contort himself, make rapid hand and foot movements that then gave way to a state of surrender, only to return with greater vigour, like someone seeking to get rid of an itchy sensation all over his body. All these bodily sensations were associated with the unpleasant feeling of wearing the loincloth. The stereotypes that materialised in the loincloth caused itching. This is what Sankofa Danzafro’s contemporary Afro-Colombian dance project is all about: to make use of embodied knowledge to allow rhythmic explorations that challenge the discomfort caused by ‘carrying/embodying’ racial stereotypes, which can then be contested using conscious and reflexive movement in front of audiences observing Black dances, who receive a message that has to be ‘heard’.

Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel

According to Derek McCormack (Reference McCormack2008), dance analysis encompasses the body, space and cultural geographies, as well as the various ways in which bodies move. Because of this, both dance and ‘danced movement’ are culturally produced and express an attitude that is both social and political and must be analysed beyond representation and meaning (Thrift Reference Thrift, Keith and Pile1997).Footnote ⁸ Dance performance does not always attribute a particular significance to each movement. As Rafael Palacios says in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, the movements and the cadence of dancing bodies express a pleasant gracefulness that often only relates to the dramaturgy or choreography of the work. However, when it comes to anti-racism in dance, sequences of movement, interpretation of gestures, music and dramaturgical elements such as lights and costumes weave a narrative that delivers a concrete message to audiences. In that sense, to dance is to tell a story.

Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel is divided into five acts, mirroring the structure of Zapata Olivella’s book. These acts do not obey a spatio-temporal linearity. Instead, they present a narrative unity that emphasises Afro-descendants’ contestation of the structural conditions of racism they face. The acts mix together rhythms arising from experimentation with the music of Afro-Colombian communities (of the Colombian Pacific and Caribbean regions) and fusions of Afro-urban rhythms. The names and order of the acts changed during the development of the work, but at this early stage the first act was ‘Muntu’: it addresses the emergence of the Afro diaspora in the Americas, the role of race mixture as a founding metaphor, and the birth, rebellion and death of Benkos Biojó (associated with the orisha Changó in Zapata Olivella’s work).Footnote ⁹ The next act, ‘Diaspora’ (also called ‘The Ship’), symbolises the transatlantic voyage and the dispersion of Africans and their descendants in America. Here an atmosphere of desperation and agitation is depicted, combining strong and emphatic movements with contortions and elevations. The following act, ‘Unction’, represents the orishas and ancestors in communion with the Afro men and women, highlighting how they bestow wisdom, knowledge and value on the muntu. In Figure 4.2, the middle figure represents muntu, who anoints the figures on either side, who are the children of muntu. The scenes are characterised by movements that imitate the atmosphere of flora and fauna, the environment and the integration of humans and nature, one of the characteristics of muntu as a philosophy and religious system. Hand movements and extensions of the torso are emphasised, along with jumps and long strides: the choreography conveys a sacred playfulness. The next act, ‘Epic 1’, represents the struggles with which the children of the diaspora fought to achieve their freedom, the fights and battles fired by rebellion. The movements and rhythms are a mixture of traditional Afro-Colombian dances and African rhythms characterised by rapid beats and explosive percussion; the choreography is based on energetic movements that require dexterity, speed and precision. The movements on stage combine several horizontal planes and the attitude of each dancer denotes pride, vigour and strength. Finally, ‘Epic 2’ depicts the struggles waged by Black communities in the present against forms of exclusion and racism and the social protests in which they participated during the 2021 national strike in Colombia.

Figure 4.2

Scene from ‘Unction’ in Detrás del sur by Sankofa Danzafro, on stage at the Joyce Theatre, New York, 2024

Figure 4.2 long description.

Figure 4.2 Long description

Mid-stage stands a female dressed in skin-tight shorts and a crop-top. On her head she wears a net that covers her entire face and from which hang long strands reaching to her knees. She represents a maternal origin figure. To her right, a female dancer, wearing a long flowing robe, squats down with body erect and arms outstretched; she also has a net covering her head and face. Opposite her is a male dancer, wearing trousers and a long sleeveless top, who adopts a position mirroring hers. He also has a net over his face and head.

(photo by Steven Pisano © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

Combating Stereotypes: Message and Performance

So far, we have focused on how anti-racist sensibilities are generated by affective and emotional responses among dance company members without addressing the issue of audiences, whose affective responses are also implicated in Afro-contemporary dance’s anti-racist perspectives (Correa Angulo and Alarcón Velásquez Reference Correa Angulo and Velásquez2024). As we have noted, Sankofa Danzafro’s motto is ‘We dance not only to be seen, but to be heard’, which means that strategies of creation and performance are ultimately oriented to audiences. As already mentioned, in Afro-contemporary dance – and in dance more generally – a regime of visuality predominates, particularly situated in the gaze of the spectators. As a result, the messages conveyed by the dance are often diluted by the intensity of the spectators’ aesthetic gaze on the bodies. These messages are characterised by a tension between the opacity and the transparency of their meanings, which are thus not always clear to the public and are only gradually assimilated. For example, Figure 4.3 is from a scene that, at the time, the dancers called ‘The Birth of a Warrior’, which shows a woman and the son she has just given birth to: this evokes the (re)birth in the Americas of both Changó and Benkos Biojó, referring to various meanings in Zapata Olivella’s novel. These references can be opaque for some and transparent for others, depending on their degree of familiarity with the novel.

Figure 4.3

Scene from ‘The Birth of a Warrior’ in Detrás del sur by Sankofa Danzafro, on stage at the Joyce Theatre, New York, 2024

Figure 4.3 long description.

Figure 4.3 Long description

The male dancer wears trousers and a long sleeveless top; his arms hang down by his sides. The woman, visibly pregnant, wears a long flowing robe, with her braided tresses piled up on her head, secured with a tied sash. She embraces the man, drawing his head to hers with both arms.

(photo by Steven Pisano © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

Although stereotypes do not operate exclusively in visual mode, they tend to work in the sphere of the visible, which serves as apparent evidence that they refer to ‘reality’. In Detrás del sur, on the other hand, there is a communicative intention that is expressed not only in the aesthetic choices of the dramaturgy, but also in the invitation to the spectator to ‘hear’ a message. In one of the musical pieces in Act 3, ‘Unction’, the vocalist repeatedly instructs the audience ‘oíd, oíd’ (hear, hear) while the dancers perform slow steps with exquisite elastic movements. This is based on the first lines of an intense poem in the first part of Changó, el gran putas: ‘¡Oídos del Muntu, oíd! / ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! ¡Oíd! / ¡Oídos del Muntu, oíd! / He visto en sueños a Changó’ (Ears of the people, hear! / Hear! Hear! Hear! Hear! / Ears of the people, hear! / I have seen Changó in dreams). The command to hear is directed at the children of muntu, that is, to Afro people, but on stage, due to the immediacy of the performance, the instruction involves the audience. Similarly, in the first act, ‘Muntu’, a character emerges from the back of the stage reciting an unintelligible message. He shouts and makes emphatic intonations with his voice; he interpellates the audience, looking them in the face and telling them, ‘Listen, understand.’ But no one can understand, because the character speaks in jeringonza, a Spanish form of pig Latin, incomprehensible to the uninitiated. This choice of language represents the misunderstandings in communication between dancers and audiences.

One of the challenges in combating and dismantling stereotypes is the difficulty of ensuring that audiences ‘listen’ to the Others who are the objects of stereotyping. The action of listening is made possible by affective charges that underwrite the communicative aspect of the message (Van Dijk Reference Van Dijk2019). The primacy of the exoticising gaze that focuses on the dancing Black bodies thus makes it impossible to truly hear what is being communicated. The viewer’s gaze returns again and again to the bodies, their appearance, their skills, the amazing abilities they demonstrate while dancing: the unspoken premise is, ‘They are Black bodies: that’s why they can dance like that’ (see also Chapter 7).Footnote ¹⁰

Sankofa’s anti-racist work seeks to break with the gaze and its primacy in the shaping of stereotypes. As Mary Louise Pratt (Reference Pratt1997) points out, the gaze is laden with an exoticisation that makes possible the emergence of the stereotype. Víctor Segalen (Reference Segalen2017) states that exoticism arises from the operation of the senses, especially those of sight and smell, in a way that distances what is being sensed. Exoticism implies a gaze and, therefore, distance. It arises in encounters that occur in contexts of power inequality and the colonisation of bodies, territories and resources, and that, in the voluminous canon of travel literature, are represented as involving an element of surprise. The genesis of the stereotype is thus based on surprise, although once a stereotype exists, this element disappears insofar as a stereotype implies complete predictability.

Breaking with the exotic gaze is perhaps the most ambitious objective of an anti-racist strategy such as Sankofa’s. To this end, in Detrás del sur, there is a careful narrative that also generates effects of surprise, but with a very different valence. A spectator of Sankofa’s work said this:

It took me by surprise. Because you expect to find Black bodies doing one thing and suddenly they’re showing through dance, something else. We were expecting them to do one thing and they did the opposite. It was a rather uncomfortable and surprising feeling.

(Alex, focus group 1, April 2021)Footnote ¹¹

Sankofa’s works generate an anti-racist effect on the audience by using the effect of surprise in reverse. Audiences are surprised when they see Black dancers enacting a story that, far from being mere entertainment, makes viewers question how they have imagined Black people in ways that may be deeply stereotypical and that imply unequal power relationships.

In the material and symbolic reproduction of racial systems, not only are discourses generated, but also ‘structures of feelings’, as defined by Raymond Williams in the 1970s, which link mechanisms of racialisation with emotions and sensations (Berg and Ramos-Zayas Reference Berg and Ramos-Zayas2015: 655; Sharma and Tygstrup Reference Sharma and Tygstrup2015). So an emotional dimension shapes the creation of stereotypes and racialised representations that become, with use, conventional ways of knowing and relating to others (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015).

However, racial stereotypes are not always active, just as racism is not always actively affecting Black people all the time, but needs specific spaces and moments for it to operate even without being noticed (Lentin Reference Lentin2016; Moreno Figueroa Reference Moreno Figueroa2010). There are moments when racial stereotypes are activated and deactivated during the performance, according to the audience’s degrees of connection to the narrative. In the interviews we conducted among Sankofa audiences, some participants emphasised that at first they did not understand what the works were about, but were dazzled by the dancing, the costumes, the lights and the scenery. Then, later during the performance, they suddenly felt that the message of the dance directly challenged them and made them question the image they had of Afro-descendants.

It’s something you don’t expect. There’s a moment when you realise that the dancers are talking about the racist way they are viewed by white people. Sometimes you feel uncomfortable because it’s like you’re being singled out. You realise that the whole performance is a message that seeks to show us how Afro people are treated and how they are seen in society. Then you ask yourself about the way you have looked at them up to now. It is not a performance that you go to just to see them dance and have fun; there is discomfort.

(Diego, focus group 2, May 2021)

Provoking discomfort in audiences happens when they are challenged about their imaginaries and representations of Afro-descendants. The message makes use of all kinds of histrionic and dramatic resources to achieve this effect, including satire and the exaggeration of erotic behaviour. Being ‘heard’ is often achieved not with words, but by enacting an anti-racist argument that challenges the audience at the emotional heart of their stereotypical prejudices.

In Detrás del sur, the aesthetics can be described as ‘typically Afro’. The dancers wear red cloths that wrap the body but leave the men’s torsos bare, while masks allude to an iconography that has become representative of Africanness in the global dance market (Samuel Reference Samuel2011). However, this aesthetic gradually paves the way towards a narrative that is told through dance and that has at its core forms of resistance that reveal the agency of Afro-descendant communities in overcoming historical and contemporary vicissitudes. In each of its acts, the work shows Afro communities as subjects of knowledge with forms of self-government and with religious and thought systems that have practical utility in facing the problems of daily life. The performance moves back and forth between past and present-day struggles.

Afro-Referentiality as a Creative Resource

During the creative retreat in Tumaco to develop Detrás del sur, a documentary film was made with the title Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel. Prácticas artísticas antirracistas (Behind the South: Dances for Manuel. Anti-Racist Artistic Practices).Footnote ¹² The documentary outlines how Afro-referentiality can be deployed as an anti-racist strategy in the several ways: these include the strengthening of bridges among Afro-descendant people; the centring of muntu and ubuntu; and the creation of work in el territorio (the territory).

Conclusion

Whether we dance to the rhythm of music or to the rhythm of life, dance is a cross-cultural expression that tells us something about the subjects who dance, their cultural practices and the stories inscribed on their bodies. The message emphasised by Sankofa Danzafro challenges the persistence of racism and its expression through stereotypes, exoticised images and the lack of recognition of Afro referents in current epistemologies. At times, Sankofa Danzafro directly alludes to racism by questioning stereotypes and elaborating narratives that dignify Afro-descent through its works. At other times, it does so through the enhancement of Afro-Colombian identities, their histories, their geographies and their knowledge embodied in dance. In this sense, Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance project has a double purpose: to dismantle the racialisation of the Afro in dance and to decolonise the body by directly combating racial stereotypes about Black people. It does the former by directly questioning stereotypes and the undervaluation of Afro dance by means of conscious explorations generating an emotionality that leads to a narrative that ‘has to be heard’. The latter is achieved through a critical review of tradition to see how parts of it reproduce colonial structures that may be present in their aesthetics, movements and performance.

In Detrás del sur we can see how the anti-racist strategies in Sankofa’s creative processes construct a message that provokes sensations and questions in audiences, especially with respect to stereotypes about Afro-Colombian people, Afro-referentiality as a creative resource and the development of an Afro-representative aesthetic. These anti-racist effects are achieved in the racialised field of dance by an engaging with the audience, to varying degrees, to create an affective atmosphere combining bodily movements and sensations, which is consciously projected onto audiences to surprise and unsettle them. An open question is whether anti-racism in artistic practice is limited to an ‘effect’ that has the capacity to ‘affect’ the viewer only in the moment (Besserer Alatorre Reference Besserer Alatorre2014), or whether it produces a narrative that can survive the fleeting immediacy of performance (Taylor Reference Taylor2002, Reference Taylor2020). What is certain is that the anti-racist narrative constructed by Sankofa not only uses dance as a vehicle, it also employs other elements of discourse. Postings on social networks, synopses of the works in the handbills, the interviews given by the dancers and the director, all contribute to and complement the anti-racist strategies of the dance performance.

Sources: the authors of this text are Abril Caríssimo, Flora Alvarado and América López. They are members of Identidad Marrón, a collective that emerged as a response to Argentina’s invisible racism. It aims to create a meeting point and space of visibility for Indigenous and mixed-race people negatively racialised by others in Argentina as negros populares (dark-skinned working-class people), who are usually associated with stigmatised villas (low-income, informally built neighbourhoods), and whom the collective defines as marronxs. Marronxs are people with Indigenous ancestry who may or may not recognise themselves as such, as well as the city-born children of campesinos, Indigenous people, and immigrants from the countryside and neighbouring countries. Identidad Marrón promotes anti-racist strategies and affirms the non-white bodies that the myth of a white Argentina has tried to silence.

The statement by Abril Caríssimo was designed as a contribution to a CARLA workshop, held in Manchester in April 2022, with some twenty-five CARLA researchers and artists. Abril was involved in the curation of the Virtual Visual Art exhibit in the section of the CARLA online exhibition dedicated to Identidad Marrón. Ana asked Abril to record a video about curation (https://youtu.be/wWA9rlIzgZg), which has been transcribed and translated here.

The text by Flora Alvarado and América López, titled ‘Malonear los museos’, was written by them at Ana’s request as a reflection on their experience of curating an exhibition titled ¿Qué necesitan aprender los museos? (What Do Museums Need to Learn?), which ran from 12 December 2020 to 6 March 2021 and was curated by Identidad Marrón and the writers’ collective Poetas Villeres (Poets from the Villas) for the public state museum Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires.Footnote ¹ The exhibition included various items from the museum’s collections, which served as points of reflection.

Context: the phrase malonear los museos is a good entry point for understanding these texts. Malonear is a Spanish word used in Argentina and Uruguay meaning to undertake a malón (from the Mapuzugun maleu, to inflict damage on the enemy). Malón is the name given by colonial and Republican authorities to the raids carried out by Mapuche warriors. The term gained special significance during the genocidal campaigns against Mapuche and other Indigenous populations carried out under the name of La Conquista del Desierto (Conquest of the Desert), directed mainly by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s. The campaigns were nominally a response to Indigenous malones. The famous paintings El malón (1845), by Mauricio Rugendas, and La vuelta del malón (The Return from the Raid, 1892), by Ángel Della Valle, capture the dominant image of Indigenous people as the barbarians against whom the forces of civilisation were ranged. One aim of the interventions designed by Identidad Marrón is to malonear – ‘invade’, ‘raid’ or ‘occupy’ – the spaces of the venerable institutions created by the forces of ‘civilisation’, such as museums and galleries, and appropriate them for the expression of marrón identities and priorities, including an acknowledgement of the pervasive presence of racism in Argentina.

Statement by Abril Caríssimo, a.k.a. Bbywacha

Hi, I’m Abril Caríssimo. I work as an artist under the pseudonym Bbywacha and I am a research student in visual arts. I was part of the curatorship of the virtual exhibit [in the Identidad Marrón section of the CARLA online exhibition].

There is a theme that I think is important to highlight in the way we think about curatorship, which perhaps has to do with specific problems in Argentina, particularly institutional ones. And this also involves the idea of translation: the translation of our own work and the translation of our experiences into institutional settings.

For the racialised artist, I feel like there are like two levels of difficulty.Footnote ² One is that we are trained in artistic institutions that are governed by white structures and schemes of thought. For all that art has been theorised and researched in Latin America, the reality is that, not only in the ways we understand and study art history, but also more generally in the ways we study today’s artists, conceptualisations and problems, and the theorists and thinkers that we read to this day – all these are still European and white.

And the problem is that a lot of how we present our own experience in art continues to be under these hegemonic gazes. They are a way of perceiving our own experience so that it continues to be seen from the outside and through the internalisation of this external, hegemonic gaze. [And this] creates a limitation on the ideas that we validate and the themes and aesthetics that we use in our work.

In my journey as an artist and in [the journeys of] other artists, I see that in the process of translation there is a difficulty in how we divide ourselves between two worlds. Between a real, everyday world, where our work is appreciated and understood in self-managed artistic spaces; and an institutional world where it is often impossible for us to translate these works or these dynamics.

And I think [the second difficulty is] the fact that historically, in Argentina, artistic spaces, such as artistic training institutions, galleries and museums, have been mostly occupied by white middle-class people. And the people who criticise and consume art, the people who know about art, surround themselves with very little diversity of experience.

So what makes translation difficult is that they can’t necessarily understand or empathise with our experiences or even understand our points of reference. Many of the ways in which we are conditioned to exist in institutional spaces continue to be in terms of ignorant art or young, emerging art, as seen from an external perspective.

Despite being racialised [as non-white] in the same way as a large part of the Argentine population, in institutional spheres we continue to be seen as belonging to another age. The importance of curatorship and institutional critique and racialised production has to do specifically with this, but there has to be an interrogation of how we are categorised, how we are understood to begin with and how we are presented. And this also has to be done from a racialised perspective because, if not, we continue to exist under these super-limited perceptions of what we should and should not talk about in our art. Like the idea that we make art that has no depth or that comes from outside, from the non-institutional [sphere]. The reality is that for the art world and for the racialised artist, these places of curation, these places of institutional critique generally come from outside, they come from spaces like Identidad Marrón.

Malonear los museos: Strategies and Considerations

Text by Flora Alvarado, with América Canela

As part of the exercise of breaking with the racist structures that exist in Argentine society, the Identidad Marrón collective not only denounces the glass doors that invisibly restrict access to cultural institutions such as national museums, but also implements actions to counteract the exclusion of the Indigenous marrón population from them. Acting on the premise that ‘anti-racism is action’ and posing questions such as ‘Is art in Argentina only for white people?’, the collective carries out numerous activities, including debates on spaces of power, led by marrón people who, from a peripheral location, work to ensure the inclusion of their territories, their perspectives and their voices, while questioning their absence in the places considered as historically relevant, which are often also the spaces where decisions and meanings are defined.

The project to decolonise, or malonear, museums must take into account various institutional factors: the spaces as such, the collections or archives that comprise them, the public that visits them, the texts that accompany the exhibitions and the way in which they are written, whether admission is free or not, and so on.

Taking culture as a right, the collective sees museums as spaces where people with cultural competences acquired through academic or classroom education should be able to participate, but also the children of workers, peasants and migrants of popular origin, because, as a right, culture should always be accessible to everyone and not just to one social sector.

Forms of exclusion operate quietly when it comes to accessing institutions that present themselves as open and inclusive. This is the case with museums and cultural institutions that are mainly accessed by a social class with certain economic and cultural capital. In addition to economic and class factors, there is also a racial factor, since the sector that occupies museums or cultural institutions (not only as spectators, but also as representatives of these spaces) is predominantly white. Even under progressive policies, racialised people, marrón identities and subaltern populations continue to be excluded from real access to culture and its spaces. Reaching museums located in wealthier areas of cities means travel, when distance, cost and time pose challenges that restrict equal access for all. The majority of racialised populations live in peripheral or working-class neighbourhoods, far from these areas. In other words, access to museums is a privilege reserved for a very small sector.

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that cultural rights must be guaranteed, including the right of everyone to participate freely in cultural life, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advances and the benefits thereof. Access to culture is a right that is being violated for a broad section of the working class, mostly racialised people. In this context, the Identidad Marrón collective faced several challenges in curating the exhibition for the Palais de Glace. Not only did we have to break with preconceived notions about the audiences that usually have access to the museum, we also had to take into account the various barriers we have mentioned (economic, geographical, ethnic-racial). Above all we had to break through the biggest barrier of all: the indifference generated by the absence of racialised people in these places. It meant adopting, as a key principle, a perspective that sees racialised people as active agents in culture, not as objects to be exhibited or subject matter to be presented and represented by an othering or white gaze, but as participating as workers and creators of culture, as bearers of voices and knowledges derived from their experiences and territories. A key challenge was also to raise the issue that museums do not discuss questions regarding access and the social profile of the public they reach. They present themselves as public, free and accessible, but in practice the exclusion of racialised sectors continues to be the reality.

The idea behind the curatorship of the exhibition, the inaugural and closing events and the various activities that took place during the exhibition was to design actions in which marrón people could walk through the glass doors of the museums. In this and in line with our key premise that anti-racism is action, we took the position that museums should take responsibility and, more importantly, take action and change their practices through dialogue and collaboration with our collective: understanding the museum not only as an exhibition space, but also as a space that has the potential to repair, to build collectively and to give a place to populations and perspectives that have been historically marginalised and silenced. A fundamental factor is that, in order for this reparation to be real and not just symbolic or temporary, it must take place in dialogue and joint action with the communities concerned.

Creating an exhibition is not just producing materials that generate pleasure, entertainment, or contemplation. For our collective, the curatorial act of conceiving and making an exhibition is an opportunity to put into practice a class-conscious anti-racist perspective on the art world. The primary aim is to extend to the marrón population the right to access, the right to culture. It is also a matter of beginning to notice the presence or absence of debates about progressive policies of inclusion, and whether this inclusion is actually made real by working with the populations in question. It is about seeing artistic and curatorial practice as a political act. In this way, putting together an exhibition creates a space that invites reflection and the questioning of preconceived ideas about who makes decisions in museums and the art system, and what happens with their installations and agendas. Furthermore, it is an opportunity to think of an exhibition as a place of encounter between the different populations that might make up its audience, but with particular attention to the racialised population of popular origin.

We tried to create an exhibition that would occupy – that is, malonear – the museum, transforming it into a space in which links between different communities are actively developed. The focus was deliberately on marrón people in order to reduce the distance between the institution and the racialised communities that do not usually occupy it. This was taken into account in the curatorial process, the inaugural and closing events and the associated activities: guided tours, workshops, audiovisual clips and social media content.

The organisers, the participants in the activities and the artists invited to star in the video clips were racialised people who already had experience in artistic and cultural practices. In this sense, the aim was also to validate and recognise their work and personal journeys, as well as to provide a space for them to meet each other. For many members of the public, on the other hand, it was the first time they had been to an institution of this kind.

The selection of works from the Palais de Glace collection was made on the basis of the bodies represented in the images, the themes they address (racialised labour, access to rights, etc.), the materials they used and the allusions they made to specific places. These works were acquired by the Palais de Glace during various editions of the annual competition of Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales. The works were selected in dialogue with racialised corporealities and realities, bearing in mind that none of the artists who created them belonged to racialised communities. The aim of the selection was to question who has the opportunity to produce artistic works. We envisioned a dialogue between the works of the Palais de Glace collection, the presence of the marrón population, the series of video clips, the guided tours and works produced by the Villeres Writers’ Collective. The exhibition opened the possibility of a dialogue between works that could have come from artists from popular backgrounds and actions performed in the present that question social imaginaries from an anti-racist perspective.

Museums are places that legitimise discourses and validate knowledge and narratives. Working collaboratively means understanding they can also be seen as a tool that provides reparations to diverse communities, always taking into account the place the museums have historically occupied and their relationship to racialised communities. It means beginning to see museums as potential spaces of reparation, not only by providing a physical space but also by enabling debates, opening their doors to reference points and collectives whose trajectories and histories can be recognised both symbolically and economically. It is a way of building the museum collectively, making a museum that allows for the existence of possibilities beyond the dominant ones.

The debate about the differences between arts and crafts is still current today. Art is seen as something produced by creative geniuses, associated with an exclusive sector that possesses innate talents, and linked to a position of power and elite, that is, only for the few. Crafts are associated with a job that is taught and learned, and with manual and mass production; it does not have a unique value because it is mass-produced. In the social imaginary, when we think of the bodies that create arts and crafts, there is also a valorisation based on racial factors. Which bodies are understood as being capable and worthy of producing the works of art, the knowledge and the signs of cultural and intellectual value that can be presented in a museum? In the art system, success is measured not only in terms of quality and productive capacity, but also in terms of the tools and doors that networking gives access to, which intervene in construction of figures taken as representative.

Art is a sign of the political, historical, social and cultural events happening at the time of its creation. It serves as an indicator that, together with theory, create narratives about history and its participants. In Argentina, the primary exponents of the arts have generally been – and still are to this day – of European descent. Those who produced the works that shaped social imaginaries and represented the Argentine nation, commissioned by the state during its process of formation, have been Europeans or Argentina-born white people trained in European art academies. In other words, the gaze that shaped the artworks foundational to the country’s history is white and Eurocentric.

Racialised bodies – Indigenous marrón bodies – are seen as objects of study, in museums to be analysed, studied and measured. The descriptions in the diaries and illustrations of the European travellers who came to the Americas revealed an anthropological or sociological gaze that objectified, infantilised and animalised Indigenous marrón people. From the transporting of Indigenous individuals to the Global North for study, to the theft of cultural artefacts from Indigenous communities, museums retain colonial roots in their history. In this scenario, the representation in art institutions of alternative ways of being for marrón bodies represented a break with the social schema in which marrón people are not even considered human persons, but objects or animals, and their cultural artefacts, in turn, are considered only as anthropological objects.

Considering racialised subjects as knowledge-producing subjects and creators of art allows us to give space to the diverse voices and knowledges of different communities. Objects are given life and meaning through the people who represent them, in a process of re-signifying and affirming narratives. It is people and their communities, and in this case people who identify as marrón, who, by their active presence in museums, can use words and use their bodies to occupy, disrupt and expose structural racism, unequal access and entrenched prejudices. Museums must position themselves as places of exchange, learning and reparation that can make their tools available to communities and collectives to ensure change with real impact.

Introduction

Discussions about invisibilised artistic traditions have put pressure on what is meant by promoting self-representation in museum practice and art circuits. With that in mind, this chapter examines perspectives around Véxoa: Nós sabemos (Véxoa: We Know; véxoa means ‘we know’ in the Terena language), the first Indigenous-only arts exhibition ever held at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the first ever to be curated by an Indigenous person in a prominent museum in Brazil. On show from 31 October 2020 to 22 March 2021, Véxoa was curated by one of the co-authors of this chapter, Indigenous researcher and artist Naine Terena. The exhibition Véxoa: Nós sabemos was part of the OPY project (opy means ‘prayerhouse’ in Guarani), a collaborative effort between three distinct institutions: the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Casa do Povo and the Kalipety village of the Guarani Mbya people. These institutions – a state museum, an independent cultural centre and a community – joined forces to highlight the lack of Indigenous arts in museum collections, address issues of preservation and knowledge transmission, and envision a different idea of Brazil. The initiative involved various activities, including Véxoa, performances, seminars and events beyond the museum’s physical boundaries, creating an interaction between museum collections and Indigenous art practices. The OPY project received the 2019 Sotheby’s Prize, recognising the excellence of Véxoa’s curatorial approach and providing financial support for the exhibition, public programming and research.Footnote ¹ The exhibition marked a shift regarding self-representation in Indigenous arts and curatorship in Brazil. In this regard, this chapter aims to contribute to the discourse on the significant role of Indigenous arts in challenging racism and advocating for Indigenous recognition in Brazil. By reclaiming spaces traditionally dominated by non-Indigenous perspectives, Indigenous artists in Brazil have been challenging colonial and extractive epistemologies in a sustained manner (see Terena Reference Terena2020).

In a context marked by increasingly open anti-Indigenous racism, propelled and encouraged by Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022) and the disproportionately severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indigenous peoples, Véxoa represented a milestone in the growing recognition of a generation of Indigenous artists in the prestigious art circuit of São Paulo and in Brazil at large. This generation is introducing a different gaze to aesthetic practices, challenging commonly held assumptions about the supposed appearance of Indigenous arts, the media they are thought to exist in, and the timelines, categories and conceptual frameworks they are expected to conform to. These artists are occupying the cultural sphere as a form of resistance and pedagogical intervention for non-Indigenous audiences, as well as emphasising the interconnectedness of all life forms, the spiritual realm and the environment, challenging anthropocentrism and highlighting the importance of ancestral ties. This generation has also been strategically employing self-representation as a means of countering the invisibilisation of Indigenous authorship in Brazil’s art history and creating spaces for conversation on the need to intensify the advocacy for Indigenous rights.Footnote ²

Confronting Structural Anti-Indigenous Racism

The centrality of Indigenous arts in Brazilian art history narratives makes this process even more pressing, emphasising the urgency of highlighting the contributions of Indigenous peoples in both artistic and societal realms. In line with this, two projects – Racism and Anti-Racism in Brazil: The Case of Indigenous Peoples; and Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA) – have demonstrated the necessity for further investigation into the particular characteristics of racism against Indigenous peoples in Brazil.Footnote ³ This implies the need for renewed approaches to the intersection of anti-racism, arts and cultural production in the country that acknowledge the specific experiences of Indigenous peoples. Both projects have demonstrated that in Brazil, terms such as ‘race’ and ‘racism’ have traditionally not often been used to discuss violence against Indigenous peoples; instead, oppression is usually framed in terms of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture’, often leading to the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from academic and political debates on racism. Furthermore, it is also important to recognise that there is a tendency to ignore the diversity of African enslaved peoples and Indigenous peoples, both victims of racism, with scholars such as Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (Reference Mignolo and Walsh2018) arguing that the modern concept of ‘race’ and modern racism originated with European colonisation, characterised by exclusion, erasure and dehumanisation.

Despite some historical acknowledgment, recent research and anti-racist policies tend to overlook Indigenous issues, focusing more on Afro-descendants, often lumping Indigenous populations into a broad category of non-whites, typically categorised as pardo (brown), resulting in the marginalisation of Indigenous issues. As Lúcia Sá, Pedro Mandagará and Felipe Milanez Pereira show in Chapter 2, the racialisation of Indigenous peoples includes ‘de-authorisation’, denying their Indigenous identity if they do not conform to preconceived notions of Indigeneity.Footnote ⁴ This paradox of being perceived as either ‘not modern enough’ or ‘not Indigenous enough’ reinforces their marginalisation. The belief that Indigenous peoples cannot adopt Western tools without losing their identity is a manifestation of this racist paradox, as they face pressure to modernise yet are criticised as ‘non-Indians’ if they do, fossilising Indigeneity as an unchangeable trait tied to non-Indigenous ideas of primitiveness. This notion that Indigenous identity can only be lost and never changed or regained denies Indigenous peoples the possibility of changing their identity, compounded by societal and political rhetoric that deems modernised Indigenous individuals as ‘not real’. Consequently, racism against Indigenous peoples is often rendered invisible due to scholarship avoiding its discussion and structural racism erasing the visibility of Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Brazilian visual arts have historically depicted Indigenous peoples through lenses of disappearance or assimilation or as sources for inspiration. The current generation of Indigenous artists in Brazil is actively challenging these persistent processes of erasure by representing Indigenous peoples as dynamic and present, thereby confronting and reshaping the narrative around Indigenous lives.

Véxoa’s Multidimensional Approach to Anti-Racism

As emphasised in the 2021 documentary Terra fértil: Véxoa e a arte indígena contemporânea na Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Fertile Land: Véxoa and Contemporary Indigenous Art at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo), while the inherent politics at work in Véxoa might not always be explicit in the artworks selected for the exhibition, they are present in various forms.Footnote ⁵ The political messages embedded in these artworks, though sometimes subtle, are integral to the artists’ expressions. The boundaries between the political and the spiritual are porous and mutually reinforcing. We can see this interplay between politics and spirituality in Edgar Kanaykõ’s photographs of the Acampamento Terra Livre (Free Land Camp), which since 2004 has been an annual event advocating ‘land titling now’ for Indigenous peoples, and in the works by the Movement of Huni Kuin Artists (MAKHU), who aim to create art that brings healing to the world. Highlighting the implicit politics within Véxoa shows that the exhibition is an exemplary case of how anti-racist action can take many forms. Even when the artists involved do not address racism through explicit condemnation, they do so through advocacy for land rights and environmental justice, critique of anthropocentrism and acknowledgment that other life forms and spiritual entities participate in creative processes. This multidimensional approach enriches the understanding of anti-racist affective operations in art and highlights the necessity for varied strategies. Thus Véxoa underscores the power of art as a tool for anti-racist activism, illustrating that both direct and indirect methods are crucial in the collective effort against racial inequality.

As Indigenous activist and thinker Ailton Krenak, one of the artists participating in Véxoa, recently argued, the current generation of Indigenous artists in Brazil is making a highly purposeful use of spaces relying on telas – a term meaning both ‘screens’ and ‘canvases’ in Portuguese – ‘making cracks in the walls of museums’ and taking advantage of social media and communication technologies as an effective means to broaden and strengthen the rights of Indigenous peoples (Jeronimo Reference Jeronimo2020: 7). The present era, starting in about the 1990s, can be described as the fourth moment of Indigenous history in Brazil, indicating a historical landmark in the achievement of increasing protagonism by Indigenous peoples.Footnote ⁶ In this fourth era, whose origins date back to Xavante congressman Mário Juruna’s use of a tape recorder to register the promises made by politicians around 1982 (Juruna, Hohlfeldt and Hoffmann Reference Juruna, Hohlfeldt and Hoffmann1982), Indigenous people pursue their own activities and actions via technologies (all technologies) in a more impactful way, standing out in Indigenous media, literature and the arts.Footnote ⁷ In this era, massive production of counter-information by Indigenous groups and individuals really started to contest hegemonic narratives, mainly through the growing use of social media and other communication technologies – in political and legal spheres as well as in the art world.

The Social Dynamics of Affect in Anti-Racist Art

We also aim to contribute to a better understanding of what affect is and how it operates in art engaged in anti-racism. Affect has become a popular concept in the humanities, being used frequently in contexts both significant and vague, which has diluted its meaning. The term is sometimes used without clear implications and may be equated with something general such as ‘personal’ or ‘subjective’. Ernst van Alphen argues for the inherently social significance of affect in art, proposing that engaging with affective operations can lead to a more ethical interaction with cultural objects (Van Alphen Reference Van Alphen2008). He contends that there is a growing need to understand affect and how it operates in art, especially given the information overload and implosion of meaning in contemporary society. For him, affect is often confused with personal feelings but is inherently social. Affects are not personal or subjective; they are social and operate through interactions between people and objects. Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004) argues something similar, stating that emotions delineate social and political boundaries, reinforcing who belongs and who is excluded from a given collective identity. Emotions can be transmitted and have physiological impacts, preceding their expression in words.

Van Alphen shows how the work of Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres marked a shift during the early 1990s from politically charged, slogan-driven art to more personal, affective forms of expression. This shift was driven by the need for new modes of contestation that resonated with the changing socio-historical context. Based on González-Torres’s claims, Van Alphen asserts that art using a more personal voice can be better understood as a shift towards affective rather than assertive or didactic communication. For him, the political impact of art now lies in its ability to generate and transmit affect rather than to convey a specific message. Additionally, Van Alphen follows Gilles Deleuze in noting that art stimulates thought through sensation rather than cognitive recognition. By doing so, he argues that art, as a mode of thinking, challenges traditional philosophical distinctions between thought and sensation.

Understanding affect as a social phenomenon is crucial in addressing anti-racism in Indigenous arts. Indigenous arts often carry profound cultural, historical and emotional significance that transcends personal or subjective experiences. By recognising affect as inherently social, we can more effectively engage with Indigenous artworks, understanding them as active agents that transmit collective emotions and social critiques. This approach allows us to move beyond superficial interpretations and recognise the political, cultural and cosmopolitical dimensions of Indigenous arts. It enables us to see how these works operate affectively to challenge racist narratives and foster solidarity among diverse audiences. Acknowledging the social dimension of affect thus enhances our capacity to engage with Indigenous arts in a way that supports anti-racist efforts.

Breaking the Spell

The Pinacoteca is well known nationally and internationally as a prestigious place in which to see masterpieces of Brazilian art dating from the nineteenth century to the present day. A state-funded fine arts museum founded in 1905, it is the oldest of its kind in the state of São Paulo. The starting point for claiming the Indigenous occupation of this space was not only presenting works from the last ten or fifteen years, associated with so-called contemporary Indigenous art, but also the possibility of framing a curatorial approach that would foreground the existence of aesthetic expressions that have always been made by Indigenous people in Brazil, but that have been historically invisibilised. When considering the art canon in Brazil, we notice many voids and omissions resulting from this invisibilisation. Challenging those voids and omissions also involves a refusal of the linear conception of time that circumscribes this notion of ‘contemporary’ and underlies colonial modernity itself.

When Macuxi artist Jaider Esbell coined the term ‘arte indígena contemporânea’ (contemporary Indigenous art), he meant it as a strategic approach, highlighting the complex interplay of power dynamics and colonial perceptions concerning Indigenous artistic expression.Footnote ⁸ According to his proposal, this phrase operates as a symbolic space for Indigenous artists to assert legitimacy and navigate the historical and cultural complexities of Indigeneity while challenging conventional boundaries of art and Indigenous representation. Esbell’s strategy encapsulates an understanding of Indigenous creativity as both a form of resistance against historical oppressions and a platform for reclaiming autonomy and agency in shaping narratives and cultural discourse. By referring to ‘Contemporary Indigenous Art’ as a ‘trap for traps’, he suggested that it functions as a mechanism to ensnare and confront the various ‘traps’ inherent in the colonial legacies of the art world (Esbell Reference Esbell2020). Esbell considers that by employing this term, Indigenous artists are strategically positioning themselves to counter prevailing power structures, subvert expectations and assert agency.

Another way to critically address the notion of the contemporary in relation to Indigenous arts would be to refuse a linear conception of time, acknowledging the multiple temporalities inherent in Indigenous forms of expression. This recognition leads us to contend that the notion of contemporary art is intrinsically linked to global power dynamics, particularly to the control and systematisation of time by capitalism (see also Brizuela Reference Brizuela2019). Consequently, it is important to acknowledge that the assimilation of Indigenous arts into the concept of contemporary art risks perpetuating a hierarchical regime of temporality, wherein alternative temporalities are marginalised and perceived as less valuable. Saying that Indigenous arts have always been present in Brazilian history and that they should be presented in art spaces according to Indigenous criteria implies questioning a version of history that assumes the vanishing of Indigenous peoples and that was used to relegate Indigenous peoples to the past. In other words, speaking back to a canon that has historically both appropriated and erased the aesthetic force of Indigenous peoples involves interrogating the supposed neutrality of hegemonic temporalities.

Denilson Baniwa, one of the most important artists in the emergence of Indigenous leadership in the arts in Brazil, argues that ‘art was used as a colonial spell’. He continued: ‘Through art, history is written, history is erased, stories are constructed and destroyed. … Art was one of the most powerful tools for the domination and erasure of various peoples.’ Part of colonisation is the colonisation of art, which has systematically portrayed Indigenous people in ‘idyllic, romanticised, sensual and tragic ways’, as Baniwa said in an event organised by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG 2020). For him, art can function as a tool to challenge these stereotypes and rewrite history from Indigenous perspectives – in other words, to break the colonial spell. He mentions artistic and literary works such as Victor Meirelles’s 1861 painting A primeira missa no Brasil, Pedro Américo’s 1877 painting Batalha do Avaí and Mário de Andrade’s 1928 novel Macunaíma as having made Indigenous populations ‘occupy a place of simplistic knowledge and savage intellectuality’; taken as sources of ‘inspiration for art’, they were made into ‘fragments of people transformed into Western knowledge’. ‘My work consists of challenging this place, occupied by living or dead models, who had no right to negotiate to be there. It is the struggle for the right to respond to arts that are like simulacra, that simulate the realities of the Indigenous, the Black, the poor, of those who live on the margins’, he pointed out, illustrating the link between the formation of Brazil’s canonical visual culture and racialised hierarchies.

Addressing Voids

As one of the largest institutions sheltering Brazilian art history, the Pinacoteca, in the years preceding Véxoa, had already been promoting seminars to critically engage with art history in Brazil and its own long-term exhibition of its collection, seeking to rethink the museum’s narrative structure and addressing the question of what topics deserved to be presented to its public. In Baniwa’s terms, the Pinacoteca was already expressing an interest in challenging its own entanglement with Brazilian art history’s ‘colonial spell’. In July and August 2017, one of the Pinacoteca’s curators, Fernanda Pitta, who would later become a close collaborator as curatorial coordinator of Véxoa, led a summer collaborative working group at the Clark Art Institute in Willamstown, Massachusetts, looking at research narrative models for long-term exhibitions of historical art collections. In September 2018, after participating in one of these events, the international symposium Ways of Seeing, Ways of Showing, Naine Terena visited the Pinacoteca’s collection with curator Valéria Piccoli. The symposium held discussions about the approach to chronology in the long-term exhibition of the Pinacoteca’s collection and realised that there were indeed many voids in how that history was being presented. Terena asked Piccoli about the reasons for such voids, as well as about why Indigenous art had not yet been incorporated into the institution’s collection.

Those voids were clear: Indigenous people were represented by non-Indigenous artists in the collection, but the absence of works made by Indigenous artists was striking. Thinking about this absence was the first step in addressing the possibility of making Indigenous artists present in the context of the institution. With the Pinacoteca’s overall commitment to making critical changes to exhibitions and displays as part of this process, a more consistent anti-racist agenda was already taking shape. This movement became evident with an exhibition titled Territórios: Artistas afrodescendentes no acervo da Pinacoteca (Territories: Afro-descendant Artists in the Pinacoteca’s Collection), curated by Tadeu Chiarelli. Running from 12 December 2015 to 13 June 2016, it celebrated the Pinacoteca’s 110th anniversary by showcasing notable works by Afro-Brazilian artists, aiming to highlight and value the contributions of Afro-descendant artists to art history in Brazil. Curated to reflect on the institution’s past and present collection, it offered a non-chronological look at Afro-Brazilian artistic production and its context within the museum’s collection. May 2017 marked the beginning of the work of Jochen Volz as general director of the Pinacoteca. Volz had acted as the chief curator of the 32nd São Paulo Biennale, Incerteza viva (Live Uncertainty), which had taken place from September to December 2016, addressing issues that are vital and urgent to Indigenous peoples and humanity at large, such as global warming, the extinction of species and the loss of biological and cultural diversity. Naine Terena contributed to this biennale, broadening the perspective on Indigenous cultures. This drive to implement an anti-racist agenda at the Pinacoteca continued with powerful solo exhibitions by Black female artists, notably Rosana Paulino’s 2018 A costura da memória (The Sewing of Memory) and Grada Kilomba’s 2019 Desobediências poéticas (Poetic Disobediences).

In 2019, the Pinacoteca significantly expanded its collection of contemporary Indigenous art through the Patrons of Contemporary Art programme, acquiring Feitiço para salvar a Raposa Serra do Sol (A Spell to Save Raposa Serra do Sol) by Jaider Esbell and a series of pieces by Denilson Baniwa, including Voyeurs, menu, luto (Mourning), Vitrine (Display), O antropólogo moderno já nasceu antigo (The Modern Anthropologist Was Already Born Old) and Enfim, ‘civilização’ (‘Civilisation’, At Last). These acquisitions marked a pivotal moment in the museum’s recent history, as its only Indigenous art held up to that time consisted of Iny-Karajá dolls made of clay and wax, known as ritxoko. The inclusion of Esbell’s and Baniwa’s works not only diversified the Pinacoteca’s collection but also underscored the institution’s commitment to recognising and showcasing Indigenous arts.

In October 2020, the Pinacoteca undertook a rehang of its collection, moving away from its elitist past to celebrate Brazil’s rich diversity. This overhaul included acquisitions of contemporary works by women, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous artists, significantly increasing their representation. The museum’s collection, previously displayed in chronological order, is now organised thematically across nineteen rooms, juxtaposing eighteenth-century academic portraiture with modernist and contemporary art. This new arrangement aligned with curator Jochen Volz’s vision to address the institution’s colonial heritage and promote inclusivity. Véxoa coincided with this rehang.

In the years prior to Véxoa, through partnerships with Indigenous artists and communities, several institutions hosted exhibitions that advanced the self-representation and self-determination of Indigenous peoples, striving to bring Indigenous agency to the forefront of artistic and curatorial practice. Notable among these were ReAntropofagia (Reanthropophagy; Niterói, Arts Center of Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2019), Dja guata porã: Rio de Janeiro indígena (Walk Well: Indigenous Rio de Janeiro; Rio de Janeiro, Museu de Arte do Rio, 2017–2018) and ¡Mira! – Artes visuais contemporâneas dos povos indígenas (Look! Contemporary Visual Art of Indigenous Peoples; Belo Horizonte, Espaço do Conhecimento, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2013–2014).Footnote ⁹ Collectively, these exhibitions emphasised the significance of art in the political and aesthetic struggles of Indigenous peoples, while also challenging the notion that Indigenous cultures are static relics of a mythical past. These events provide context for why Véxoa became the first exhibition to be curated solely by an Indigenous person at a highly prestigious museum in the country. Ultimately, Véxoa is the culmination of a long process and represents a significant political achievement accomplished by Indigenous peoples.Footnote ¹⁰

Responding to Anti-Indigenous Racism through the Arts

In the Brazilian context, anti-Indigenous racism has historically served as justification for land appropriation and colonial violence towards Indigenous peoples.Footnote ¹¹ It was later used to justify state-sanctioned violence directed at Indigenous peoples under the military regime as well as after the enactment of the 1988 Constitution. During Dilma Roussef’s administration, Brazil’s Comissão Nacional da Verdade (National Truth Commission, 2012–2014) recognised Indigenous peoples as among the groups targeted by the crimes and human rights violations during the dictatorship from 1946 to 1988. However, the country’s deeply ingrained developmentalism continued to threaten Indigenous lives during the almost two decades of government by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party), which relied on the advancement of predatory agribusiness and genocidal megaprojects such as the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam. The situation worsened after 2019 with Jair Bolsonaro’s openly anti-Indigenous far-right agenda, the increasing power of the rural caucus and their backing of the ‘time frame’ or marco temporal legal argument.Footnote ¹² In broader terms, we can say that the history of contact between Indigenous peoples and colonisers has been marked by attempts to whiten the population. Historically, there were various moments in which actions were taken to homogeneously integrate Indigenous peoples into the national population, ranging from physical extermination to the imposition of formal education.

Currently, more than 300 Indigenous peoples and about 250 Indigenous languages exist in Brazil, distributed throughout all regions of the country. The trail left by attempts at extermination is clearly visible in the racist construction of the images of Indigenous peoples in the eyes of the non-Indigenous national population. This construction is sometimes encouraged by mass media, textbooks and, more recently, by an enormous amount of fake news spread across popular social networks in Brazil. Such actions attempt to delegitimise Indigenous identity and belonging, with the assumption that Indigenous peoples no longer maintain their cultural traits and, because of that, should adhere to a new reality – a new guise for socio-cultural integration. We have also seen various attacks based on physical stereotypes and the demoralisation of the Indigenous movement and its members. In recent years, discrimination by gender and race, among other forms of difference, has been widely legitimised by the Brazilian population itself, through actions that systematically affect minoritised groups.

This violent and complex historical backdrop recalls the relationship between the building of Brazil as a nation-state and how, despite the many achievements of Indigenous people spanning from early colonisation through to contemporary society, colonial structures persist. Derogatory, racist and Eurocentric imagery is one of the instances in which coloniality unfolds, assigning intellectual and cultural inferiority to Indigenous peoples and shaping ideas about who is seen, who has the power to see, who is represented and who represents. On the other hand, Indigenous people of various ages have been developing their own narratives and disseminating them to broad audiences, appropriating an extensive range of technologies, bringing different forms of knowledge together and gathering arguments to fight for the realisation of rights achieved in the 1988 Constitution and the maintenance of ways of life, as well as the continuity of the process of demarcation of Indigenous lands.

In this context, Véxoa emerged as a site where it was possible to discuss Indigenous existences in twenty-first century Brazil through the arts, in conjunction with a reflection on the invisibilisation of Indigenous forms of expression in the history of art in Brazil. Véxoa was committed to making space for Indigenous artists as agents and producers of content, not merely as sources of inspiration for non-Indigenous artists. The exhibition’s curatorial approach sought to encompass not only ‘contemporary’ Indigenous arts but Indigenous arts more broadly, calling for a renewed look at the history of art in Brazil, as well as a rethinking of the Brazilian artistic system and museum culture. The rationale behind the exhibition was to showcase Brazilian art created by Indigenous artists. By adopting this approach, Véxoa exemplified how Indigenous arts could be an effective vehicle for anti-racist activism, even if in subtle and indirect ways. By foregrounding Indigenous curatorship and artistic expression, the exhibition challenged the traditional Western-centric art narratives that have historically predominated in Brazilian museums. This process was crucial for dismantling the entrenched racial hierarchies and biases that have historically marginalised Indigenous voices in the art world, ensuring that Indigenous narratives are told from Indigenous perspectives. The affective power of the artworks in Véxoa played a pivotal role in this approach, encouraging viewers to confront their own biases and complicity in systemic racism, and thereby promoting a more profound commitment to anti-racist action. The following pages provide some examples of how this was performed. Although it is not possible to discuss all the artworks that were exhibited in Véxoa, we intend to shed light on some of the strategies that Véxoa’s curatorial approach implemented.

Confronting Preconceived Notions of Authenticity

A key aspect of Véxoa was the recognition, validation and reterritorialisation of items usually classified as ‘artifacts’ and ‘crafts’ that are typically denied artistic status or quality, positioning them as artworks. Véxoa placed emphasis on valuing them, the processes involved in their creation and the people who produced them, wherein the context of these works is as significant as the outcome. One of the aspects addressed by Véxoa was the critique of expectations surrounding Indigenous crafts, articulating a disjunction between cultural authenticity and external demands. This critique emerged in the collective works of Gustavo Caboco, Juliana Kerexu, Lucilene Wapichana, Ricardo Werá, Camila Kamé Kanhgág and Dival Xetá, particularly in their collaborative series Where is Indigenous Art in Paraná? (see Figure 5.1).Footnote ¹³ By incorporating images of animals such as the orca whale and giraffe – beings that are not found in Indigenous territories in Brazil – the artists played with and ironically subverted the expectations of what constitutes ‘authentic’ Indigenous art. This deliberate inclusion of animals that do not inhabit Indigenous territories in Brazil challenges the stereotypical confines imposed on Indigenous creativity, questioning why traditional motifs such as the anteater or the jaguar are deemed more ‘authentic’ than an orca whale or a giraffe, animals foreign to the cultural and geographical milieu of Indigenous peoples in Brazil.

Figure 5.1

Gustavo Caboco and his mother, Lucilene Wapichana, 2020, in front of their collaborative works with Camila dos Santos da Silva, Divalda Silva and Juliana Kerexu, from the series Where Is Indigenous Art in Paraná?

Figure 5.1 long description.

Figure 5.1 Long description

The man wears jeans and a T-shirt; the woman wears a knee-length dress with elaborate embroidery and a feathered tiara-style headdress. On the wall beside them are five artworks displayed on fabric backgrounds. Three of these textiles are embroidered with various designs, including words, human figures, hands, plants, fish, and other animals. The remaining two feature fabric backdrops supporting three-dimensional wooden models — one of giraffes and the other of an orca suspended within a textile net.

(© Levi Fanan/Pinacoteca de São Paulo, by permission).

In his text for the catalogue of the Véxoa exhibition, ‘O ser humano se reconhece como ser humano?’ (Do Human Beings Recognise Themselves as Human Beings?), Gustavo Caboco relays a narrative that underscores this irony (Caboco Reference Caboco and Terena2020). During an encounter in a Guarani Mbya village, Caboco and Juliana Kerexu responded to demands for non-traditional Indigenous sculptures with humour. They understood requests from outsiders for Indigenous artists to produce figures such as a giraffe or an orca as a metaphor for the broader expectation that Indigenous peoples must constantly adapt and cater to external definitions of their identity. This expectation extends beyond the art realm into their everyday existence, where Indigenous people are often pressured to conform to non-Indigenous norms and aesthetics to secure their livelihood. When Kerexu provocatively asked, ‘Do human beings recognise themselves as human beings?’, she highlighted the irony of having to assert one’s humanity and cultural identity continually.

This critique is further deepened by the irony of commodification in Indigenous arts. The Guarani Mbya bracelets bearing the logo of the Flamengo soccer team, as described by Caboco, epitomise this irony, lying in the juxtaposition of traditional craftmaking with popular commercial symbols. Fundamentally, this irony advances a critique of the expectations placed on Indigenous arts and crafts, questioning the assumption of authenticity dictated by external perceptions and the absurdity of these demands. Through their work, these artists simultaneously reference their cultural heritage and the imposed necessity to perform and transform their identities for external validation. They intervene in the reductionist view that Indigenous arts consist of ‘little sculptures’, as Caboco emphasised. By challenging the notion that Indigenous arts must adhere to predefined, exoticised categories to be recognised as legitimate art, these artists invite viewers to reconsider their own assumptions about Indigenous arts and identities. Their use of irony becomes a means of empowerment – a strategy to navigate and subvert the constraints imposed upon them, while simultaneously engaging in a dialogue about recognition.

Beyond Quota Fulfilment

The recognition of the absence or insufficient presence of Indigenous representation in museums and the steps taken to address these voids also lead us to discuss the importance of moving beyond mere inclusion, ensuring the sustained and meaningful integration of Indigenous peoples in the art world. In this regard, the issue of tokenism in art institutions remains challenging, but Indigenous artists are actively working to transform these spaces. Olinda Tupinambá, who participated in Véxoa with the film Kaapora – O chamado das matas (Kaapora – The Call of the Forests), reflected on this topic during a 2023 talk titled ‘The Future Existence of Indigenous Peoples’ as part of the programme of the exhibition Histórias indígenas (Indigenous Histories) at the São Paulo Art Museum (Tupinambá Reference Tupinambá2023). She expressed the sentiment that, in certain environments, Indigenous people might feel as if they are merely fulfilling a quota. She acknowledged the risk that institutions might invite Indigenous artists for a period and then consider their obligation fulfilled, as if they have ticked a box. This perception of superficial fulfilment can undermine the meaningful engagement and concern that should ideally underpin the involvement of Indigenous artists. However, as Tupinambá pointed out, many Indigenous artists are making significant strides in utilising these spaces to their advantage. They are not content with mere representation; instead, they seek to bring more Indigenous voices into the conversation, exerting a proactive effort to subvert tokenistic inclusion and push for more substantial and sustained participation.

The process of curating Véxoa at the Pinacoteca underscores a similar concern. The purpose of showcasing Indigenous arts should not be treated as a temporary trend. Indigenous arts should not be relegated to a quota but should instead be integrated into the ongoing narrative of art history. Indeed, Véxoa was not just an exhibition but also a strategic effort to reposition Indigenous arts within art institutions. It aimed to embed Indigenous artists into the broader conceptual frameworks and timeline of Brazilian art history – a gesture that also disrupts and reshapes this timeline. This approach strove for an integration that acknowledges the depth and diversity of Indigenous arts. It sought to ensure that Indigenous artists are meaningfully integrated into cultural and historical discourse. This ongoing effort demonstrates that while resolving the issue of Indigenous representation in art institutions may be complex, it is indeed worth pursuing through persistent and strategic engagement.

During the live streamings held in partnership between the CARLA project and the Pinacoteca, several participants stressed the fact that for Indigenous peoples, art is not something separate or to be learned in a strictly technical manner for later application. This resonates with how contemporary art makes space for artistically untrained people to have the freedom to express themselves through art, bringing ‘the powers of life into art’, as Arthur Danto (Reference Danto2007: 126) explains. The fact that the avant-garde movements of the 1960s were keen on bridging the divide between art and life, aiming to eliminate the distinction between high and popular art, demonstrates that. However, one of the distinctive characteristics of Indigenous arts is the idea that art praxis and creativity are intrinsically cosmopolitical, constituted by entanglements between humans and non-humans, that is, an ecology of human, plant, animal, mineral, spiritual and other forms of life.

There is currently an increasing interest among art historians and art researchers in general to acknowledge Indigenous arts within the extensive context of artistic production already canonised by the various artistic movements in the world. For instance, Fernanda Pitta (Reference Pitta2021) examines the origin and development of the concept of Indigenous arts in Brazil. She demonstrates that it was initially constructed through the appropriation of Indigenous artistic expressions to build a narrative of Brazilian national art, which has had long-lasting implications for how Brazilian art has been perceived. Pitta argues for a re-evaluation of the role and recognition of Indigenous arts in Brazilian institutions, emphasising the need to navigate cultural differences and avoid subsuming diverse artistic conceptions under a homogenised national narrative. She advocates an ‘indigenisation’ of art history, which involves honouring the conceptual frameworks and histories of Indigenous peoples rather than fitting them into pre-existing Western-centric models. Pitta critiques traditional art historical narratives that often exclude or marginalise Indigenous art, calling for a shift in its perception and integration into the broader narrative of Brazilian art history and advocating for institutional recognition of Indigenous contributions.

Exhibitions such as Véxoa exemplify this much-needed shift, highlighting a recontextualisation of artworks made by Indigenous people and the established canon of contemporary art movements. Such a conceptual framework is sometimes referenced in Brazilian media to broaden the understanding of Indigenous artworks, considering the more than 520 years of contact and resistance. Indigenous arts, which, as we have noted, have often been seen as crafts or artifacts, are now being described as contemporary Indigenous art or even Brazilian art made by Indigenous people. In this context, works from different historical periods with distinct characteristics were displayed in the three rooms dedicated to Véxoa, supplemented by music and other artworks in the corridors and Denilson Baniwa’s intervention in the car park in front of the museum (see Figure 5.2). This intervention, called Hilo (Hilum), was part one of a three-part work titled Nada que é dourado permanece, which referenced Robert Frost’s well-known poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’. A second part was Amáka (Coivara), for which he stored, in a collection of glass jars, ashes from the National Museum’s devastating fire of 2 September 2018. Amáka is the Baniwa term for a burned area prepared for planting, following the slash-and-burn agricultural technique known as coivara, which involves burning vegetation to clear land for agriculture. For Hilo, Denilson initiated a planting and seeding action of medicinal and ornamental plants, flowers and spices in the Pinacoteca’s car park, two years after the fire at the National Museum. In this work, Denilson catalysed a mode of creativity that symbiotically gestated artmaking with other species, building aesthetic bridges across the web of life. The space previously reserved for cars was thus subjected to a healing process by Denilson and his plant and animal allies. Together, they fostered life in what was supposedly pure aridity among the stone blocks of the urban landscape. Through this coivara and fertilisation of the ground at the city’s oldest museum, both subjective and physical territories were restored. The third part of Baniwa’s work, Terra preta de índio (Indigenous Dark Earth), consisted of a video recording of the planting and seeding performed in the outdoor area, broadcast live and displayed in the exhibition room (see also Pinheiro Dias Reference Pinheiro Dias2021).

Figure 5.2

Denilson Baniwa and his intervention in the car park of the Pinacoteca de São Paolo, 2020

(© Levi Fanan/Pinacoteca de São Paulo, by permission).

Hierarchies between art, craft and artifact were critically examined in the Véxoa’s central exhibition room, which presented apapaatai – ritual masks of the Waujá people – and pottery produced by Yudjá women. Such hierarchies were also interrogated through the presentation of the jaguars by the Pataxó artist Tamikuã Txihi, made of clay fired in a pit, representing guardians of memory and ancestral knowledge passed from generation to generation. Tamikuã, born in Pau Brasil, Bahia, is a visual artist, poet and leader. She lives in the city of São Paulo, in the Guarani-Mbyá territory in the Jaraguá Indigenous Land. Through her art, Tamikuã aims to promote the physical and spiritual protection of Indigenous people and their territories. Tamikuã’s participation in Véxoa was particularly symbolic as an anti-racist gesture following the vandalisation of her jaguar sculptures in a 2019 regional exhibition of visual arts in the municipality of Embu das Artes (in the city of São Paulo), in the context of bolsonarismo and the resurgence of the far right in Brazil. During that exhibition, her pieces were broken in an anti-Indigenous attack, underscoring the ongoing discrimination and violence faced by Indigenous peoples.

Invited by Véxoa, Tamikuã brought her broken jaguars and included new pieces (see Figure 5.3). The decision to exhibit them as they were, broken, recast the damaged pieces as expressions of remembrance and as a testament to over five centuries of resistance. Tamikuã’s jaguars stood in Véxoa as symbols of strength and protection, carrying their offspring that represent the future. The racist attack on her pieces during the exhibition in Embu das Artes did not deter her; instead, she responded by creating two additional pieces for Véxoa, asserting the continuity and resilience of Indigenous practices amidst ongoing struggles. As Tamikuã said in an interview in the documentary Terra fértil: ‘I left these jaguars as they were; I didn’t want to remake them. In that way, the remembrance and memory of the struggle of a people, of the original peoples who have been resisting for more than 520 years, could remain.’

Figure 5.3

Tamikuã Txihi’s jaguars, 2020

(© Levi Fanan/Pinacoteca de São Paulo, by permission).

Among the questions raised in Véxoa, the most visible were related to art institutions and the absence of Indigenous artworks. The Pinacoteca de São Paulo itself, until 2019, kept just a few Indigenous items in what it classed as its permanent collection, all of which were in fact on long-term loan from other collections – which was one of the points of reflection for its team and management. Why were Indigenous works not part of the Pinacoteca’s own collection, which is one of the largest in Brazil? This exclusion of Indigenous arts, not only from the Pinacoteca de São Paulo but also from other institutions, reflected a strategy of keeping Indigenous peoples out of the sphere of intellectual recognition, given that Indigenous peoples are still commonly seen as relegated to the past, delegated to anthropology and having lost much of their ancestral knowledge. Véxoa did not aim to fix the historical neglect of Indigenous arts but instead to provoke reflection about this neglect. The project acknowledged the risk of ‘planned obsolescence’ for Indigenous arts in Brazil, drawing a parallel to the concept of planned obsolescence in consumer capitalism, where products are designed to become outdated quickly to drive constant demand. Similarly, there is a danger that Indigenous arts might be treated as a fleeting trend. When Indigenous art becomes fashionable, it garners attention from institutions, galleries, curators and critics. However, there is a risk that once the trend passes, they will be ignored and forgotten, much like obsolete electronic gadgets. This cycle aligns with a modernist and capitalist mindset that prioritises continuous innovation for profit. Véxoa challenged this mindset, urging for a more sustained engagement with Indigenous arts that goes beyond passing fads. In this way, Véxoa sought to intervene in a space that was not restricted to the rise of Indigenous arts in the art market, but was more concerned with establishing the presence of Indigenous peoples in state-managed public spaces, and especially with pushing for public policies for the creation, expansion and maintenance of collections.

Véxoa’s narrative arc, then, ranged from works by present-day exponents of Indigenous art, such as Denilson Baniwa, Jaider Esbell and Daiara Tukano, to pieces such as the Yudjá pots and items by thinkers such as Ailton Krenak, who before then was unknown as an artist to a significant part of the art public. The temporality of the exhibited works also brought about a reflection on the process of continuity and the resistance of Indigenous artistic practices, given that the intention of the curatorial approach was not to present innovations, as if Indigenous artists would only have emerged now, but rather, through the time span of the presented works, to reaffirm that Indigenous arts have always existed in the territory now known as Brazil – that Indigenous people had always known how to make art, but have undergone a process of erasure and neglect. This feeling of erasure and neglect seems to have mobilised the performance carried out by Daiara Tukano and Jaider Esbell, entitled Morî’ erenkato eseru’ – Cantos para a vida (Songs for Life), which took place on 23 November 2020. It was presented as a kind of performative cleansing ritual to expel harmful forces from the institution (again, we could think of Baniwa’s notion of breaking the colonial spell). During the performance, before going up the stairs of the museum, Esbell emphasised that the moment was important because Indigenous people were entering the Pinacoteca through the front door for the first time. This statement, along with what Krenak said about ‘making cracks in the walls of museums’, is directly related to the racism experienced by Indigenous people, which is reflected in institutional spaces such as universities, public offices and museums. Esbell and Krenak capture how Indigenous people feel in Brazil when living through daily situations of erasure and racial violence.

Yacunã Tuxá was one of the artists for whom Véxoa provided an opportunity to present her art within a prestigious art institution for the first time. Her digital illustrations contributed to the exhibition’s framework from both autobiographical and broader cosmological perspectives, including by foregrounding her identity as a lesbian Tuxá woman. Her work navigates a landscape marked by gender-based violence, LGBTphobia and racism. Addressing multiple layers of marginalisation and historical injustice, Tuxá’s art highlights the prejudice that Indigenous people face even in supposedly inclusive spaces such as universities, as well as the lesbophobia she encountered within her own community after coming out. By showcasing Tuxá’s illustration Mulher indígena e sapatão (Indigenous and Dyke Woman), Véxoa created a space for critical discussions intertwining race, gender and sexuality within the context of the Indigenous struggle. Broadly speaking, Tuxá’s works reclaim and celebrate the diverse identities and histories of Indigenous women, often misrepresented in mainstream narratives.Footnote ¹⁴ In a different vein, another digital illustration titled A queda do céu (The Falling Sky) further exemplifies Tuxá’s approach. In this piece, she depicts an Indigenous person holding a copy of the well-known eponymous book by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. Tuxá emphasises how the weapons of Indigenous peoples today extend beyond traditional tools such as the club and the bow and arrow to include books, which hold legitimacy in the eyes of non-Indigenous people. From this perspective, both books and digital art – her medium of choice – emerge as crucial tools for strengthening her community.

Edgar Nunes Corrêa (a.k.a. Edgar Kanaykõ), from the Xakriabá Indigenous Land in Minas Gerais, participated in Véxoa with a series of photographs focusing on Indigenous resistance and traditional ways of living. Like Tuxá, he adopts a present-day medium – in his case, the camera – as a platform for struggle and resistance, likening it to an alternative ‘bow and arrow’ (Corrêa Reference Corrêa2019). By using photography, Indigenous people such as Kanaykõ reclaim self-representation, asserting control over portrayal and safeguarding their heritage. For him, photography serves a dual purpose: it is both a means of documenting traditional ways of living and a tool for activism. On one hand, it captures rituals, singing, body painting and other aspects of Xakriabá daily life from an insider’s viewpoint, preserving them for future generations. On the other hand, it raises awareness and galvanises support by documenting Indigenous resistance. Events such as the Acampamento Terra Livre (Free Land Camp), where Indigenous peoples from across Brazil converge to advocate for their rights, are visually documented by Kanaykõ. His photographs from such gatherings serve as visual testimonies of resistance. Thus, his photography not only portrays the Xakriabá community but also contributes to the broader Indigenous movement in Brazil, showcasing the cultural resilience and political activism of these communities.

For instance, in Guerra nas estrelas para sustentar o céu – Série luta e resistência indígena (Star Wars for Holding up the Sky – Indigenous Struggle and Resistance Series), from 2017, Kanaykõ portrays a young Indigenous man wearing a Star Wars T-shirt in a demonstration, alluding to the ongoing Indigenous resistance against external threats, akin to a cosmic battle depicted in the popular science fiction saga. The fact that the man being portrayed is wearing a Star Wars T-shirt is particularly significant; it bridges popular culture and Indigenous struggle, drawing a parallel between the fictional fight against imperial forces in the Star Wars narrative and the real-life resistance of Indigenous peoples against colonial and present-day oppressors. The young man’s attire symbolises the intersection of Indigenous identities with global cultural elements, shedding light on the dynamic and evolving nature of Indigenous resistance. Other works by Kanaykõ such as Wawi and Wairê depict traditional Xakriabá body painting, chants and dances, serving as visual records of cultural practices and symbols of resilience, and as a form of resistance against attempts to undermine Indigenous ways of living.

Olinda Tupinambá’s film Kaapora – O chamado das matas also counters this undermining by illustrating how Indigenous perspectives can challenge stereotypes that have long devalued Indigenous epistemologies. Véxoa marked Tupinambá’s first opportunity to engage with an art institution. In the film, the artist, from the Tupinambá and Pataxó Hãhãhãe peoples, examines the relationship between Indigenous peoples and spiritual entities. Her work connects this relationship to environmental issues, a concern that Tupinambá has been actively working on through the restoration of degraded areas in the Caramuru Paraguassu Indigenous Land in Pau Brasil, Bahia, where she was born. Non-Indigenous viewers may perceive Kaapora as a myth or legend. However, in her film, Tupinambá portrays her people’s connection with the entity, demonstrating that Kaapora is a living and existent being. Portraying Kaapora as real and alive, rather than a myth or legend, is an anti-racist gesture, even if not explicitly named as such.

This example demonstrates the efficacy of diverse, sometimes indirect, anti-racist strategies in addressing structural inequalities and promoting cultural restoration and recognition. Featuring Kaapora as an existent entity in Tupinambá’s film is an anti-racist gesture because it validates Indigenous knowledge systems that were historically marginalised and dismissed by colonial narratives. This representation resists stereotypes that reduce Indigenous spiritual entities to mere folklore, affirming their cultural and spiritual significance. Furthermore, by integrating Indigenous perspectives with environmental activism, Tupinambá decolonises ecological discourse, emphasising that Indigenous spiritual ties with the land are vital for planetary care. This approach challenges the racial hierarchies that place Western thought above Indigenous epistemologies, pushing back against their historical devaluation. Furthermore, Tupinambá’s political and artistic resistance as an environmental activist, filmmaker and performance artist illustrates the combined anti-colonial roles of the arts and reforestation as forms of aesthetic and epistemic insurgency in the context of the Anthropocene.Footnote ¹⁵

Conclusion

Véxoa marked a significant milestone in the history of Brazilian art by being the first exhibition entirely curated by an Indigenous person in a prestigious museum in the country. This milestone called into question the long-standing absence of Indigenous artists in museum collections. The exhibition challenged conventional boundaries and distinctions between art and craft, which have often marginalised Indigenous artistic expressions as handicrafts. Véxoa not only showcased Indigenous arts but also instigated a necessary critique within the fields of museology and anthropology, addressing inherent racial inequalities in the representation of Indigenous aesthetic expressions. Moreover, it emphasised the need for museums to work closely with Indigenous communities and to consistently incorporate Indigenous professionals within their institutions. This shift, as demonstrated by Véxoa, is crucial to ensuring that Indigenous perspectives are represented in both curatorial and administrative processes.

Véxoa aimed to educate the public on the diversity and depth of Indigenous arts, presenting a wide range of works from various Indigenous artists and communities, which was important for its anti-racist impact. The exhibition served as a platform for educating the public about the plurality of Indigenous cultures, seeking to foster long-term change. Véxoa not only showcased present-day Indigenous arts but also emphasised the importance of traditional forms of knowledge and practices. By juxtaposing works that incorporate traditional techniques and materials, such as pottery and masks, with works made with present-day tools, such as digital illustration and video performance, the exhibition challenged the racist notion that Indigenous cultures are relics of the past. Véxoa also highlighted intersectionality within the Indigenous struggle, showing how issues of race, gender and sexuality compound experiences of marginalisation. By including works by artists such as Yacunã Tuxá, who navigates both her Indigenous and lesbian identities, Véxoa broadened the discourse on anti-racism to include overlapping layers of oppression.

Additionally, the exhibition underscored the role of Indigenous arts in environmental advocacy. Véxoa demonstrated how Indigenous arts can be a powerful tool for sensitising, raising awareness and mobilising support for this cause. This approach showed how the fight against anti-Indigenous racism is inherently connected to broader struggles for justice. Furthermore, Véxoa’s presence in a major institution such as the Pinacoteca de São Paulo served as a critique of institutional racism within the art world. By highlighting the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from major art museums, Véxoa called for systemic changes within these institutions. It advocated for more inclusive curatorial practices and the integration of Indigenous agents at all levels of the art world, aiming to transform the structures that reinforce inequality in the art world itself. This effort challenged conventional understandings of what counts as art and highlighted the aesthetic diversity of Indigenous traditions. Through its curatorial process, Véxoa not only brought visibility to previously unknown artists but also attempted to reframe the standards of artistic recognition. Indeed, in Véxoa, the concept of curatorship (curadoria) was linked to healing (curar), serving as a means of cultural and historical restoration.Footnote ¹⁶

Véxoa contributed to the current anti-racism momentum in Brazil to highlight the historical and ongoing role of racism through a nuanced approach, seeking to build broader alliances and to avoid the potential backlash that more explicit racialised demands might provoke. Véxoa integrated a structural understanding of inequality, which includes but is not limited to racism. This approach, reflected in the exhibition, aims to address foundational power structures while maintaining a racially-aware sense of justice, showcasing how anti-racist strategies can be effectively implemented within the arts, even without explicit mention of racism.

While naming racism explicitly is often seen as essential for anti-racist action, Véxoa demonstrated that it does not necessarily guarantee a comprehensive understanding of racism or effective anti-racist strategies. The perspectives on anti-racism evoked by Véxoa reveal that different Indigenous artists have varied approaches to addressing racism. Many focus on broader struggles such as land rights, anti-anthropocentrism and environmental justice, which also have racialised dimensions. This approach resonates with the notion of ‘alternative grammars of anti-racism’ proposed by Peter Wade and Mónica Moreno Figueroa (Reference Wade and Moreno Figueroa2021). Indirect anti-racist methods, as demonstrated by Véxoa, can sometimes be advantageous, particularly in recognising and addressing structural racism within art institutions. Through this multidimensional approach, Véxoa provided a framework for integrating anti-colonial practices in the arts, emphasising the importance of diverse strategies in the fight against racial inequality.

Source: ‘O poder do rap guarani’, a ninety-minute online conversation with Bruno Veron and Kelvin Peixoto, of Brô MC’s (from Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul), and Kunumi MC (now known as Owerá), of the Tekoá Krukutu (in Parelheiros, São Paulo), moderated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias. The conversation can be accessed on CARLA’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqvpH1HpNHw.

Context: the Brazilian rap and hip-hop movement began in São Paulo in the late 1980s, led by Black performers and activists who gathered in a square in the city centre, Praça Roosevelt. The first album, Hip-hop cultura da rua (1988), was a collective work led by legendary DJ Thaide. It was soon followed by Consciência Black (1989) by Racionais MC’s, a group that would spearhead the rapid rise of the genre all over Brazil. As in other parts of the world, Brazil’s rap and hip-hop are mostly urban. For example, the lyrics of Racionais MC’s, which became emblematic of the genre, centre on youth life in the peripheral areas of the city of São Paulo, featuring topics such as racism, social inequality and drug violence. These themes held clear appeal for Indigenous peoples confronting racism, displacement and violence in Brazil, and in 2009 Brô MC’s emerged as the first Indigenous rap and hip-hop group, singing in a combination of Guarani and Portuguese. The region they come from, Mato Grosso do Sul, is characterised by extreme forms of violence and racism against Indigenous people.

So, when our ancestors, our grandparents, return to these lands from where they were removed, which is their tekoá of origin, through re-occupations, prejudice arises here in Dourados, in Mato Grosso do Sul. The Indigenous people here in Mato Grosso do Sul are called lazy bums. They often call us land stealers, they say we are stealing their land. And the media, radio, TV help spread that message that Indigenous people just want to let the land run wild, not to farm it. The white guy, his thinking is to invest, to make a profit for his pocket. And for us Indigenous people, the land is precious, it is more than money. They don’t understand this.

For this reason, there is this prejudice against Indigenous people. When you go to the city, go into a store, people look at you from head to toe, discriminating against you like this: ‘Oh, look at this Indian coming in.’ Here in Mato Grosso do Sul you see this. It is an issue that Indigenous people suffer on a daily basis. I believe that if Indigenous people care too much about this they will not be able to survive. There have been many Indigenous people who suffered prejudice and then came to the village and committed suicide. You see it all the time, an Indigenous man who committed suicide, who fell into depression because he was humiliated in front of everyone in the city. That’s why there is a village, here in Mato Grosso do Sul, known as suicide village, a village where many people committed suicide.Footnote ²

So the media, TV, pass on bad information to non-Indigenous people, to white people. That’s why when people come here at night, for example, when they take a taxi to come to the village, the taxi drivers are afraid. On the radio they always say that [Indigenous] villages are dangerous. But that’s not true. It’s bad information they give about the Guarani-Kaiowá and Terena people here in the Jaguapiru and Bororó villages. Sometimes I listen to the radio. They say things like: ‘I don’t know why the Indigenous people want the land, since they don’t plant anything.’ Or, ‘You saw, right? They demarcated that land there and we only see bushes there.’

Also, they are so prejudiced against us that they treat us as if we were invisible people. So, they stop us in stores: when we enter a store, the guard is on top of us, as if we were going to steal something. Because, in their view, Indians steal, just take things, thinking that they don’t belong to anyone, but that is not the case. I’ve seen it many times when I enter a store: employees keep an eye on us. When we go somewhere, they walk around, or when we go to get something, they watch us. Or on the other hand: when we enter a place, people think we’re not there. They brush past us and don’t come and ask if we need anything. When something terrible happens, like deaths, which happen all the time because a lot of fatalities happen here on the highway, they don’t really care. When we went on Xuxa’s TV programme, an online newspaper said that we were representing Mato Grosso do Sul and Dourados. There were a lot of people who commented saying that we didn’t represent them, we didn’t represent Dourados, nor Mato Grosso do Sul, because we were Indigenous, lazy bums, we just liked to invade land, and that we were dirty and smelly.

This discrimination is plain to see, not only in the city, but also in universities throughout Brazil. And I see that our excellent president himself [Jair Bolsonaro] propagated this hatred even more. I think it is the Indigenous people who are holding things together here on the planet, because the Indigenous people are the protectors of the lands, the animals, the forest. It is the Indigenous people who are protecting life. If it were up to white people, the forest, the animals would have been destroyed long ago. And the forest is so important to us that without it we cannot survive, because it brings us the oxygen that we breathe. In Amazonas, you see the fires that happened, the landowners themselves did it, didn’t they? To put pressure on the government. Then there’s the issue of miners. They are destroying the forest. The Indigenous people, as Bruno mentioned, are not backward. Many white people say that we are backward. We are not. We are protecting something that is good for the world. And in the white world, the only value is greed. This is what happens here in our community, but I think it happens throughout Brazil as well.

Introduction

Our work within the Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA) project brings into dialogue two forms of subalternity in Argentina: Afro-descendant and Mapuche. The collective research process involved a relational analysis of the plays produced by Teatro en Sepia, an Afro-descendant theatre company directed by Alejandra Egido, and by the Grupo de Teatro Mapuche El Katango (Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango), directed by Miriam Álvarez. This process generated new collaborative theatrical texts and productions. Our analytical perspective combined social sciences and theatre, exchanging methods and staging strategies, and allowing us to develop the political implications of these dramatic creations. The dialogue in theatre and academia between Afro and Indigenous subaltern experiences, both located in processes of racialisation in Argentina, together with the connection between activist spheres and the academy, in which Egido and Álvarez also participate, have produced innovative artistic and research outputs.

Artistically, the collaboration produced two new plays. The first, Ñiküfnaqkechi waria (Silence in the City), was directed by Álvarez. Two scenes were produced as video clips from this play, ‘Las hierbas’ (Herbs), with a performance by Lorena Cañuqueo, and ‘Como dos gotas de agua’ (Like Two Peas in a Pod), with performances by Egido and Álvarez (see Figure 6.3 later in the chapter). The second play, Fuego amigo (Friendly Fire), was written and directed by Egido, with Álvarez also acting.Footnote ¹

In analytical terms, we highlight here two dimensions that emerge from the anti-colonial and anti-racist work we did using a collaborative methodology. First, from a theatrical point of view, in discussions between the four of us during more than six months in 2020, we analysed the poetic procedures used by Egido, Álvarez and Cañuqueo. Second, from a socio-political perspective, we compared different experiences of racialisation and analysed associated anti-racist strategies. This implied thinking of the stage as a space of reconstruction and a site of construction and redefinition of belonging from which both theatre companies address the different affective responses to violence against, and the forced displacement of, racialised bodies (Da Silva Reference Da Silva Ferreira2007). Both affect and emotions can be read as constitutive of our collective experiences, but affect was understood as embodied knowledge and traces of experience that precede emotions and are experienced via our bodies’ perceptual capacities (Sirimarco and Spivak L’Hoste Reference Sirimarco and Spivak L’Hoste2018). Affect arises in concrete social situations and generates varied collective capacities for action, and it is particularly important for understanding silenced or unexpected processes such as uprisings and spontaneous emergence (Beasley-Murray Reference Beasley-Murray2010). Following Denise Ferreira da Silva, we consider affect in its colonial and gendered dimensions, considering that some bodies are more exposed to forms of violence than others: that is, some bodies emerge from the colonial situation and racialisation as violated bodies (Da Silva Reference Da Silva Ferreira2007). At the same time, different circumstances generate different capacities for self-realisation and empowerment, which can give rise to unexpected re-emergence – of identities, peoples, presences – in adverse situations, with artistic creation being a privileged space for this (Da Silva Reference Da Silva Ferreira2022; Saldanha Reference Saldanha2004). This understanding gives us insight into the staged corporealities that we categorise as dissident, and into the way in which affect, by materialising particular poetics, is also a political practice. The theatrical practices analysed here share analytic and theatrical procedures that recreate Afro and Mapuche lives from archives and memories and on stage, challenging their strategic erasure by white European Argentina. But, far from homogenising these experiences, we understand that they have specificities that differentiate them and that we address here.

Dissident Scenes in the White European Nation: Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango and Teatro en Sepia

The processes of racialisation that shape these theatre companies emerged in response to the construction of an Argentine nation-state that aspires, through its discourse and imaginaries, to be European and white. On the one hand, the Argentine elites enacted the project of a nation ‘without Indians’ through the so-called Conquest of the Desert, which brought together the military occupation of Indigenous territories in Patagonia (and later the Chaco) between 1878 and 1885 (Delrio Reference Delrio2005) and the symbolic representation of these lands as a ‘desert’, open to be colonised and incorporated into the Argentine nation. The Indigenous people located there were depicted as ‘barbarians’, justifying their dispossession in the name of civilising progress. This thinking, typical of the nineteenth century, remains in the common sense of Argentina today.

On the other hand, the premise that Afro-Argentines ‘disappeared’ after the late nineteenth century has sustained the myth of a white, European nation (Frigerio Reference Frigerio2006; Geler Reference Geler2012, Reference Geler2016). Early on, intellectuals such as Juan Bautista Alberdi and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento argued that Afro-Argentines had died in battle, especially in the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), or had succumbed to various conditions because of their intrinsic vulnerability (Geler Reference Geler2010). Moreover, in order to sustain this ‘disappearance’, they applied statistical invisibilisation. The last national census to include data on race was 1827, although municipal censuses (e.g. for Buenos Aires) had racial data until 1895 (Andrews Reference Andrews1980; Edwards Reference Edwards2018, Reference Edwards2020). Despite the fact that Afro-descendants were recognised anecdotally as having contributed to the construction of the nation, they are not valued as members of a nation-building people and are generally considered to have disappeared.

Images of ‘barbarism’ and ‘absence’, on the one hand, and a model of society based on the influx of European immigrants imagined as ‘civilised’ and ‘desirable’, on the other, structure differentiated citizenships, which, intertwining with ideas of territory, class, gender and age, have performative effects in the present. These are all questioned, staged and reversed in the artistic creations of Teatro en Sepia and the Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango.

Rather than analysing the process of Argentine racial formation here (see Chapter 3 and also Adamovsky Reference Adamovsky2012; Aguiló Reference Aguiló2018; Alberto and Elena Reference Alberto and Elena2016; Briones Reference Briones2003; Frigerio Reference Frigerio2006; Geler Reference Geler2016; Segato Reference Segato1998), we emphasise that the dominant model of the nation has been challenged by Afro-descendant and Indigenous activism, which between the 1980s and 2000s achieved important dimensions of visibility vis-à-vis the state. This led to legal and institutional recognition, such as the 1994 constitutional recognition of the pre-existence of Indigenous peoples (Carrasco Reference Carrasco2000) and the creation of the Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia y el Racismo (National Institute against Discrimination, INADI), which began to officially recognise Afro-descendants in the country (Pita Reference Pita2021). These policies initiated a process which is not only fragile, but also one in which recognition has to be demonstrated and validated according to state criteria. The artistic projects we analyse go beyond this demand for visibility and begin to investigate the multiple trajectories and lifeways that Afro-descendants and Indigenous peoples have followed from the creation of the nation-state to the present day. The two theatre groups emerged in the 2000s (El Katango in 2002 and TES in 2010), during a period when Argentine society was beginning to recognise its ethnic-racial plurality and when multiculturalist legal reforms allowed the groups to establish a working relationship with the state. However, many sectors of the dominant society and media continue to express surprise at finding ‘Blacks’ and ‘Indians’ in Argentina, and stereotypes update the core assumptions of colonial ideologies, such as ‘the spiritual Indigenous woman’ or ‘the happy Black’ (Andrada Reference Andrada2016; Morales Reference Morales2014).

On the basis of their experiences, the two theatre groups arrived independently at the conclusion that the persistence of surprise at Indigenous and Afro presence is not Argentine structural ignorance, but rather an ideology that has produced strategic erasures of Afro and Indigenous people in order to create the perception of a white nation, even among people with Indigenous and Afro ancestry. Surprise is one of the modalities of structural racism, where the bodily reaction to the existence of non-white, non-European people is a visceral reaction, barely mediated by reflection. The Afro-Indigenous presence provokes a corporeal shock in the context of the erasures produced by the assumption that one lives in a white society.

The multicultural policies of the 1990s have not been able to erase the legacy of late-nineteenth-century images of Argentina as a country ‘without Indians and without Blacks’ and, as a result, both the theatre companies, linked to wider Mapuche and Afro movements, work to internally reconstitute Mapuche and Afro social ties, while also addressing emotionally and affectively powerful erasures and stereotypes, such as those that criminalise or romanticise racialised subalterns.

Mapuche and Afro Staging: Theatrical Poetics and Corporealities

In this section we analyse El Katango’s play Tayiñ kuify kvpan (Our Old-Ancient Ancestry), premiered in 2004, which is about relationships with the ancestors and the Mapuche diaspora experience.Footnote ⁵ We also explore TES’s Afrolatinoamericanas: De voces, susurros, gritos y silencios, to analyse the relationship between Black women and the Museo de la Mujer Argentina (Museum of the Argentine Woman) in Buenos Aires, where the play premiered in 2012. These analyses draw on our initial research, in which we discussed how each creator works with non-fiction theatre and against the silences of national history and the archives. We explored how each artist addresses the effects of racialisation on the body, in order to recover the trajectories of Mapuche and Afro people and to empower forms of existence and re-emergence.

Traces of Ancestry

Tayiñ kuify kvpan represents the intersections of ethnicity, territory, gender and class, but also adding the dimension of age, on the assumption that in all complex political processes more than one category of difference is involved (Hancock Reference Hancock2007). Tayiñ kuify kvpan emerged from a theatre workshop for Mapuche youth in Bariloche that explored forms of identification as Mapuche among young people.Footnote ⁶ Participants brought up the theme of ancestors, lineage and personal connections with the dead, including dream practices. Miriam Álvarez and the young people then explored the bodily gestures performed in Mapuche ceremonies, such as jejipun (prayer ceremony) and purun (dance). As there were fragmented memories of these gestures within the group, an activist from an older generation was called in to share her knowledge and experience. With Álvarez’s guidance and attention to corporeality and gestures, an intergenerational space for the transmission of knowledge was generated. Stories were reconstructed based on orality and we also sought to reconstruct aspects of the gestures that the young people, non-professional actors, brought to the stage. Research and the reconstruction of senses of belonging were intertwined in the making of the play.

The resulting mise-en-scène is structured in six frames of non-linear action, thus distancing itself from what Bertolt Brecht calls Aristotelian dramaturgy, characterised by a beginning, middle and end, which together form an organic dramatic structure. The performance begins when the audience enters the auditorium. Two of the characters are already on stage: two old people who represent the spirits of the past, the dead who continue to accompany the living today. Sitting to one side, the old woman knits, while the old man lies dead in the middle of the scene. Then, once the audience is in their seats, tableau one begins, with two young women bringing clothes and food to the alwe (spirit). After they have set everything down, the old man stands up, takes the clothes that have been left for him and begins to walk until he meets the old woman, who represents another spirit.

From this beginning, the play is structured around the relationship between the living and the dead. The dead are old people and the living are represented by two young women who have suffered encroachment on their lands, dispossession and poverty. A later tableau features an old woman who saves herself from the army’s incursions into her land, but now wanders disoriented. Although she refers to an historical event (the late-nineteenth-century Conquest of the Desert), she is not located in a time that can be considered the past, nor is she included among the dead, but among the living. She is a liminal character who places the genocide and its effects in an on-going present. Her liminality is a bridge between the past and the present, breaking with linear temporality. The experience of this character in the play articulates with Nawel gvxam (Story of the Tiger), a traditional Mapuche tale that narrates the return home after the Conquest of the Desert war. The story is told by an old woman, the protagonist, who escapes the invasion and then meets a nawel (tiger) that does not attack her, but helps her, and whom she calls futa lamgen (big brother) (Golluscio Reference Golluscio2006). In the play, two characters appear who encourage the old woman to follow the nawel. Next there appears a younger woman, who addresses her as abuela (grandmother) and cares for her (see Figure 6.1). She recounts that many local people, including her own mother, have – like the abuela – been violently displaced from their territory and forced to move to the city.

Figure 6.1

Scene from Tayiñ kuify kvpan with Lorena Cañuqueo and Sofía Curapil, on stage at the Escuela de Arte Municipal La Llave, Bariloche, Argentina, 2004

(photograph by Matías Marticorena, © Archivo de la Campaña de Autoafirmación Mapuche Wefkeletuyiñ, Estamos Resurgiendo, by permission).

The theatrical staging sought to elicit a certain aesthetic identification in the Mapuche spectators, taking into account a process of self-recognition. As we will analyse in detail, the staging constitutes a Mapuche corporeal repertoire by means of a metacultural operation, defined as any cultural action that, while being performed, reflects on culture itself (Briones Reference Briones1998): that is, a set of practices that begins to be called and understood as ‘culture’. The aim was to stage organised forms of behaviour through gestures that were identifiable for the Mapuche audience: the palig (a Mapuche game), the jejipun (a Mapuche prayer ceremony), the use of traditional dress such as the headscarf for women and the headband for men, and the use of the Mapuche language, Mapuzugun. The work reconstitutes a Mapuche corporeal repertoire elaborated in the 1990s by Mapuche activism that, through a metacultural operation, sought the resurgence of these practices, which had been silenced by decades of state persecution and Christian evangelisation.

Afro Screams and Silences

In 2012, when Teatro en Sepia premiered the play Afrolatinoamericanas: De voces, susurros, gritos y silencios (see Figure 6.2), a transition took place: the company became feminist and dedicated itself to the experiences of women of African descent, no longer the Afro community in general. The play resulted from an invitation from the Museo de la Mujer Argentina in Buenos Aires in the year of the bicentenary of independence. As part of the celebrations, the museum planned events that showcased women’s participation in Argentine history. But the initial programme included only the experiences of white European-descent women and did not recognise the role of Afro women in the struggle for independence. So the members of TES decided to test the relationship between Black women and the Museo de la Mujer as a feminist space. The idea was to work with two time periods: the historical past and the present day, highlighting the continuity of Afro issues and struggles.

Figure 6.2

Poster advertising Afrolatinoamericanas: De voces, susurros, gritos y silencios for a performance run in 2013

Figure 6.2 long description.

Figure 6.2 Long description

The women standing wear sleeveless dresses cinched below the bust, along with leggings and headscarves. The woman kneeling wears trousers and a top with a shawl draped around her shoulders. The text at the top of the poster provides the title of the play and the names of the playwrights and director; further down are the names of the actors and a brief summary of the play; at the bottom are the sponsors' logos, performance dates, and venue details.

(© Alejandra Egido, by permission).

A starting point for the production was the figure of Sarah Baartman, an African woman of the Khoikhoi ethnic group who in 1810 was forcibly taken to Europe and made to exhibit herself naked as a public attraction because of her prominent buttocks (Geler Reference Geler2012). It was decided that the actresses, all of them Afro, would go on stage with their faces covered, demonstrating that, in the social imaginary, Black women are considered as bodies, without faces or heads.

The rehearsals were moments of collective construction between Alejandra Egido, historian Lea Geler and the non-professional actresses (Geler Reference Geler2012). The scenes drew on historical materials and contemporary texts by Afro-Latin American women playwrights, some of which directly allude to a situation of Afro ‘resistance’ or to historical events in the Afro community. Texts were selected that overlapped the historical past and the present, showing the resonances between these moments (an operation already described for El Katango). The performance included personal and contemporary testimonies of the performers delivered through video, as commentaries on the historical and literary texts.

An ecclesiastical legal text recovered by historian Florencia Guzmán structures the plot of the play. This text refers to an early-nineteenth-century divorce trial in Córdoba, Argentina, in which a Creole woman asks the Church to annul her marriage. The woman argued that ‘her husband has adulterated the marriage bed, and gives himself to every Black and brown woman who enters his service, whether by purchase or agreement, thus squandering the dowry of his children on enslaved children’ (Guzmán Reference Guzmán, Celton, Ghirardi and Carbonetti2009: 412). Although the wife brought the enslaved women to give testimony at the trial, where they attested to the violence, including rape, that they suffered at the husband’s hands, the Church’s final verdict, with which the play closes, was that it did not consider that the evidence given was ‘sufficient grounds to authorise the separation of the spouses’ (Guzman Reference Guzmán, Celton, Ghirardi and Carbonetti2009: 419). The husband’s violence was not seen as a problem.

The tension between the white mistress and her husband unites her with the enslaved Afro women who also denounce the master’s abuses. But the scene also presents the frictions between these women. While the wife protests at her wounded honour, the Afro women were subjected to enslavement, sexual abuse and the jealousy of the wife. Their positions cannot be equated, an understanding that indirectly challenges the role of white feminism in the present day and shows why an anti-racist feminism is relevant. In rehearsals, actresses improvised around life in a colonial house and the place of women, whether mistresses or enslaved, and improvisations also drew on feminist texts such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s La frontera (1987) to bring in themes of dissident feminisms, classic feminism and sexual diversity in a context in which mass feminism in Argentina did not take into account Black and intersectional feminism. The play opened up this discussion in Argentina: Egido sums up the staging of the play as ‘a thump on the table’, put together with urgency and little time. The play was a simultaneous intervention into white feminism, which did not consider racialised differences, and into claims by the Afro movement that did not consider gendered differences and put women between brackets.

At the same time, in order to unsettle the association of Afro people only with colonial times, scenes based on historical texts were superimposed with contemporary accounts given by the actresses. For example, in a scene where the character of Josefa Tenorio, an enslaved Afro-Argentine military woman, reads aloud a letter she addressed to General San Martín – hero of Argentine independence – asking for her liberty, her monologue is interrupted by a present-day video of the performer, an Afro-Argentine actress, in which she narrates the obstacles she faces in finding a job as a dental hygienist because of her skin colour.

While making visible the Afro contributions to the formation of the Argentine nation in the shape of a military woman – a heroine of independence who still did not win her freedom – the scene also reveals the current situation of Black women in Argentina, where the descendants of enslaved women continue to fight for recognition as Afro and Argentine, in a country that alienates them, and to carry forward the anti-racist struggle for the right to dignified work. The strategy of superimposing the past and the present emphasises the non-fictional character of the work and refutes assertions that Argentina ‘is not racist’.

Dialogues Between Afro and Indigenous Experiences

Over recent decades, Afro and Indigenous activists in Argentina (and elsewhere in Latin America and the world), alongside decolonial thinkers, have drawn connections between the colonialism of the conquerors and the emergence of nation-states, something common to Afro and Indigenous experiences. However, connecting Afro and Indigenous trajectories is still a field in need of development. For the moment, academic works that generate rapprochements between these collectives are few, but important (Edwards Reference Edwards2020; Hooker Reference Hooker2020; Safa Reference Safa2005; Wade Reference Wade, Andrews and de la Fuente2018). For their part, Afro and Indigenous organisations have spearheaded demands for historical reparations and state recognition, against a background of multiple instances of convergence and solidarity, which acknowledge that the separation of Afro and Indigenous struggles is a legacy of colonial divide-and-rule strategies. Despite this, however, the construction of common relationships often has a peripheral place within their agendas, for reasons that will be mentioned later.

This is reinforced in contexts of multiculturalism with state policies that encapsulate ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Afro’ in different institutional spaces, even when there are equivalent expectations on the part of the state that lead, paradoxically, to policies demanding that Afro activisms adapt to criteria of Indigenous legitimacy (Rahier Reference Rahier2020; Wade Reference Wade2010b). While official recognition has generated spaces for interaction with states, the emphasis on authenticity and the demand to demonstrate ‘community’ and prove identity have created a political context where distinctions have become more pronounced (Hale Reference Hale2005). If one of the key advances of Afro-descendant activism and research has been to identify the forms of racism that Latin American nationalisms have long denied, this critical analysis also allows us to rethink the experience of Indigenous racialisation from an Afro perspective. We follow the provocation of Denise Ferreira da Silva (Reference Da Silva Ferreira2007), who identifies colonised bodies as more exposed and vulnerable, especially in the Americas, to the powers of European rationality. The exposure of racialised bodies to expropriations and vulnerability (their ‘affectability’, for Da Silva) is a common aspect of the experience of racism that El Katango and Teatro en Sepia investigate and intervene into, as are the vital forces that, working from the body, reconstruct Afro and Mapuche lives and communities.

It is important to highlight the novelty of this encounter between the Afro and the Indigenous, but also to identify the gap that exists in memories of and historical works on these encounters, which is why in this project we also recreated these encounters, working from small beginnings. However, we do not want to lose the specificities of the distinct projects of TES and El Katango, which are, at the same time, exactly what allow us to establish connections and dialogues. In order to show how ‘the Afro’ and ‘the Mapuche’ are represented in the work of Teatro en Sepia and El Katango, we will analyse the links and convergences that emerged from their encounter in the CARLA project. During the first year of the project we analysed plays from each theatre group so as to create a dialogue between them. In what follows, we take the work of the theatre groups to reflect from a Latin American intersectional perspective that is localised and contextualised in Argentina (Viveros Vigoya Reference Viveros Vigoya2016).

Anti-Racist Theatres, Interwoven Theatricalities

Given the context just described, a constant theme during our research was the search for traces of any Afro-Mapuche encounters, recorded in archives and social memories, and more specifically encounters that had been encouraged by theatrical productions. Except for references to barely visible Afro communities located in proximity to Mapuche territories, bereft of details about encounters and relations, we did not find any specific work.Footnote ⁸ Hence the directors’ desire to create plays that would stage such encounters, working in a mode of historical speculation that makes an informed reconstruction of archival gaps and ellipses in memories (Hartman Reference Hartman2019). With the premise of incorporating an Afro character in Álvarez’s work and a Mapuche character in Egido’s work, both creators wrote their outlines. The writing was individual, but took place in the shared framework of a writing workshop called ‘Clandestine Dramaturgy’ directed by David Arancibia, a Mapuche playwright based in Chile. During the process, the playwrights exchanged versions, provided information and commented on each other’s work. The collaborative work was called Entramadas (Interweavings) and emerged, in our words at the time, ‘as an urgent and necessary exchange of experiences between two forms of theatre that challenge the erasure of Indigenous and Afro-descendant narratives, gestures, bodies and experiences in Argentine theatre’.

The work that led to the writing of these proposals was preceded by collective reflection on the affective impacts of coloniality on racialised bodies described in the previous sections, some of whose modalities continue in the present. These forms continue to target Afro and Mapuche bodies in ways that have significant similarities. Both Afro and Mapuche bodies can

1. (1) be denied (i.e. their actual existence);

2. (2) be made foreign (Afro-Argentines are identified as foreigners from other Latin American countries and Mapuche are often identified as Chilean);

3. (3) be surveilled as ‘other’ bodies in the space of the city (both theatre companies work in cities that are thought to be white and where the non-white is marked as strange and dangerous);

4. (4) be recognised only within limited folkloric parameters (Afro people linked to a colonial image, women dressed in white with their hair covered; Mapuche people as rural and wearing traditional clothes), which evoke an illusory past (a harmonious colonial society where Afro people were street vendors and enslavement is invisible, and Mapuche people were in small, dispersed rural communities);

5. (5) be made hyper-visible in folkloric stereotypes (Afro people as happy and associated with dance and music, not with thought; Mapuche people linked to a stereotypical spirituality) or in images of criminality (Afro people associated with illegality; Mapuche people linked to violence and terrorism).

These points were identified as ‘differentiated communalities’ in our meetings and in the process of thinking about the motivations and interventions of each theatre group.Footnote ⁹ On the basis of this process of collective reflection, Egido and Álvarez decided move towards theatrical creation.

Entramadas, which speculatively reconstructs stories of encounters and silenced lives, has been an important achievement, because even though each theatre group had been exploring how to stage their productions by combining political and poetic dimensions, working together allowed us to expand this differentiated communality and speculatively reconstruct Afro-Mapuche encounters (resonating with projects such as King Reference King2019). Specifically, it allowed us to represent Afro and Mapuche bodies in a single theatrical work and thus unite us in questioning white Argentina. We arrived at two theatrical creations, noted at the beginning of this chapter: Fuego amigo (Friendly Fire) by Alejandra Egido and Ñiküfnaqkechi waria (Silence in the City) by Miriam Álvarez. The plays bring together the stories of Mapuche and Afro women, referring to common experiences of oppression (such as forced displacement and forced labour) and common recourse to a sense of humour as a gesture of resistance. We observed that the stories of both collectives could be represented in both theatre groups, making visible that ‘we share more than we imagined’, as the creators put it. In the plays, Afro and Mapuche people meet and, despite not knowing the particularities of their respective stories, they resonate with each other’s experiences, not only empathetically but also because each recognises the traces of colonialism in the other’s history.

Ñiküfnaqkechi waria is a play that, at the time of writing, is still under construction. It seeks to question the silence with which both Mapuche and Afro-descendant populations were surrounded after the Conquest of the Desert, an experience linked with successive periods of loss of land and the ongoing dispossession of lands by criollo settlers. The women in the play turn to their memory, their ancestral ties and beliefs to give themselves strength to carry on. The joint work generates a common space on the stage that intertwines the experiences of violence and the forms of resurgence of both peoples, a path towards anti-racism and decoloniality that is taking shape as Afro and Indigenous struggles in the Americas are linked to one another (King et al. Reference King, Navarro and Smith2020). When we rehearsed and also when we discussed the theatre groups themselves, we found points of connection that generated a common matrix: the white Argentina that silenced both collectives, the forced mobilities, the violence on bodies and territories.

Thus, in the construction of Fuego amigo, as in Ñiküfnaqkechi waria, the idea was to represent forced displacements as part of the creation of a broader cartography (Dubatti Reference Dubatti2016). In Fuego, we see what the urban territory means for Mapuche and Afro-descendant people. In Ñiküfnaqkechi, rural territory takes centre stage, but here we also sought, through poetic procedures of expressionism and symbolism, to evoke a territoriality occupied by water. For Afro-descendants, this meant the Atlantic, the ocean crossing and ports; for the Mapuche, it meant water as a place of refuge, of healing and of memory. In one scene of Ñiküfnaqkechi, a film of a fast-flowing river is projected and at one point we see that it is carrying photographs, swept along by the current. This river represents water and fluidity in general and evokes a way of seeing Mapuche territory as ever-changing. When this scene, ‘Como dos gotas de agua’ (Like Two Peas in a Pod), was premiered at Manchester’s Contact Theatre in April 2022, the feedback from the audience was striking and included comments from Afro-Colombian artists who were not only moved, but also expressed the uniqueness of seeing two subordinate corporealities with so much in common in Latin America, who, nevertheless, do not usually participate together in artistic projects (see Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3

Scene from ‘Como dos gotas de agua’ with Alejandra Egido and Miriam Álvarez, on stage at the Contact Theatre, Manchester, UK, 2022

(© Jami Bennet and Shawn Stephen, by permission).

Fuego amigo adds another contribution to this innovative encounter and the differentiated communality of these two plays with its feminist perspective and a futuristic projection. By fictionalising the stories of the protagonists (a Mapuche woman and a woman of African descent) and locating them in an imagined new social order in Argentina based on the realities of the pandemic, it metaphorically evokes the way the health crisis exacerbated existing tendencies while also underlining the corruption of the neoliberal order and highlighting the historical resistance of these subaltern characters in the face of a system in breakdown. The play’s protagonists are working together in a near-future scenario as technicians who have been hired to install sensors that measure the presence of viruses in the air at traffic lights. The job requires them to move around, and instead of having cars or motorbikes, they travel on horseback. With the trust that comes from spending long hours together working in a daily routine, they begin to share their personal stories with each other. The Afro woman tells how she was evicted from her home and ended up living on the street, possibly all as a result of racist exclusion from the labour market. The Mapuche woman recounts her eviction from a community school where she worked. It becomes evident that both women are extremely strong, capable of overcoming these circumstances. In contrast to the past experiences that they narrate, both women are electrical technicians and expert horse riders, which challenges the standard view of these activities as masculine. The play then shows them joining forces to bring a legal suit against the Argentine state, thus speculatively raising the possibility of historical and political reparation for colonised peoples. In the scenes depicting the lawsuit, the state’s responsibility for the exploitation of the bodies and expropriation of the lands of Afro-diasporic and Mapuche peoples as constitutive processes of the nation becomes evident.

Conclusion: Theatrical Poetics and Mapuche and Afro Lives on the Stage

The stage, as a space for experimentation, not only allows new forms of representation and narrative but also foments the recomposition and resurrection of Afro and Mapuche lives through the poetic and deeply political language of theatre (Simpson Reference Simpson2017). The artistic practices of the two theatre companies are anti-racist and decolonial because they emerge from (collective) bodies and fragmented territories and because they propose the reconstruction of life against the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the dehumanisation/instrumentalisation of Afro bodies that have generated a hierarchical order of bodies and territories in the nation. The companies also offer a discursive-enunciative anti-racism that challenges the differences produced by structural racism. This challenge is expressed, for example, in the denaturalisation of the common sense that sees Afro bodies in Buenos Aires as ‘foreigners’ or ‘outsiders’ and which is the geopolitical reflection of Argentina’s model of civilisation. It is also expressed by contesting the discourses of the mainstream media, certain political leaders and the Argentine establishment that characterise Mapuche activism for territorial rights as ‘terrorism’. In other words, both companies propose a dialogue among their own collective experiences in the present in order to produce alternative readings in political, poetic and aesthetic terms.

The two companies also have in common the aim to go beyond dramaturgy as metaphor or allegory for something else. The original theatrical and socio-political research they have done reconstructs histories from state archives and from the bodily archives of their communities of belonging. Thinking on the basis of bodies on the stage reminds us that decolonisation, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2012) say, is not a metaphor, and that in the Indigenous context it has to include the restitution of land. In the Mapuche context, following Lorena Cañuqueo (Reference Cañuqueo2015), it implies the possibility of living and circulating in a territory without restrictions being imposed on thought. In the case of Afro-descendants, going beyond metaphor is about the possibility of control over the body, the right to mobility and the right to remain in a country, neighbourhood, home. That is to say, perhaps we can think in terms of control of territory and then of bodies, in Mapuche theatre, and in terms of control of the body and then of a diasporic territory, in the theatre of TES.

In a recent lecture, Angela Davis addressed the question of why anti-racist and anti-colonial art should be made in these contexts of emergency (Davis and Dent Reference Davis and Dent2020). Her answer was that art is urgently needed in the face of emergency because artistic practice allows us to process what is being experienced, beyond the analytical rationality of science. Art, Davis asserted, is a space in which to imagine other lives and other futures. TES and El Katango perhaps go a step further. Not only do they imagine, but they also initiate a process of (re)construction, using the poetics of theatre to challenge the historical erasures instituted in Argentine national narratives. Both theatre projects, mainly made up of women, reflect on their experience within the interstices of the movements of which we are part. The stage opens up a space where the bodies of Afro and Mapuche women are linked to their respective past trajectories, breaking into racist structures and connecting the stage with multiple other territories. The stage is thus a place of regeneration and resurgence of Afro and Mapuche lives in their multiplicity.

Source: an online event, ‘Conversatorio: Casa adentro; prácticas artísticas antirracistas’ (21 May 2021) with members of the Afro-Colombian artistic collectives Sankofa Danzafro and Colectivo Aguaturbia (both of which collaborated with CARLA), and guests Peter Wade and Mara Viveros (both members of the CARLA project team); moderated by Carlos Correa Angulo (CARLA Research Associate for Colombia) with the technical assistance of Rossana Alarcón (CARLA Research Assistant for Colombia) and Paula Uribe. A recording of the event can be accessed on CARLA’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNtgI6SwbTo.

This discussion explored the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. We were interested in seeing how artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.

According to Rafael, anti-racist dance has a healing effect when it subverts stereotypes that ridicule Black dancing bodies and turn them into a caricature of sexual frenzy. Dance itself is wellness; this is why it is healing.

Anti-racist art also has the potential to be deeply affective, in the sense that it starts from a deeply emotional place, which is sometimes made explicit and becomes transmuted into a space of liberation:

Thus, an anti-racist art is the possibility of healing the histories, lineages and silenced actors that come from the legacy of enslavement. Anti-racist art effects this healing when it makes visible legacies, people, artistic projects and the intellectual thought of Black people in diverse spaces, such as, for example, in central Andean territorial spaces that have excluded, silenced and erased the Afro from their configuration.

This chapter will reflect on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice. Reviewing the work of the diverse artists we have collaborated with in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), we can see that there are many ways artists can embody anti-racist and decolonial elements in artistic practice. For example, they can work towards decolonising spaces, especially institutional spaces, in the art world.Footnote ¹ They can use their art to communicate or channel another entire way of being, living and feeling in the world, challenging an entire system of interlocking oppressions and inequalities – racism, capitalism, sexism, heterosexism, anthropocentrism and so on.Footnote ²

In the chapter, I focus on two types of affective intervention that I believe help us to think about various ways of doing anti-racism through art. I label the two types as (1) challenging stereotypes and (2) working with communities. I explore how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create affective traction. I think these modes of practice have specific characteristics that make a comparison of them interesting and useful. The aim of the exercise is to be productive and helpful in the struggle against racism by providing some tools that scholars, artists and organisations may find useful to think strategically about anti-racism as a practice and reflect on the opportunities and risks that attach to different interventions.

Ambivalent Effects/Affects in Art Practices

The key argument of the chapter is that artistic practices that intervene in the world and mobilise affect towards decolonial and anti-racist ends have ambivalent effects. Challenging stereotypes is a vital and necessary activity; it is also necessary to bear in mind that it brings with it the possibility of reproducing and even reinforcing those same stereotypes. Working with communities to produce artistic works can also risk reinforcing stereotypes and it usually requires funding, which brings risks of co-optation by funding bodies. If the communities are racially diverse, working with them may also dilute a concentrated focus on racism. I argue that, while challenging stereotypes is an important and necessary mode of action, community-based work provides certain useful affordances and possibilities that are less available to modes of practice that focus on challenging stereotypes. The latter modes tend to be more insidiously ‘haunted’ by the racist meanings and unconscious affective intensities attached to the stereotypes they set out to contest. Working with communities involves multi-stranded social relations that operate across racialised differences and mitigate binary objectifications and stereotyping. In short, artistic practices and interventions can have ambivalent and even contradictory effects, in large part depending on how they are interpreted by audiences and fitted into existing understandings of the world.

The reasons for the ambivalence of artistic interventions are linked, first, to the nature of artistic practice and, second, to the way art is inserted into racial capitalism and structures of coloniality. Regarding the first point, I agree with Alfred Gell (Reference Gell1998) that art objects have agency and create effects in the world through their relational engagement with other objects and people. Gell denies that art objects encode symbolic propositions about the world, but my view is that symbolic propositions can also have relational agency in the world; there is no mutually exclusive opposition between doing and saying. Art objects are also examples of what Sara Ahmed calls objects of emotion, which include material objects, images, and oral and written statements. These objects circulate in the world and, over time, accumulate affective value, becoming ‘sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 11). This happens in ways that tend to erase the history of accumulation so that emotions appear to reside naturally in the objects or in people, obscuring the fact that ‘what we feel might be dependent on past interpretations that are not necessarily made by us, but that come before us’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 171). These two theoretical footholds provide a way to explore how artistic practices have effects in the world and they both suggest that, because art objects are relational and circulate in affective economies, they can produce multiple effects. The reason why this multiplicity might be structured as a contradictory kind of ambivalence is linked to the second point: the way art is inserted into racial capitalism and structures of coloniality.

According to Terry Eagleton (Reference Eagleton1990), with the Enlightenment there emerged an understanding of ‘the aesthetic’ as a ‘discourse of the body’ (materiality, the senses, instincts, imagination), but also as a mediator between the body and the mind (reason, rationality) in the process of forming human subjectivities (Reference Eagleton1990: 13). The aesthetic thus involves both the senses and reason and it is the way in which rationality (the law, reasoned understandings) is incorporated into the affective life of the body, regulating it in accordance with the dictates of rationality and law, while also allowing bodily sensibilities a degree of autonomy. But the introjection of rationality into the operations of the body/senses has historically – under colonialism and racial capitalism – also been the introjection of classism, racism and sexism (often legitimated by science) into socialised bodies, as a way of controlling and regulating them in hegemonic fashion. However, insofar as the aesthetic is rooted in the body, as well as mediating between body and mind, or affect and reason, it can also be a means of questioning reason and its regimes of governance, from the space of relative autonomy that the body has, even in its constitution through social processes. The aesthetic thus has an inherent and ambivalent duality, located between reproducing the status quo and challenging it in various ways, which range from simple unruliness to movements for progressive social transformation and which all derive from the lived experience of inequality and oppression.

As noted in the book’s Introduction, this duality has been noted by others. Doris Sommer recognises that ‘culture’ can be repressive and constraining, but thinks that ‘cultural agency’ – defined as creative activities that contribute to society, such as pedagogy, research, activism and the arts – can inject a ‘dangerous supplement to systems that prefer to be left alone’ (Sommer Reference Sommer and Sommer2006a: 13). Focusing more directly on art, Diana Boros distinguishes between ‘plastic’, conformist, profit-oriented, mainstream art, which, while it may contribute to a sense of community, is repetitive and overproduced, and ‘visionary’, transcendent and rebellious art, which opens important political possibilities by encouraging within people ‘the expansion of their imaginative capabilities, their true independence (knowledge of self) and their sense of empathy’ (Boros Reference Boros2012: 15). The categories Boros uses map roughly onto what Susan Buck-Morss (Reference Buck-Morss1992) calls ‘anaesthetics’, which describes the mind-numbing control of people’s lived connection to the world produced by modern media from the nineteenth century onwards, and ‘aesthetics’, which, in the meaning it originally had before being hijacked by these media, described people’s lived engagement with the world (i.e. Eagleton’s discourse of the body). For Jacques Rancière, art is inherently political because it creates an image of society, what it and its people look like and what it is permissible to show about them. As such, the political context can allow for art to be used for regressive and progressive ends: ‘The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2013: 19). Likewise, with specific reference to the use of images in anti-racist work, Mónica Moreno Figueroa (Reference Moreno Figueroa2024: 2326) argues that ‘anti-racist projects may include the possibility of re-inscribing racist discourse and practice’, due to the contradictory ability of images to explain and illustrate, but also ensnare.

This is important for my purposes because the affective affordances of the various modalities of artistic anti-racism that I describe in this chapter are never unidirectional, univalent or unambiguous. On the other hand, neither are they necessarily classifiable as either one thing or another. In fact, a given artistic practice or work can have contradictory effects at the same time, depending on its relational location in a network of articulations and connections. While prima facie it may seem as if anti-racist art should by definition be progressive, according to the intentions of its creators, this is rarely a straightforward matter, if only because things can be read against the grain of these intentions. And these readings are not necessarily conscious or perverse ‘misreadings’: as mentioned earlier, ‘what we feel might be dependent on past interpretations that are not necessarily made by us, but that come before us’ (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 171). Affective responses tend to ‘travel along already defined lines of cultural investment’ (Pedwell and Whitehead Reference Pedwell and Whitehead2012: 123) and some subjects – such as women and Black people – have become so ‘over-associated with affect’ that they become the objectified targets of other people’s affective responses (Hemmings Reference Hemmings2005: 561).

In what follows, I explore two modes of artistic intervention: challenging stereotypes and working with communities. For each modality I look at key examples, exploring the affective dimensions that are generated with this type of artistic intervention and the affects that circulate between bodies and minds; these can be channelled to strengthen anti-racism, but that might also create potentially problematic effects, which are not necessarily avoidable but need to be seen as coming with the territory.

Challenging Stereotypes

The stereotype is a simplified image of a category and its component members. While social psychology and studies of human cognition recognise that simplification is a normal part of human categorisation processes, the stereotype has come to mean a preconceived, over-generalised and over-simplified image of a person, situation or thing, which attributes to every instance of a given category the same simple and essential characteristics and thus acts to distort a more complex reality. A stereotype can be a source of bias or prejudice in that it can affect how people behave towards others, whom they expect to align with the stereotypes they hold about them; and how people comport themselves in relation to stereotypes they assume exist about them (a phenomenon known as stereotype threat).

Stereotypes are key components of entire worldviews, deeply embedded in our cognitive systems. When stereotypes are racialised, they act as fundamental and interconnected nodes that bring together elements of a whole regime of representation that supports racialised hierarchies and legitimates discrimination, inequality, violence and, ultimately, death. These images reproduce schemas for thinking about racialised categories of people by orienting perceptions and behaviours in ways that tend to align with them. Importantly, the schemas are robust but not completely rigid: stereotypes can survive multiple ‘exceptions’, because individual instances are not simply either in or out of a given category, they are more or less close to the prototypical exemplar of it (Hinton Reference Hinton2000).

Challenging racialised stereotypes that reproduce the unequal position of subaltern groups and legitimate violence against them is thus a vital strategy in anti-racism, which has effects at many levels, symbolic and material, and in terms of impacting on issues of recognition and redistribution, and of stigmatisation and discrimination. Such challenges not only help to counter the false conceptions and unwarranted, prejudicial assumptions that generate indignation, pain, anger and death among those they stereotype, they also work to affirm the legitimate presence and value of racialised subaltern groups in the society; they combat invisibility and silencing, and thus also strengthen a sense of identity and human worth, generating feelings of confidence and legitimacy.

It is useful to locate challenging stereotypes in terms of what Paula Serafini (Reference Serafini2022: 25–28) says are the five functions of art in the context of decolonial social movements and community organising against extractivism. She identifies denunciation (making visible but also establishing the legitimacy and relevance of what is made visible), documentation (literally, but also in terms of constructing narratives different from those of developmentalism), democratisation (sharing information and building community around these narratives), deconstruction (of dominant naturalised concepts, such as culture/nature, mind/body, feeling/reason), and design (creating new objects and new ways of being). Challenging stereotypes crosses several of these functions: in one sense, it is a form of denunciation, a protest at being misrepresented and stigmatised in ways that legitimate the violence that is often visited upon subaltern racialised people. An example could be contesting stereotypes of Indigenous people – or indios, to use the colonial term – as located in the past and in nature and thus as either irrelevant to extractivist projects or destined to be overcome – often with genocidal violence – by the projects’ modernist conquest of nature. Simple denunciation is necessary but limited. As Macarena Gómez-Barris (Reference Gómez-Barris2017: 3) says, ‘if we only track the purview of power’s destruction and death force, we are forever analytically imprisoned to reproducing a totalising viewpoint that ignores life that is unbridled and [that] finds forms of resisting and living alternatively’ – forms that would fall into Serafini’s ‘design’ category.

Challenging stereotypes is, however, also a form of deconstruction, in that it contests a dominant, taken-for-granted representation. And the challenge goes deeper still, towards design, because contesting an image of this kind generally involves creating a different narrative about what it means to be Indigenous in Latin America today. Disseminating the challenge also involves sharing that narrative and, potentially, mobilising people around it, while the challenge implicitly deconstructs nature/culture binaries and creates new objects (e.g. the ‘modern indio’) that point to new ways of being.

Nevertheless, as I have indicated, artistic anti-racism is never unidirectional, univalent or unambiguous. Contesting racist stereotypes in art practice appears to be a progressive and decolonial intervention, but it is haunted by the very racialised hierarchies and colonialities it sets out to challenge (cf. Stoler Reference Stoler2006). Lingering traces remain of the very racist stereotypes being challenged that have accumulated an affective baggage of meanings and past interpretations, which have ‘stuck’ to them (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2015: 11) and traces of which (re-)activate as the artwork circulates and gains agency in different articulations and arrangements of relational networks of people, objects and ideas. Ann Stoler uses the concept of recursion to get at the way regimes of governance and discourse – in her case, colonial/imperial ones – are not erased by regimes that appear to displace them: elements of the old are reworked and redeployed in new ways to achieve some of the same effects through ‘processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations’ (Stoler Reference Stoler2016: 27). Christen Smith, trying to grasp the contradictions of ‘Afro-paradise’ in Bahia, Brazil, where Black bodies are celebrated as part of Brazilian culture while also being subjected to genocidal violence, points at the same phenomenon when she suggests it is necessary to read Bahia as a palimpsest, in which, according to Achille Mbembe, time ‘is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones’ (cited in Smith Reference Smith2016a: 63). Amade M’charek refers to the same phenomenon when she says that an effect of what she calls ‘folding time’ is that ‘history can be recalled in objects. History is never left behind’ (M’charek Reference M’charek2014: 31).

These palimpsestual, recuperated, enfolded traces can linger and remain active in different ways. One is that challenging stereotypes often involves giving some visual space and airtime to the stereotype itself, usually with some parodic or satirical intent, perhaps using grotesque exaggeration – as in the controversial work of US Black artist Kara Walker or the early work of Afro-Colombian artist Liliana Angulo Cortés, which focus on the Black body (I will return to this in what follows). Another way of lingering or haunting is when there is a simple inversion of existing meanings, resignifying a trait that is negatively valued in racist hierarchies by giving it a positive value. For example, Mara Viveros Vigoya (Reference Viveros Vigoya2002) found that some Black men in Colombia had appropriated racist stereotypes of them as over-sexed and recast them in a positive way to suggest they were sexually attractive. Similarly, Moreno Figueroa (Reference Moreno Figueroa2024) argues that some Black women in Mexico’s Costa Chica region supported what could easily be seen as photographic sexualised objectifications of them, because the images made them feel good and represented. Joane Nagel (Reference Nagel2003: 121–124) argues that the Black Power movement in the US resignified racist images of Black men as violent to convey meanings of a virile masculinity ready to defend family and community. Astrid Ulloa (Reference Ulloa2005) shows that some Indigenous movements coincide with state discourses in promoting images of Indigenous people as close to nature and thus as ecologically-minded guardians of the environment; but being ‘close to nature’ is also readable as being ‘uncivilised’. These resignifications are important but they also provide affordances that allow existing elements of the original stereotype to operate in a racist way in the context of networks of dominant representations.

Haunting and lingering traces can remain even when stereotypes are challenged by constructing new images – for example, the technologically savvy Indigenous person, the urban Indigenous person, the Black professional, the Black woman with a ‘natural’ Afro hairstyle – which defy the existing regime of racial representation and its hierarchy of values by creating new contradictory elements. But we should not underestimate the power of partial reinscriptions and recuperations, in which past patterns of interpretation made by others are not displaced but recursively reactivated.Footnote ³ The affordances provided by artworks are inherently relational – they emerge in relation to agents who use them in the world in various ways (Keane Reference Keane2018). As such, the effects that artists’ works produce in the world can be multiple and uncontrollable. To be sure, it may be obvious to artists that they cannot control how other people view their work. It may be less obvious how deeply rooted the effects of haunting and recursion are and especially how contradictory effects can coexist, perhaps even within the same person.

It is also worth noting that, in art practice, the challenging of stereotypes is quite often done within the institutional structures of the mainstream art world and its audiences and markets, even if the challenge is disruptive or not condoned by the institution. This, of course, is in large part the whole point of the challenge: the dominant institutions and norms have to be tackled head on. Insofar as these dominant institutions and structures are fertile locations for recursions of coloniality, the risks of haunting are ever present.

Let us explore an example in which this modality of anti-racism is clearly in play. Several paintings by Brazilian Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa challenge the stereotypical and constraining image of the Indigenous person as tied to the past, to rurality and to primitiveness (Sá and Milanez Pereira Reference Sá, Milanez Pereira, Brandellero, Pardue and Wink2020).Footnote ⁴ A series of his prize-winning works from 2018 show prototypical índios, identifiable as such by their body paint, dress and bead adornments, using video cameras, mobile phones, computers and sound systems (see Figure 7.1).Footnote ⁵

Figure 7.1

Cunhatain, antropofagia musical (Cunhatain, Musical Anthropophagy) by Denilson Baniwa, Reference Baniwa2018

(© Denilson Baniwa, by permission).

These paintings engage with dominant images of Indigenous people in Brazil as constantly on the edge of extinction and death, relegated to oblivion by forces of coloniality that combine elements of settler and extractivist colonialism (Pacheco de Oliveira Reference Pacheco de Oliveira2016: ch. 2). Western visions of progress and modernity are founded on a notion of the past as something to be transcended, but also as a reservoir of nostalgia, a past that Indigenous peoples are held to embody. Denilson’s paintings could be seen as tapping into an Indigenous futurism that, like the work of some North American Indigenous artists, ‘urges the viewer to imagine Indigenous futures’ (Baudemann Reference Baudemann2016: 118). But Denilson’s work urges the viewer to see these images as part of the present too. The paintings play with time via what Grace Dillon (Reference Dillon and Dillon2012: 3) characterises as ‘Native slipstream’, which ‘views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream’. Denilson works between el indio permitido (the permissible indio) – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s term for the Indigenous figure seen as acceptable by the dominant classes (Hale Reference Hale2004) and which elicits in them affective forces of nostalgia, pity and joy – and what might be called the indio inconforme (rebellious, challenging, otherwise-minded), which often elicits responses of anger, fear and contempt from elites.

These images should be seen in the context of other pieces of Denilson’s work, such as his video Colheita maldita (Accursed Harvest, 2022), which likens agro-industrial landscapes to a horror film in which we are all trapped, and his performances as a pajé-onça (shaman-jaguar), in which he walks through modernist landscapes (city avenues, art galleries), producing spatial and temporal dislocations and an embodied critique of modernity.Footnote ⁶ Denilson brings together challenges to racist stereotypes and a whole political ecology and ontology to suggest ways of being Indigenous that are urgently relevant to the present and the future.

All these images and performances foreground in one way or another the figure of the índio. Of course, this figure is haunted by racist meanings and emotions and my argument is that these can be reactivated as the images circulate. We should recall that mainstream Western society is familiar with images that mix ‘the primitive’ (often in the figure of the Indigenous person) and ‘the modern’ (often represented by technology). Michael Taussig (Reference Taussig1993) argues that modern Western civilisation has long used the indio and his/her supposed fascination with technologies – such as phonographs – to attest to the wizardry of Western technologies that Westerners value so highly but also come to see as routine and second nature. With his/her apparent fascination, the indio, seen as close to nature, can vouch for the natural and life-like imitations produced by technologies such as record-players, tape recorders and cameras, which originally astonished Westerners before they became routinised.Footnote ⁷ Taussig contends that Westerners often laugh with pleasure and fascination at what they perceive as Indigenous people’s fascination with Western technology (Taussig Reference Taussig1993: 231).

Denilson’s paintings flirt with this primitivist tradition in complex ways. The paintings depict Indigenous people as prototypical índios – mostly wearing traditional clothing and body paint – but there is little amazement in the way the people in the paintings handle the technological devices; on the contrary they appears as a routine items. For the non-Indigenous viewer – who is arguably the intended audience addressed by the gaze of the subject in the painting – this creates a contradictory effect. There is something familiar and yet unfamiliar about the image; something easily assimilable to a primitivist perspective, yet also profoundly unsettling of it. There is a matter-of-factness about the way technology features in these paintings that, for the non-Indigenous viewer, is at odds with the very traditional depiction of the Indigenous subjects and their surroundings. Both the stereotype of the forest-dwelling Indigenous person and images of the Indigenous person ‘fascinated’ by the wonders of modern technology fit neatly into the dominant racial formation and thus generate a sense of frustration and anger for some Indigenous people.

Appropriating cameras for political ends, as documented by Terry Turner (Reference Turner1992) for the Kayapó (see Chapter 5), can channel these sentiments into a fight for justice, but making the technology everyday – as the Kayapó also do when they use cameras in their village-based ritual ceremonies, as opposed to their encounters with the state – creates a different affective response; it generates a sense of radical equality by showing that the same technology is ‘at home’ in quite different surroundings. Denilson’s paintings create a sense of both radical (Indigenous) alterity and radical (technological) sameness. The Indigenous person lives a life that is quite different in some respects from the lives of non-Indigenous people, yet in other respects their relationship to technological modernity is the same – both categories of people are fully at home with technologies, which are experienced as routine.

Despite these complexities, however, I argue that these paintings remain haunted by the affordances they provide for traces of primitivist racism. This is due to the double effect of a key component of the images, on which they depend for their effect, which is the classic depiction of the índio as semi-naked and wearing body-paint and beads. These elements remain key indicators of Indigenous status in Brazil.Footnote ⁸ For Indigenous people, they are part of everyday life, spiritual relationships and aesthetics, but they are also important in the way they present themselves to the state, during protests and negotiations, and in the public political sphere in general (e.g. in street marches). As in Denilson’s paintings, these indicators make the claim that it is possible to be ‘Indigenous’ in this way and also be an active part of today’s mainstream society. But the effect can also be to reinforce a primitivist view of Indigenous people; the images allow the possibility of a colonial romantic reading of traditional índios fascinated by a modernity that is beyond their ken. This reading is not entailed by the image: the point is that images circulate in multiple assemblages of people, objects and meanings. People will read the image in ways mediated by diverse connections with other agents and discourses. But the possibility of the colonial recursion exists. It is a catch-22 situation caused by the agency of the artwork in a relational network.

A further example of this complex ambivalence is in the work of the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro. The company is directed by Black Colombian Rafael Palacios and includes dancers who are all Black in Colombian terms (negro or afro) and self-identify as such.Footnote ⁹ The terrain of dance is a complex and contradictory one for challenging racism directed at Black people, because dance (and music) are so deeply embedded in the hierarchies of the racial formations involving Blackness. From colonial times, music and dance have been a field in which dynamics of control, subjugation, assimilation, co-optation, appropriation and resistance have played out (Birenbaum Quintero Reference Birenbaum Quintero2019; Feldman Reference Feldman2006; Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993; Radano and Bohlman Reference Radano and Bohlman2000; Wade Reference Wade2000).Footnote ¹⁰ This means that dance or music identified as ‘Black’ or ‘Afro’ – whether identified as such by performer or audience – can always signify varied things and mobilise contradictory affective forces, such as indignant disgust and (sexualised) pleasure (e.g. by white audiences both decrying and enjoying music they associate with Blackness), admiration and envy (e.g. by white musicians and dancers competing with the supposedly ‘natural’ talents they often ascribe to Black performers), and despair and pride (e.g. by Black performers facing racism and mobilising against it).

In terms of racism and anti-racism, Black dance and music – and the Black bodies with which they are closely connected – are highly ambivalent spaces, with the potential to both foster and subvert racism in complex ways. As artist Liliana Angulo says in reference to her art installation Négritude (2007), which featured a soundtrack of Latin American songs that referred to the figure of el negro (the Black man), ‘the songs of Afro-Caribbean genres chosen [for the installation] express many of the ideas and imaginaries promoted by the thinkers of the Négritude movement [that began in the 1930s] and they also display many of the stereotypes of racism. It is not something Black and white, because no one in our countries is Black or white.’ The fact that these musical styles are ‘directed at the body, at enjoyment, at celebration and sensuality’ could make them subject to ‘being co-opted as stereotype’; on the other hand, this does not detract from their power to be fundamental cultural practices that can also be ‘revolutionary, liberatory, challenging, insolent, etc.’ (cited in Giraldo Escobar Reference Giraldo Escobar2014: 151, my translation).

Similar ambivalences have been evident in other representations focusing on Black bodies. Kobena Mercer, for example, contends that the images of white photographer Robert Mapplethorpe from the 1980s, which sexualise Black male bodies, reiterate ‘the terms of colonial fantasy’ and thus ‘service the expectations of white desire’. But while ‘colonial fantasy attempts to “fix” the position of the black subject into a space that mirrors the object of white desires’, Black readers ‘may appropriate pleasures by reading against the grain, overturning signs of otherness into signifiers of identity’ (Mercer Reference Mercer1994: 134–136). Nearly forty years later, the same ambivalence inhabits the queer Black art of the late Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode. A commentator writes: ‘Despite being black and insisting his art does not pander to the same stereotypes as Mapplethorpe’s, his work is unable to circumvent these stereotypes entirely.’ The writer recognises that this is because the power of interpretation lies with the viewer, but still hopefully concludes that, despite this, Fani-Kayode’s photographs ‘retain subversive potential because both he and the men in his photographs possess subjectivity’ (Muldoon Reference Muldoon2020). I think the point is that the subversive potential and the inability to circumvent stereotyped readings are both available routes that can be traced in overlapping but different networks.

The controversies surrounding the work of US Black artist Kara Walker traverse the same terrain. While many commentators contend that her work ultimately undermines the stereotyped images of Black people she consistently deploys in scenarios commonly featuring racial and sexual violence (Neary Reference Neary2015; Seidl Reference Seidl2009; Shaw Reference Shaw2004), others say she does not offer a clear resolution (Schollaert Reference Schollaert2014) and fellow African American artist, Betye Saar, who has also worked with stereotyped images of Black women, protested publicly that Walker’s art ‘was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment’ (PBS 2000). Walker herself says ‘One theme in my artwork is the idea that a Black subject in the present tense is a container for specific pathologies from the past and is continually growing and feeding off those maladies’ (cited in Neary Reference Neary2015: 160). This resonates with the recursiveness of the past that I wish to highlight. In this respect, Janet Neary comments that, once Walker produces an artwork, ‘she does not have control over her production’: her work ‘identifies, but cannot fully control or inoculate against, the workings of racial terror’ (Neary Reference Neary2015: 160).

I argue that this kind of ambivalence can be seen in Sankofa Danzafro’s fifty-minute production La ciudad de los otros (The City of the Others, 2010). The dance starts with music that has a rolling drum-heavy beat, with rhythmic horn riffs and vocals that combine rapping and chanting; the choreography suggests a dance party, including a male-female pair close-dancing with synchronised hip action, and featuring a street-style dance-off between competing crews, overlain by a chanting rap vocal; a solo clarinet comes in with melodies suggestive of musical styles (bullerengue, cumbia, chirimía) from Colombia’s historically Black coastal regions (see Figure 7.2). For audiences in Colombia and elsewhere in the Americas, this all evokes a sense of ludic Blackness. The next scene shows people strap-hanging in a bus or train, while a solo voice sings over a drum, known in Black regions of Colombia as a tambor alegre or conuno, which plays a fairly complex rhythm. This segues into several minutes of an energetic solo male dancer interacting with the drummer, ignored by the other ‘passengers’ who are now seated on chairs. A change is marked when another drum, the llamador in Colombian Caribbean regional terminology, starts playing a single beat under the tambor alegre, joined by a guasá or shaker, which together provide the rhythm for a male-female couple dance that is clearly a traditional dance from the region (in this case a bullerengue, although the non-specialist might identify it as the better-known cumbia), a cultural reference reinforced by the appearance, towards the end of this segment, of the unmistakable flauta de millo (cane flute) of the Caribbean coastal region.

Figure 7.2

An early scene from Sankofa Danzafro’s La ciudad de los otros, Battery Dance Festival, New York, 2015

(photo by Steven Pisano, © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

At this stage, the instruments and much of the music are clearly rooted in the musical traditions of the coastal regions, although the opening dance party scene and the solo male dance interlude introduce a more urban and ‘contemporary’ dance element that is still recognisably ‘Black’ for the audience. Meanwhile, the suggestion of an urban transport system and the fact that all the dancers, male and female, wear smart-casual trousers, long-sleeved shirts and ties both contradict the sense of a ‘folkloric’ performance and frame these traditional elements as, perhaps, cultural oases or memories for Black people living in city environments that they experience as belonging to ‘others’. Nevertheless, some basic connections between Black bodies, drum-heavy rhythms and ludic, sensual and energetic dance moves are reiterated throughout.

The performance then moves off into diverse scenes that do not reiterate these familiar connections. One sequence of almost ten minutes has a peaceful feel, with music dominated by the sounds of harp and piano, and bodies moving in synchronised waves, with hands and arms that reach out and stroke. Subsequent scenes evoke urban life and are accompanied by frenetic, rhythmic, metallic electronic music, which at times develops into alarming stress-inducing noises overlying bodies that twist and convulse, struggle and drown, collapse and revive. The overwhelming impression is of people confronting hostile urban/industrial environments, being shut in, going mad, being distraught, arguing, being assaulted, and being observed and checked up on. This aligns with Sankofa Danzafro’s own description of the performance, which says that it ‘reveals the lack of opportunities for human beings who for generations have been marked by ethnic discrimination and social inequity’. There are also impressions of resisting and defying, expressing oneself individually and freely, interacting collaboratively and in a friendly way with others. There are moments when each dancer has a solo dance break in an enclosed space defined by three 2.5 × 1 metre boards, suggesting confinement, each of which ends with a defiant gesture that says something like, ‘This is who I am.’ There are other moments when people dance in groups of three or four or all in unison, working together, lifting and supporting each other (see Figure 7.3). This reflects the official description’s statement that ‘Black and other marginalised communities, always observed through the same lens, demand political power that results in authentic forms of coexistence.’Footnote ¹¹

Figure 7.3

A later scene from Sankofa Danzafro’s La ciudad de los otros, Battery Dance Festival, 2015

(photo by Steven Pisano, © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

The overall effect with regard to stereotypes of Blackness is ambivalent. The use of music and dance as a medium to express a positive message about Blackness will inevitably be obliged to navigate existing negative and restrictive stereotypes about Blackness. As noted, some fundamental and familiar affective connections between Black bodily dexterity and elasticity in dance, drum-heavy rhythmicity, and playfulness and sensuality are reproduced in the performance. This resonates with some powerful stereotypes about Black people that are deeply rooted in the hierarchies of coloniality, and which trivialise, sexualise and animalise them. In addition, some stereotypical associations specific to Colombia are also reiterated, linking Blackness to the coastal regions and to traditional ‘folkloric’ musical styles such as bullerengue or cumbia.

On the other hand, a great deal of the performance, while it necessarily connects Black bodies to dance and music, addresses themes that break with familiar stereotypes, at least in the Colombian context. Harp and piano music, for example, are not associated with Blackness in Colombia. A more important break is the portrayal of urban Blackness, as, in Colombia, Blackness is typically associated with peripheral rural regions, despite a long history of Black settlement in cities. (This would be less relevant for US or European contexts, where Blackness is stereotypically more urban.) In addition, showcasing in visible and audible terms the trauma and alienation affecting Black people – in short, highlighting racism – challenges traditional images of Colombia as a racially tolerant social formation in which racialised difference is not considered important. The performance makes a case for Black solidarity and cultural specificity – rooted, for example, in traditional music and dance – as a resource for dealing with exclusion, rather than just a resource for the cultural diversity of the nation, defined in the dominant imaginary as an inclusive polity.

Ultimately, foregrounding Black bodies as vectors for anti-racism and decoloniality is inherently an ambivalent strategy (Moreno Figueroa Reference Moreno Figueroa2024; Ruette-Orihuela Reference Ruette-Orihuela, Figueroa and Wade2022). Brazilian Black feminist Beatriz Nascimento noted that ‘slavery is present in our bodies, our blood and our veins’ (cited in Smith Reference Smith2016b: 81) and the fact that enslavement restricted Black people to their sheer physicality is one reason why she privileged the body ‘as a political site’ and insisted that ‘the quest for Black autonomous space is located first in the corporeality of the body’, that ‘the body is the territorialization of memory’ and that the quilombo – as physical and symbolic space – ‘is the transmigration of the Black body from the senzala (slave quarters) to autonomy’ (Smith Reference Smith2016b: 80, 82).Footnote ¹² Yet this journey is haunted by traces of coloniality and its racist stereotypes of the Black body, reduced to a negro permitido – or more frequently a negra permitida (permissible Black woman) (Rahier Reference Rahier2014: 146) – that is, a body for sensual consumption by others.

It is interesting that Liliana Angulo, reflecting back on her work from the early 2000s, which played with stereotyped images of Black people using hyperbole, caricature, parody and satire (see Giraldo Escobar Reference Giraldo Escobar2014), commented that, for her in 2018, ‘stereotypes are no longer a preoccupation’ (Valoyes Villa Reference Valoyes Villa2018).Footnote ¹³ In an online conversation in 2020, she observed:

Since then, Liliana Angulo has moved in other directions, including working with local communities.Footnote ¹⁵ In the next section, I argue that this kind of work may offer different affordances that sidestep some of the ambivalences and hauntings that working with stereotypes involves – although working with communities presents its own challenges.

Working with Communities

This modality of anti-racist artistic practice involves working with people who occupy the lower rungs of racialised hierarchies. This work seeks to affirm presence, combat invisibility and silencing, strengthen identity, and support local struggles for justice and equality. This mode of practice may also aim to build capacity in the communities, both by giving people specific skills and by increasing general self-esteem and confidence.

Regarding the affective dimension of this modality, we can see that racism produces feelings of isolation and alienation among those who experience its negative impacts. If one effect of racism is to produce the internalisation of racialised value hierarchies, this effect is exacerbated to the extent that a person feels they are on their own in dealing with the demeaning judgements they have internalised. Recognising and feeling the collective nature of the experience helps people to grasp the structural character of the oppression they face (Pyke Reference Pyke2010); working with and interacting with neighbours around issues of racialised difference and identity, especially in a creative setting, can generate feelings of solidarity and connection and of aspiration and hope, all of which can be channelled into anti-racist struggles.

These struggles are frequently intersectional, insofar as people do not ‘live single-issue lives’ (Lorde Reference Lorde1984: 138) and thus, in practice, they find it meaningful to challenge issues around racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism – among other -isms – in ways that acknowledge their connectedness. In particular, racism and classism in Latin America are very closely interwoven, given that in most areas of the region, the spectrums of racialised and class difference tend to coincide strongly (Telles and Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America Reference Telles2014), which is different from the United States and Europe, where the lower strata are majority white. The congruence of racial and class hierarchies in Latin America is important for the effects and affects produced by anti-racist art practices in the community.

An example of this modality is the work that Sankofa Danzafro – the same group discussed in the previous section – did over a four-month period in 2020 with young people, mostly but not uniformly Black, in the working-class communities of Medellín. Within the framework of the Red de Danza de Medellín (Medellín Dance Network), organised by the mayor’s office in association with a local university and several cultural organisations, Sankofa Danzafro organised neighbourhood dance ‘laboratories’ to deliver training, some of it virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with Sankofa, Carlos Correa organised the production of a video showcasing the process, which consisted of Sankofa Danzafro members training groups of young people, who then presented short dance routines.Footnote ¹⁶

The video shows excerpts of the young people’s performances and extracts of interviews with them and the Sankofa dancers. These interviews are short and the context tended to elicit positive statements, but it is clear that the process and, especially, the focus on dance, generated powerful feelings of community. One boy said, ‘I like to dance because of the way I am, to make more friends, create companionship.’ Another said ‘It is important to dance in the neighbourhood, in the community, to rescue young people and rescue others too.’ A dancer-instructor said that the end result of the process was ‘a work that the children had achieved, in which they managed to join together, seeking the companionship and the family that we always try to find in these processes’. The mother of one girl valued the positive forces the work generated as a counter to forces undermining community. She identified these forces as ‘vices’ and the COVID-19 pandemic. First: ‘It is no secret that we live in vulnerable communities … where there’s a lot of – let’s call them vices, other alternatives to choose.’ Second: ‘The hardest thing we had to face was virtuality: if it wasn’t the internet, it was the children who couldn’t be together because maybe they didn’t have a cell phone or a computer.’ In the face of this, she said that, for the children in the project, it was ‘beautiful to be able to participate, be able to dance, be able to live and be able to enjoy themselves day by day and feel they are just children’.

Although the word ‘racism’ did not appear in the video, the trainers saw this community-building as closely linked to Black identity and resilience. One said: ‘We address the theme of identity with the children, which is also a question … that everyone has about how they are seen and how society sees them; and what are the stereotypes that exist in society … about us, and that damage us physically and psychologically.’ Another noted that the young people already had a reservoir of embodied knowledge about dance from their own experiences and that building on this was facilitated because their knowledge had ‘a lot of affinity with Afro-contemporary dance techniques: there are many movements that are similar. So we make a connection there.’

In terms of the dancing itself, a key feature was the location of the routines in ordinary cityscapes, such as pavements, the open concrete plaza surrounding a local cultural and sports centre, the occasional green space squeezed in among the roads and houses, and small playgrounds. In these spaces, to the ubiquitous sound of drum rhythms, young people performed energetic and dynamic dance routines in public, sometimes as buses, cars and trucks roared past at arm’s length (see Figure 7.4). The drums, the movements and the bodies of the people together constituted a clear assertion of Blackness in the public space of the city – which, it is important to say, is the capital city of a region that is little associated with Blackness and that has a historical reputation for being racist (Wade Reference Wade1993). Together the dancers, drummers and instructors used sound and body movements to intervene collectively in the affective history of the city of Medellín, adding a dimension in which Black people occupy everyday public spaces – beyond theatres and art galleries – transforming them temporarily, and challenging the long-standing racist views that cast Blackness as uncivilised and thus marginal in a city widely perceived as a beacon of modernity and whiteness.

Figure 7.4

Scene from Muestra final: Laboratorios de creación en casa, video, 2020

(from video by Lethal Peligrosos Producciones, © Sankofa Danzafro, by permission).

Spatial arrangements are an expression of, and a means to enact, power relations, involving both control and resistance (Gregory and Urry Reference Gregory and Urry1985; Massey Reference Massey2005). Where racial difference is imbricated with power relations, spatial structures will necessarily be racialised and racial hierarchies will necessarily be spatialised (Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz2007; McKittrick and Woods Reference McKittrick and Adrian Woods2007; Neely and Samura Reference Neely and Samura2011; Wade Reference Wade2020). Space can be seen as ‘an active archive of the social processes and social relationships composing racial orders’, active in the sense that spatial structures are not just a static representation of the racial order, but, via the located activities of people, actively participate in the construction of that order as a material-semiotic assemblage (Knowles Reference Knowles2003: 83). As an archive, racialised spaces can be sites for control and for resistance and autonomy; as with the discursive realm of stereotypes, processes of recursion mean that spaces can be haunted by traces of coloniality that remain active (McKittrick Reference McKittrick2011). But working with communities creates a distributed form of agency that is different from the stereotype-challenging art object, which, although it creates effects and affects in a relational way as it circulates, is more likely to become an object with a life of its own, which can provide affordances for racist readings that are locked into a recursive binary of representations – racist versus anti-racist.

What we see in this video is a vivacious performance of affective intensities that goes beyond the simple representation of identity framed by a binary of hegemony and resistance. It would be possible to see the urban spaces and their temporality as being hegemonic structures that are defied by Black bodies dancing in resistance. But this binary framing does not grasp the everyday, habitual inhabiting of these spaces and temporalities by the dancers, along with their families, friends and neighbours, of which the dance performances themselves are just a snippet. Importantly, we also see beyond the performances to glimpse some of the community networks in which they are embedded: we see families, we see dancers talking about how dance fits into their everyday lives and provides them with support, we see the instructors talking about how they make connections with the young dancers.

Together, the dancing and the music, the bodies in motion, synchronised with each other and the drummers, while also being embedded in everyday relationships in the community, create affective intensities in space and time to suggest that urban places can also be scenarios for living as a Black person in the city – alongside non-Black others. This is not a romantic invocation of the organic community: the idea of distributed agency does not depend on the idea of individuals coming together as one. Rather, it is a scenario of events involving bodies and objects that relate to each other in diverse ways and with diverse affective experiences, according to the event in question – whether it is a dance performance or rehearsal, a street football match, a neighbourly visit or conflict, a school class or queuing in a local shop. Doing artistic work in communities may bring people together around a specific event, but this cannot be separated from other events in which they are also involved together and which produce bodily reactions and investments that are not reducible to simple categories and oppositions (Thrift Reference Thrift2004: 71). Community-based work tends to foreground that people do not live single-issue lives: they encounter each other in the multi-stranded complexity of their everyday living.

The importance of this can be seen if we think back to the issue of stereotypes. To some extent, the same problems of haunting and recursion exist for community-based work as for the modality of challenging stereotypes. For example, people who operate with the racist assumptions that Black people are naturally good dancers or that they spend too much time dancing and not enough time working might be reassured in these assumptions on catching sight of a Sankofa Danzafro dance lab performance on the street. This potential problem exists, but I think that, in specific contexts, community-based interventions are well placed to sidestep them. To start with, these interventions, while they may be funded by institutions (e.g. local government, NGOs), often work outside the institutional spaces of the art world (theatres, museums, galleries, etc.) where the hauntings and recursions of coloniality may be powerfully felt. The way such interventions diffuse through the community, becoming imbricated with everyday life and distributing agency across a wide network, means that stereotypes are rarely stand-alone objectifications: if a young Black person is a dancer, then they are also a neighbour, a friend, a school colleague, a sports team-mate and so on. In a barrio in Medellín (and in other Latin American cities), such links are also likely to cross clearly racialised differences, mitigating the reification of racialised identities and attendant issues of exclusiveness and divisiveness, which otherwise hamper collaborations and solidarities that intersect boundaries of difference. The community focus brings out that people have multi-faceted lives, rather than just being the embodiment of a certain stereotyped image.

Just as the challenging of stereotypes does battle with haunting and recursion, so community-focused strategies face other rough patches on the field of anti-racist struggle that come with the territory and have to be negotiated. There are pitfalls of tokenism and co-optation: material support given by the city authorities for this kind of community-building intervention can entail limitations on autonomy, especially if the interventions are explicitly about reaffirming Blackness and thus readable as exceeding the bounds of el negro permitido – for example, by appearing to be not inclusive enough and even ‘racist in reverse’. However, by virtue of the distributed agency that attends community-based endeavours, this kind of art practice, especially in Latin American cities, can engage with people in an inclusive fashion, even if the topic is, for example, Afro-contemporary dance. But this in turn heralds another potential problem, which is that, precisely by virtue of distributing agency across racialised difference, there is the risk that the specific issue of racism might slide into the background and be overwhelmed by generalised images of marginalisation and disadvantage. There is a tricky balance to be achieved in terms of highlighting racism in an inclusive way. It may be that working with Afro dance (or other expressions of Blackness) in the community is a medium well suited to doing exactly that.

Conclusion

The two modes of anti-racist intervention through art that I have analysed are not mutually exclusive. They overlap and interweave in the work of specific artists and in specific interventions. Sankofa Danzafro’s work gives examples of challenging stereotypes and of working with communities. Liliana Angulo Cortés started working with stereotypes and has moved towards working collaboratively with communities and other artists in projects that highlight the work of Afro-Colombian artists who have been marginalised by the art institutions of Colombia. Like many other Indigenous artists in Brazil, Denilson’s work – of which the paintings I analysed are a small sample – is intimately connected to Indigenous communities. Within a single artistic intervention the same overlap occurs: the Sankofa Danzafro dance labs, which were an example of working in the community, also indirectly challenged stereotypes.

My argument has been that each mode puts into circulation affective forces in ways that have their own particular strengths and problems. I think that challenging stereotypes is a vital part of the decolonial and anti-racist struggle. I also think that this specific mode of intervention is perpetually haunted by the colonial and racist meanings of the very images it sets out to challenge. This is in part because of the recursive power of the structures and discourses of coloniality, which do not disappear but adapt and transform. And it is in part because of the way art objects circulate in relational networks, where the meanings that have accumulated through histories of coloniality and have stuck to the objects can be reactivated and recuperated in racist ways.

When artistic anti-racist practice foregrounds working with communities, the problem of haunting is less obvious. While the spaces in which the artists and communities work may be shaped by structures of coloniality (e.g. residential and job segregation along race–class lines), the racialised identities that emerge from the work tend to be less subject to objectification, because the agency of the artists and the art objects produced is distributed across a social network in the community that – especially in the context of Latin American cities – is heterogeneous and variegated. The affects that stick to these art objects as they circulate and create effects in the world are therefore likely to exceed the binary of racism versus anti-racism, while the racialised identities that are generated and their representations are also less subject to the hauntings that attend the art objects involved in challenging stereotypes. On the other hand, working with communities raises issues of co-optation by institutional forces and of how to stop the specificity of racism from slipping into the background.

The book closes with some final reflections from three artists or groups of artists who kindly agreed to offer some thoughts on art and anti-racism and on their experiences with the CARLA project. The text from Arissana Pataxó – the Indigenous Brazilian artist who features in Chapter 2, who contributed to CARLA’s online exhibition and who worked with Felipe Milanez as a research assistant in Brazil – was edited and translated from a conversation between her, Lúcia Sá and Jamille Pinheiro Dias. The contribution by Miriam Álvarez, Lorena Cañuqueo and Alejandra Egido – the Mapuche and Afro-Cuban people behind the Argentine theatre companies Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango and Teatro en Sepia, and co-authors of Chapter 6 – was written by them and translated and edited by Peter Wade. The piece from Wilson Borja – the Afro-Colombian graphic artist who features in Chapter 1 and who contributed to the online exhibition – was edited and translated by Peter Wade from audios recorded by Borja.

Some Thoughts on the CARLA Project and Indigenous Art

Arissana Pataxó

I’m always on tenterhooks when it comes to university-related projects because, ever since the expeditions of the nineteenth century, universities have been institutions that go into communities to extract knowledge. In the nineteenth century, naturalists went to find geological riches, medicines and knowledge that they could exploit. In the same way, today the university often seeks out knowledge that already exists in communities in order to transform it into concepts that it presents as new.

When I took part in the first online meetings of the CARLA project, I confess that I didn’t really understand the project’s objectives. I mean, I knew it had to do with racism, anti-racism and Indigenous art, but it wasn’t clear to me what they wanted to do. I also knew that we were going to organise a meeting here in Salvador, and Felipe [Milanez] had invited me to be part of that organisation. With the pandemic, we couldn’t organise the meeting, so we decided to use the resources in another way. And then, in the conversations to decide what to do, we felt the need to organise Indigenous artists to move art forward here in Bahia. There was a lot of participation by Indigenous artists, even those from Bahia, in exhibitions in the southeast of Brazil, but there was no such participation in the northeast, especially here in Bahia. That’s why we decided to re-articulate the project to include more artists from Bahia, and the way that Felipe found to circumvent the university bureaucracy was to add them as researchers, since these artists were not linked to the university. So for four months, we had this presence of research artists at UFBA [Universidade Federal da Bahia] whose aim was to carry out some artistic work and plan an exhibition in Salvador that would bring the discussion of anti-racist art to the city. The idea was also that we could interact and create a collaborative network of conversations and dialogues. And it happened – what we did made it possible for the artists to work together: me, Glicéria Tupinambá, Yacunã Tuxá, Juliana Xukuru, Ziel Karapotó, Olinda Yawar Tupinambá.

It was from this articulation that we managed to organise the exhibition Hãhãw: Anti-Racist Indigenous Art, bringing the project’s own concept of anti-racism to the exhibition at UFBA’s Museum of Sacred Art, in Salvador, in November 2022, with the participation of artists who had links with UFBA as researchers, as well as others who had already taken part in the CARLA project, such as Denilson Baniwa, Naine Terena and Gustavo Caboco.Footnote ¹ At first, we didn’t call it an exhibition, but simply anti-racist Indigenous art, because we wanted to occupy other spaces, not just the museum. For example, we occupied the cinema of UFBA’s Geological Museum, showing films by Denilson, Naine and Ziel, and the public space of the UFBA library, where Glicéria created a mural. We also occupied spaces by means of talks, bringing Juliana Xucuru and Ziel Karapotó to speak at UFBA. We spent six months organising these occupations.

It was only when the exhibition was ready that we were able to see everything that had been produced, despite the short time we had to organise it. Some of us finished some of our artworks the day before, and the dialogue with the museum was very difficult, because they wanted to see the photos of the works before the exhibition, and we had to say ‘Calm down, the photos don’t exist yet’. For me, that’s normal, but they wanted to have the works three months in advance, so they could decide what would go in and what wouldn’t, and for them it was a problem to have things at short notice. But we were sure about what we were going to do, what was going to be there. Of course, we also had a lot of uncertainties. Initially, the museum had given us a very small space, because an exhibition by an individual artist was scheduled for the same date. But suddenly they called us to say that the artist had cancelled the exhibition and the space would be open. That’s when we occupied it. In other words, when everything seemed like it was going to go wrong, everything worked out and we ended up with this larger exhibition space. At that moment, I thought we wouldn’t have enough works, so Yacunã and I brought some more.

After the exhibition was finished, the idea arose that it needed to circulate, to go to other places, and so it did. Under Ziel’s curatorship, it travelled to Fortaleza, adding several local Indigenous artists, and from there to the Centro Cultural do Cariri [in Ceará state], where even more artists were added. Then came the proposal to bring it back to Salvador, to the Solar do Ferrão in Salvador, this time curated by Yacunã and with even more artists. If memory serves me right, there were more than twenty Indigenous artists in this final version. A much larger network of artists was created as a result of these circulations. What emerged was a kind of movement, with the younger artists taking on the curatorship of subsequent versions of the exhibition, nominating artists who became part of the group, and everyone, especially the younger ones, learning a lot from this process. Working together, we got know each other’s abilities and inclinations, and this is very important because the art system depends on those who make referrals, on collaborative networks.

It was also important that the Brazilian arm of the project focussed exclusively on racism against Indigenous people, because there is already a lot of discussion in Brazil about racism against Black people and little discussion of racism against Indigenous people. And because there is little discussion, there is still the idea that there is no racism against Indigenous people. Even some Indigenous people end up not seeing everything that happens, not seeing the discrimination against a certain group or people as racism, and giving it other names. Over the last few years, I’ve seen a change and now this discussion about racism comes up more often, but we still need to do more. We suffer racism all the time. I remember, for example, one time when we were demonstrating in Porto Seguro [Bahia state] against one of the PECs.Footnote ² My husband and I were in the bank [making a withdrawal]. We weren’t wearing traditional clothing, but outside some people were coming from another village to board the river ferry, dressed [in traditional clothes] and singing. As we were leaving, a man who was also in the bank said: ‘They’ve opened the corral’. My husband asked: ‘What did you say?’ I held onto my husband and the woman [who was with the man] realised that we hadn’t liked the expression he had used and pulled him by the arm. There is a lot of fear on both sides. This is just one example. I could mention many more. We hear a lot of things all the time, and sometimes we swallow and keep quiet, and sometimes we speak.

Through the exchange with other artists from Latin America, promoted by the CARLA project in Manchester, I was able to see that the racism that happens to us is everywhere, and it happens almost always in the same way, with the question of territory being a central issue. Felipe Tuxá makes the point that the denial of our existence – that is, denying that this or that people exists, or denying that a people or an individual is Indigenous because of cultural transformations that are often imposed – is a way of guaranteeing a political monopoly over a territory, over a place. I saw these same issues in the presentations given in Manchester, mainly from the MCs, but also the performance of the women from the Mapuche theatre.Footnote ³ These are topics that we often discuss here in schools and communities. Often we don’t call it racism or anti-racism, but these are discussions that are always in our midst, this question of the denial of identity and how people see us.

The event [in Manchester] also allowed me to think about other arts. I’d already had a lot of contact with rap. But I hadn’t had any experience with theatre and I was very taken with it because I hadn’t seen it before, although there are cultural activities in the communities that can be considered theatrical performances, but not in the more academic way that the Mapuche women did it. The use of memory in their work is very important, because although we think we always have to look to the present or the future, the memory of the past, of who we are, strengthens us and makes us better understand our common history.

I don’t think that we, as artists, are going to provide any solutions to concrete problems, but I believe that art collaborates with discussions in the theoretical field, helping to break down the racist view that non-Indigenous society has of us. With this, it contributes to making changes in future policies. For example, in textbooks today I have seen a change in the way non-Indigenous schools have dealt with the whole question of the arts, and this has happened through Indigenous arts. And thanks to this, the way of talking about Indigenous people has changed. Textbooks are obliged to address this issue, and they have done so through the works of Indigenous artists, Indigenous writers, Indigenous filmmakers and Indigenous musicians.

Some teachers from pre-school to high school have also sought me out, and through my works, they end up addressing the theme of the Pataxó people and Indigenous themes in general. I think this will create young people with a new way of thinking about Indigenous peoples, who will no longer think that the Indigenous person is the one in [the stories about] Pedro Álvares Cabral [the European ‘discoverer’ of Brazil], but who will be able to imagine that they will study with Indigenous people, that they can, in the future, have a consultation with an Indigenous doctor, and know that we are part of society, not something excluded. I think art has changed this since we started participating in the circuit [of the art world]. Of course, there is a bubble of people who attend and have access to those spaces, but at the same time the circuit ends up creating visibility, and this visibility leads to discussion in other places, such as schools. So I think that the more we, as artists, create articulations like the one we created with the CARLA project, the more we are together in these collaborative networks, the more power we have to bring these discussions to the arts.

Another change I’ve seen is the presence of Indigenous art in universities. When I started at university, Indigenous art was unheard of, so when I now see professors inviting me and other Indigenous artists to read texts by Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, I realise how much the university has changed in the ten years since I started my degree. Before, Indigenous issues were only dealt with in the field of anthropology.

That’s why I think education is still a fundamental tool, especially in relation to children. I’ve noticed, for example, that children are asking more sophisticated and elaborate questions, and are no longer asking such racist questions as we used to get when we visited schools. Today I see kids asking more critical and less racist questions.

The articulation that led us to work together at UFBA to organise the exhibition was important in breaking down our individualities and strengthening us as a group around common actions to promote anti-racist art. Although our works discuss particular themes related to each of our peoples, almost everything we do can be summarised around the territorial question: the murders, the struggles of leaders, the violence and changes our communities have to face – all of this is linked to the question of land. The territorial issue is at the centre of discussions about racism against Indigenous peoples, and this is what the exhibition Hãhãw: Anti-Racist Indigenous Art showed.

CARLA: Final Reflections

Miriam Álvarez, Lorena Cañuqueo and Alejandra Egido

While discussing among ourselves what we wanted to say in these final reflections, we came across a photograph (see Figure C.1) that resonated with us. We saw in it a possible hint of the relationships between the Mapuche population and the Afro-descendant population that existed at various historical moments, relationships that we reactivated in the collaborations and dramatic texts that we created for CARLA. The photo was taken in about 1870 by Cristián Enrique Valck (1826–1899), a German immigrant to Chile, who established a studio in the southern city of Valdivia. The image caught our attention due to the very dark skin of the child in the centre. What might explain it? History relates that in colonial times Valdivia had a substantial Afro-descendant presence, made up of Black prisoners and soldiers, brought from areas further north, including Peru, and forced to work as labourers constructing fortifications in the city. A 1749 census reveals the coexistence in Valdivia of Black and Mapuche people and, while the authorities paid Mapuche people to hand over captured Black escapees, it is quite possible that intimate relations existed as well.Footnote ⁴ We also know that research is being done on how Afro people escaped enslavement by fleeing to Indigenous and Mapuche communities (Carmona Reference Carmona Jiménez2024; Edwards Reference Edwards2020). Although in the case of this photo, it is a speculative theory that needs investigation, it helps us to stay connected, thinking together. This image for us is a sign of those alliances and relationships and above all it allows us to reconstruct that past and activate other chosen relationships.

Figure C.1

Photo of Mapuche women and children by Cristián Enrique Valck (1826–1899); probable date 1870; probable location Valdivia, Chile

(source: Carlotta database, Swedish Museums of World Culture).

To put Black and Indigenous bodies on the stage in Argentine theatres, as we did during the CARLA project, is to propose the representation of a corporeality made invisible by the constructions of whiteness in this country. The widespread discourse that Argentinians ‘descended from ships’ (foregrounding only migrants from Europe) has been reproduced over many years by different presidents and personalities. A large part of society is convinced that Argentina has no Indigenous population. They also affirm that there are no Blacks in the country, because ‘they all died of yellow fever’, as Alejandra Egido, director of the Teatro en Sepia company, jokingly says. These statements, although ridiculous and lacking any basis in history, are not usually questioned and form part of recurrent stereotypes within the Argentine racist imaginary. In the present, this imaginary even forms part of the government’s own agendas.

The CARLA Project, in which the members of the Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango and the Teatro en Sepia company participated between 2020 and 2022, was a framework that led to a novel encounter for both teams. Although we belong to racialised and strongly stigmatised groups, our work agendas had not come into contact until we were invited to come together by our colleague, Dr Ana Vivaldi, researcher of the CARLA team. Although the beginning of our relationship was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic that led to quarantines and lockdowns, this did not prevent us from communicating and even creating dramatic texts together, such as ‘Como dos gotas de agua’, about two women, one Mapuche, the other Black, both displaced from their homes, who encounter one another in transit; and Fuego amigo, which features a Mapuche woman and a Black woman working alongside each other as city employees.Footnote ⁵

Sustained over many months by virtual means, these encounters led us, with jokes, stories and anecdotes, to reflect among the four of us – two Indigenous women from Río Negro province (Patagonia), an Afro-descendant woman who is also a migrant in the city of Buenos Aires, and a white Latina woman from Argentina who lives in Canada – on racism, anti-racism and possible ways of dealing with it poetically in the theatre. We were full of similar stories that spoke of dispossession, forced displacement, invisibilisation and the ways in which our peoples related to their territories, which we shared in conversations in each virtual meeting, and we all thought: why didn’t we get together before?

Navigating between terror and tenderness, by telling our stories we conjured up our ancestors, some of them quite remote. Enquiring into these relationships and links allows us to bring them into the present. In this way, the past and the present blend together, or rather, they interrelate, because they are in permanent communication. In our narratives, the ‘sad stories’ that our own families repressed – the forced relocations, the loss of land, the silencing of our ceremonies and ancestral knowledge – appeared and still appear. This happened and continues to happen to us because we are Mapuche and Afro-descendants, justification enough in the coloniser’s view. We would come to this conclusion and burst out laughing, because we could not find a better way to cope with the ‘sad stories’. They are traces that remain in our souls and in our bodies, but which have also generated new ways of understanding ourselves and formulating our desires.

Alejandra explained to us about palenques and what the quilombos mean for Afro-descendants, and Miriam and Lorena told of the deportations of Mapuche people of all ages from Patagonia to Buenos Aires.Footnote ⁶ Each shared idea led us to enquire into the representations that organise common-sense understandings. For example, in Argentina, the notion of quilombo does not refer to those spaces built by the enslaved Blacks who fled to live in freedom and in an organised way. On the contrary, the word quilombo is used often in a derogatory way to refer to disorder and chaos. What would happen if we knew that they were actually socio-political spaces of freedom? Alejandra told Miriam and Lorena that ‘the first escaped slaves must have been owners of territories here in Argentina’. Miriam and Lorena shared stories of journeys of thousands of kilometres on foot and massive deportations of Indigenous people who were taken from their territory and forced to serve those who now hold the economic power in this country. And we also talked about how absurd it is that every time we claim rights, people say: ‘the Mapuche are Chileans’. As if, before this time, borders had existed and as if this historical aberration could erase the violence committed against the Mapuche people. The conversation came to an end when Alejandra said: ‘This is going to need another cup of coffee.’ And yes, we could go on for hours and hours over coffee or yerba mate, because this long history of family and community relations runs through us, but it also allows us to generate a ‘we’ today, in the present. It is a way of generating a sense of belonging in this country that marks us from time to time as not being part of it, despite the fact that, in the case of Miriam and Lorena, we were born in this territory. It is like living in diaspora within one’s own territory. As Alejandra put it in her script for Fuego amigo: ‘I don’t know how I can be moved by the anthem of a country that doesn’t recognise me. How ridiculous, please!’

We reflected together on the political conjunctures that affected us before and during our journey in the project. Far from abating, there were acts of intense violence against our collectives, some of them promoted by the state itself, which reactivated a long memory of wounds, but also of struggles. But we also critically analysed our spaces of activism. We saw that our peoples, or the Indigenous and Afro-descendant organisations and political movements that fight for our rights within the institutions of the Argentine state, were each moving along their own path, without any alliance or link that we were aware of. Until our participation in the CARLA project, we had not had the opportunity to reflect on an anti-racist agenda linking Mapuche and Afro-descendants in Argentina. Each of us, Alejandra, Lorena and Miriam, participated in these political activisms. However, always being attentive to the problems of our own collectives had prevented us from observing the realities of other people who are also racialised.

We believe that this is the great contribution that the CARLA project has given us by allowing us to meet, to dialogue, to bring to light our pain and share the possibility of reversing it through laughter and creativity; and to propose approaches, albeit incipient, within our spaces that can mobilise projects to denaturalise and challenge racism in our country.

Some Thoughts on Art, Anti-Racism and CARLA

Wilson Borja

Something that has stayed with me ever since I read his work is what the African-American artist Romare Bearden called the dilemma of the Black artist.Footnote ⁷ He asks whether, if we are in fact artists, do we have to be talking all the time about problems of race and discrimination? It was always a disjuncture for him. But in the end he says: If not us, then who? I think that’s always echoing in my head and, in fact, I think this also emerged in the CARLA project. And the reason is that these issues actually traverse our bodies. So the main way of manifesting this as artists is simply through what we do. I think that the conversations we had in CARLA always revolved around these themes – or at least I saw them from this point of view – because racism penetrates us, it mistreats us, it murders us. We have to talk about these things, yes, but what would happen if we didn’t? If it wasn’t us, who would do it? This is precisely what the painter Romare Bearden talks about, having been part of the civil rights movement in the United States: If not us, then who? Who has the power, who has the right, who has the will to talk about these things?

These things are deeply uncomfortable and painful, but at the same time, extremely important and relevant, if we think about the current global context, where fascism, which has never ceased to exist, is now rampant and brazen across the planet. I believe that work that tackles anti-racism through art is more important than ever, and that it will always be there, unleashing the forces of struggle. Whether we like it or not, consciously or not, we artists decide how to show racism up and confront it. It is a form of struggle, it is a way of fighting for the fundamental rights of many people on the planet. I don’t know if an image or an artistic project will change things, but it does mean that there is resistance, a way to fight against this structure that eats people alive.

In terms of the relationship between art and anti-racism and the project that we have been developing with the Aguaturbia Collective – the IRA Archive – I think that CARLA’s project generates via its portal, its web page, its archive, a way of being able to record and effectively share this information with all the people who didn’t know or don’t know and don’t understand.Footnote ⁸ They think racism is just a local thing and I guess this is the same in different countries. From the conversations we were able to have and the meetings we had with the rest of the people in the project, it’s about being able to visualise a problem that crosses borders or rather that is not defined by borders. In fact, this colonial phenomenon crosses all of our lives, it crosses the entire globe. When one can effectively materialise, condense, archive or put in one place the various projects that address these issues, it is a very important tool. It has been very useful for me precisely in my role as an educator, because then it is not just me telling a story, me talking about a problem, and instead I can provide a tool, so that anyone who is interested in understanding a little more about these issues has some grounding.

I suppose surely this would have been considered when the project was designed, but it would have been very interesting to be able to hear voices from Ecuador, from Peru, from different countries in Latin America, Central America, and hear how the nuances of these issues effectively transgress borders. But I think that one of CARLA’s important contributions is precisely to have condensed and generated a platform where people can learn about different experiences, which together give much more strength to what could be thought of as an anti-racist movement from the point of view of artistic practices.

Another aspect of the relationship between art and anti-racism that is very clear to me is that, if we look at the practices of artists who occupy racialised bodies, we are always effectively questioning and challenging oppressive structures. From our practices, we find tools that effectively allow us to engage in such conversations. During the process of working on the CARLA project, the conversations I have had with different people have been enriched by the fact that I can talk not only about my experience, the local experience, what happened to me, the anecdotes, the trauma, the problems of growing up with these structures, but also by the fact that I can show them that this is a reality that crosses the borders of different countries. I think that one of the most relevant contributions of the project has been precisely this: for us, or for me in particular, to be able to weave these networks that started out being very local, understanding that in other places there are other kinds of struggles. Being able to see them, talk about them, discuss them first hand with the people who are actually doing them was very interesting and very important. I think it was a driving force, it was something that gave fuel to what we were already doing, to what we were doing in the Aguaturbia Collective, and in conversations with Liliana [Angulo Cortés] and in various projects. It effectively adds other dimensions to everything I’m doing.

In conversations with Liliana and with other artists in the Aguaturbia Collective – with Paola [Lucumi], with Natalia [Mosquera Valencia], with Loretta [Moreno] – the question often arises that if we didn’t have to talk about the problems of racism on the planet, what would we actually be doing in our practices? Because we are not only elaborating or working on anti-racist projects. But in a way, it has become an effective and reliable tool that allows us, on the basis of our practices, to question and challenge the structures of racism, to generate conversations, to present the issues to people who had no idea that these things even exist. In my case, I have tried to do this using images. But I think that the CARLA project adds to those projects that were already in development by giving them a boost, like a push, a more solid base, precisely by thinking about the meeting of people from different countries, different places. It shows that racism is a global problem and not an anecdote that happens to one person, who suffers, but ends up talking about the problem in isolation. I think that weaving these networks and these dialogues strengthens what we do and allows us to continue working, and to continue generating these discussions.