Carlos Correa Angulo: This colloquium is entitled ‘Decolonising the Arts in Latin America: Anti-Racist Irruptions in the Art World’. We will be talking with artists from different parts of Latin America about their work from a decolonial and anti-racist perspective. We will have the participation of Miriam Álvarez, director of the Mapuche Theatre Group El Katango, and Alejandra Ejido, director of the Afro-descendant company Teatro en Sepia, both from Argentina. From Colombia, we will have the poet and Afro-feminist activist Ashanti Dinah Orozco, as well as Rafael Palacios, founder and director of the Afro-contemporary dance company Sankofa. From Brazil, they will be joined by Arissana Pataxó and Denilson Baniwa, Indigenous visual artists. I ask you please to introduce yourselves.

Denilson Baniwa: First of all, good afternoon to you all. I am from the Baniwa people, who come from the territory called Alto Rio Negro, on the border of Brazil with Colombia and Venezuela. I mean these people live in the three countries. I am part of the Brazilian Indigenous movement, fighting for the rights of traditional peoples and their territories, and from this position I present myself to the world. My artistic work is based on my cosmovision as a member of the Baniwa people and on their resistance to European invasions, occupation and colonisation of our lands, especially in Brazil. In this sense, my work reflects on the construction of a country born from the domination of traditional peoples, which continues into the present.

An example of this is my intervention in one of the iconic monuments of São Paulo, Brazil’s main city. This is the Monumento às Bandeiras, which pays homage to the bandeirantes. The bandeirantes were a paramilitary group from the Portuguese colonial period who were hired to hunt down Indigenous and Black people escaping from slavery, and whom the official Brazilian culture positioned as national heroes. My intervention consisted of projecting onto the monument images of a large Portuguese caravel sinking, from which emerges a forest of mythical and spiritual beings. The purpose of this work is to reconfigure the history of Brazil from the perspective of the originary peoples, who until now have had no voice.

Miriam Álvarez: I call myself a Mapuche theatre maker and also a teacher of theatre. Having grown up as an urban Mapuche and having studied theatre made me want to represent these silenced histories of the Mapuche people. The Mapuche people are a pre-existing people who occupy the territories that are today under the sovereignty of the Chilean and Argentine states. The formation of these states divided our people. I live in the city of Bariloche, in Argentine Patagonia, which is a border city, because we are very close to Chile. And that exemplifies the realities we Mapuche live in, because we have to negotiate with different state and political entities and with very different realities.

Ashanti Dinah: Good afternoon to everyone and thank you for opening this much-needed platform that calls for a kind of aesthetic justice for the world of art in general. My name is Ashanti Dinah and I was born in the Colombian Caribbean. I see myself – and this is my political identity – as an Afro-Caribbean woman, [who is] always in relation to the Caribbean meta-archipelago, in that polyrhythmic and syncopated identity that those of us born in the Caribbean have. For many years I have been an activist with some [experience of] leadership at the national level. I started very young, at the age of fifteen, when I joined the Angela Davis organisation in Barranquilla, my home town. When I came to Bogotá, the city where I currently live, to study for my master’s degree, I refocused my interests not only on the ways in which Afro-descendant characters appear in canonical works, but also on Afro-descendant literature – especially Black women writers who speak with their own voice and use their identity from that position.

And then I also took up my own voice as a Black woman, as a woman of African descent. I didn’t get there very quickly; we know very well that identities are constructed, they are dynamic and they are found along the way. I learned to be a Black woman through dialogue with white feminists and I understand what it means to be a woman and Black at the same time. After publishing several magazine articles and essays, I was finally able to publish my first collection of poetry last year, entitled Las semillas del Muntú [The Seeds of Muntu], which is part of a trilogy. It was very well received. I am currently working on the second book of poems in the trilogy, called Alfabeto de una mujer raíz [Alphabet of a Root-Woman], which recently received an honourable mention in a call from the Ministry of Culture for unpublished works by Afro-Colombian authors.

Arissana Pataxó: I am from the Pataxó people and currently live in Santa Cruz Cabrália, in the Indigenous territory of Coroa Vermelha. The Pataxó people live in the states of Bahia and Minas Gerais, mainly in urban areas, and we also have Pataxós in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Brasilia, who have moved there to study at university and work on Indigenous policy. My artistic work is linked to education, as I have been a primary school teacher since the age of nineteen, working mainly in the community of Coroa Vermelha.

I started to get involved in the art world in 2005, when I took a course in visual arts at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Bahia. At first, my intention was not to become an artist, but to acquire technical knowledge. However, I realised that I needed to enter the artistic field in order to address Indigenous issues, where there was a total lack of understanding of our culture. This was particularly evident in academic environments, which are theoretically spaces of knowledge and learning, but show a great fragility when it comes to understanding the Indigenous world.

Alejandra Ejido: It is a pleasure to share this stage with such restless and interesting creators. I am Cuban, trained in the performing arts in Havana, and I have always been committed to working on social emergencies on stage. I worked in theatre companies in Barcelona, dealing with issues of gender violence. When I arrived in Buenos Aires, I noticed the absence of Afro-descendant theatre and Afro-descendant issues in general and I began to focus my work precisely on filling this gap. Gradually this work began to focus specifically on the theme of Afro-descendant women and their oppression. For the last ten years I have been directing Teatro en Sepia, a company that focuses on Afro-descendant and Black women’s experiences.

Rafael Palacios: I am a dancer and choreographer trained in traditional African and Afro-contemporary dance techniques in Africa and Paris. When I founded Sankofa in 1997, my aim was to create a space that would allow us to deepen the knowledge that the dancing body can give us, capable of connecting with its past, its identity and its origins, in order to understand who we are in the present and, above all, to formulate strategies that will allow us to lead a better life in the future.

Dance has many qualities, secrets, codes and wisdoms that we, Afro-descendants, can examine and reformulate for a better life. We can discover not only who we are, but also how to communicate with the rest of society and create intercultural dialogues. Through dance, we seek to be heard in a society that has often stereotyped the Afro-descendant body, condemning our dance practices to a place of eroticism and exoticism, without recognising that through every movement we make as Black people, our history, our culture and our vision of society are manifested.

Jamille Pinheiro Dias: I would like to ask you how your artistic work relates to the notion of internal colonialism.

Denilson: Brazil tends to identify itself with Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and this has marginalised the rest of the country, which functions as a kind of colony of these centres. Brazil has grown from this core, where the majority of the population is of European origin. It is a model of a country that, by concentrating power in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (areas that represent the Brazil that does not want to be Brazil, but a copy of Europe), excludes the Indigenous peoples, the Quilombolas and the Blacks.Footnote ¹ We Indigenous people are forced to leave our places, as I left the Amazon, to occupy spaces in an art world controlled by Europeans. But this is the only way to confront this colonisation and create new perspectives based on Indigenous visions, otherwise we will continue to be invisible. As a friend of mine says, we have to place some artistic ‘bombs’ in certain places in order to explode colonised thinking and build another way of thinking from the ruins.

Arissana: I adopt the identity of artist as a strategy to address Indigenous issues in spaces that exclude us. In general, recognition comes after being validated by institutions in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This is not only external, but also within our communities. My first award did not come from an institution in Bahia, but from Rio de Janeiro, and this led to recognition in other parts of the country. Unfortunately, this dynamic continues, as Denilson mentioned.

Rafael: In Colombia, as in Brazil, internal colonialism hinders the recognition of peripheral cultural and artistic practices. The production of cultural managers and artists from the Colombian Pacific is rarely recognised in the capital and when it is, it is considered folklore or local expressions without artistic value. These are the conditions handed down by colonialism. As artists, we are not so much interested in fighting for spaces to be opened for us, but in creating and validating our own practices.

Miriam: Yes, in Mapuche theatre we face similar challenges. At best, our practices are seen in terms of folklore. We are asked to essentialise Mapuche representation. In Buenos Aires, for example, people expect rituals, ceremonies and Mapuzungun [the Mapuche language]. For them, the Mapuche are something of the past, almost extinct, because the general perception is that Argentina is a white, European country. However, our presentations try to communicate our current reality, which is also shaped by the present and the urban experience. We are not interested in being part of the artistic elite of Buenos Aires. We reach out to the Mapuche population in the peripheries, bringing theatre to those who do not have access to it.

Ashanti Dinah: In Latin America, when it came to identity formation, there was a whole class of conservative and feudalist political and economic elites who proclaimed themselves white and, in this sense, white-mestizo. A segregated, anti-popular and stately creole aristocracy monopolised state affairs and also shaped national or canonical cultural and artistic practices. The construction of the nation was articulated around a philological obsession with Colombian identity that linked power to the written word. It is no coincidence that the main political leaders were also writers who, through their essays and literature, validated a colonial grammar centred on Catholic and Hispanic whiteness.

The tradition of contestation was born with Candelario Obeso, who mocked the canon, its whiteness and its idiomatic correctness, even dedicating some of his works to people like Miguel Antonio Caro and Rufino José Cuervo, who represented this conservative elite. Obeso begins to write in the way that people in the Caribbean express themselves, especially the rural population, producing what I call a syntactic dislocation that denounces what the dominant powers consider a deformed and vulgar use of language. My work reclaims this contested voice that defies the segregation produced by literature and the canonical arts.

Alejandra: I live in the capital of the country, Buenos Aires, which is also one of the great capitals of theatre. And I see that the theatre audience here does not necessarily ignore what happens in the provinces, but they do ignore Afro-descendants and, of course, Afro-Argentineness. The narrative that Blacks died in the wars of independence and the epidemics of the nineteenth century remains dominant. We foreign Afro-descendants are ignored. Afro-descendants, like the originary peoples who preceded the nation-state, are not recognised in Argentine culture, except from a rather superficial folkloric perspective, which is reflected, for example, in the proliferation of intercultural festivals.

I was surprised by Miriam and Rafael’s attitude of not wanting to be part of the mainstream art movement. I feel that it is impossible for people of African descent to work in a completely self-organised way, without infrastructure. But I am intrigued by their perspective and will think about it more.

Carlos: I would like to ask how you integrate anti-racism in your artistic work. Do you consciously think about anti-racism as an artistic strategy?

Rafael: Sankofa’s artistic quest is to explore our own knowledge, but also the oppression of our bodies. We dance to achieve our emancipation, to be heard, to activate liberatory processes, and all of this is related to anti-racism. Our artistic practice questions the exotic and sexualised representation of our bodies on stage, as in the case of mapalé, a dance with Afro-Colombian roots that has been misrepresented because it has been reduced to an imaginary of savagery and eroticism, with dancers in loincloths and covered in oil. In our work, La mentira complaciente [The Complacent Lie], we denounce this form of representation and reclaim this dance as our own, focusing on its historical context and its meaning for Afro-Colombian peoples. We want the white public to know why these dances were born and why they were created and preserved by our peoples.

To go back to a point Alejandra made earlier, it is not that I am not interested in being part of the Colombian art scene. Of course I am interested, because we have the right to express ourselves and to be seen and heard as Black men and women in our country. What I am saying is that it is not the others who validate me. We, with our own explorations and our own categories and ways of expressing what we do, can say what kind of art we are making. It is an art that is linked to social processes, an art that provides solutions for the daily lives of the people and communities from which these cultural practices come. Each of the works we create in Sankofa seeks to disrupt and undermine the structural racism that we face every day, from the moment we get up to the moment we go to bed, from the moment we are born to the moment we die.

Miriam: In our Mapuche performance practices we try to have an impact on two levels. On the one hand, we reach out to the Mapuche population, who generally do not go to the theatre. This means that we have to go to them and present and disseminate our art in a way that invites and motivates them to experience it. On the other hand, we want to install in society in general a reflection on Mapuche themes and, in particular, to bring people into contact with Mapuche stage practices. In works such as Pewma [‘dream’ in Mapuzugun] we deal with the Indigenous genocide in Patagonia, an event that structured social relations in the area where we live.

To talk about Indigenous genocide in the academy or in Argentine artistic practices is to break with a strategic silence in this country. For our Mapuche people, it is a very painful subject because it is not something distant. My great-grandmother was nine years old when the Conquest of the Desert took place, as the military occupation of the territories was called, which was a great massacre. She is not a distant person in my life, because she is the person who raised my mother. So in my family there are silenced stories about the genocide of the Indigenous people. In Pewma we investigate the silences of our relatives. This is an example of how we think about racism.

Ashanti Dinah: I think it is very important to consider the process by which one arrives at an anti-racist poetics. There are many writers of African descent who have never articulated an anti-racist discourse, which I regret. Perhaps they did this as a strategy of insertion into the art world, or to avoid being stigmatised as militants or activists by hegemonic literary criticism. But I start from a very important fact, which is that Hispanic American literature is marked by the racialisation of Afro-descendant characters, who are always located on the side of the barbarian in the antinomy of civilisation and barbarism. We must fight against the racism of a hegemonic canon that perpetuates stereotypes and racism, not only in the representation of Afro-descendants, but in the tyranny of a certain form of diction, writing and speech. The contrast is what Franz Fanon called zoological language, because according to racist grammars we do not speak and communicate, we babble and shout. Our anti-racist poetics seeks to counter the categorisation of our ways of expressing ourselves as inferior and to restore the dignity of our language as a legitimate language.

An anti-racist poetics seeks to give voice back to the Black community, with Black characters telling their own life stories from their perspective and with their own way of expressing themselves. In my work there is a defence of African symbolic memory, which includes the spiritual or religious, not as something barbaric, but quite the opposite. It is necessary to appeal to Ubuntu or Uramba, as it is called in one area of the Colombian Pacific, to return to the ancestral wisdom of the older women. Finally, I would like to stress the importance of an intracentric perspective, where we look at ourselves rather than seeing ourselves through the Eurocentric gaze. I don’t need to ask permission from Vulcan or the Greek gods because I have Xangó and my Orixás.

Arissana: In Brazil, it is true that the image of Indigenous people has largely been constructed through the arts, whether in literature, cinema or other artistic expressions. Unfortunately, this representation has often been based on folkloristic stereotypes, far removed from the reality and diversity of the more than three hundred ethnic groups and two hundred Indigenous languages present in the country. Although we have the defence of land rights as a common agenda, we are different nations that have been homogenised under a single figure: the ‘Brazilian Indian’. Artistic practice provides a valuable platform to deconstruct these stereotypical images that have been constructed over time through artistic production itself. It also opens up spaces for dialogue between nations and communities, as well as with Brazilian society, allowing Indigenous voices to be heard and contributing to a more authentic and diverse representation.

Alejandra: Our dramaturgy tries to decolonise theatre by focusing on characters of African descent, mostly women, who have rarely been in the limelight. But it is also a way of disrupting other currents, such as feminism, because by focusing on the experience of Black women, we are talking about the fact that we are different kinds of women. For example, our play No es país para negras [This is No Country for Black Women] came out of research we did in an Afro-descendant neighbourhood in the greater Buenos Aires area. We performed our plays in a house where local Afro-descendant women usually gather. After our performances, we would talk amongst ourselves.

After three months of performances in that house, we noticed that there were themes that systematically came up in all our conversations. So, we interviewed 140 Afro-descendant women, which allowed us to learn about their socio-economic realities. We then produced a new play, No es país para negras 2, which reached a diverse Afro-descendant audience and generated a very interesting debate. We address issues that no one talks about, such as how sexual diversity or love relationships are experienced from an Afro-descendant perspective. The challenge for Teatro en Sepia is always to work with limited resources, without a physical space.

Denilson: As for how art can transform and decolonise, I would like to add that art is essential to rethinking coloniality, but the approach must be holistic and multidisciplinary. This is because colonising thought itself comes from all artistic expressions: literature, music, dance, film and visual arts. Although I work with the visual, I believe that it is necessary to combine all the arts in order to structure a [form of] decolonising thought that communicates broader ideas. This more interdisciplinary perspective can go where each artistic discipline alone cannot. We will only make a difference if we start writing books and creating visualities from this Native American, African American, Afro-American, ecological-originary thinking, from all these worlds that have always been on the margins of the Western world.