Derivas Analíticas Journal - Nº 20 - March 2024. ISSN:2526-2637
The right to formlessness: the not-whole of the African-Brazilian art and its consequences – A conversation with the curator Igor Simões
Vinícius Lima
Psychoanalyst
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“I am atlantic”. With this striking epigraph by Beatriz Nascimento’s ,[1] we are invited to dive into the powerful exhibition The right to form,[2] which opened in September 2023 and will be on display until March 2024 at the Inhotim Museum, in Brumadinho/MG. Curated by Igor Simões (guest curator), Deri Andrade (co-curator) and Jana Janeiro (guestpedagogical curator), the exhibition brings together 60 works by 31 black women and men artists whose production falls into a category that is not so much aesthetic, but rather, political: Afro-Brazilian art. This is basically Igor Simões’ argument, professor, researcher and curator of the exhibition, who kindly granted us an interview for this issue of Derivas.
Simões is blunt. Afro-Brazilian art does not have a formula: “The Afro-Brazilian artist produces whatever he wants: he is not defined by a set of themes or a single formal language”. He can talk about race, but he can also talk about anything else. Let us not be mistaken here: Afro-Brazilian art is not without race; but it's definitely not just about race. In this regard, the American writer James Baldwin (1984[1955]/2020) opens the way, in a beautiful passage read by the curator in our conversation: “If I write so much about the condition of black people, it is not because I think I have no other subject, but only because that was the gate that I felt forced to unlock so that I could write about anything else.”
From Simões' perspective, among the themes covered by the works, there are certainly approaches to racial issues, because “this is the gate that these artists and intellectuals still find themselves forced to unlock in order to talk about anything”. This fact is a “result of the experiences of being black in Brazil, but also of being black anywhere on this planet”. This is a perspective guided by the materialism of their bodily circulation in the world: “There is no – at least I don’t remember any – safe place on this planet to be a black person. And, if this condition permeates my experience of moving around in the world, it is obvious that these themes will permeate my reading.”
Therefore, questions about race, racism and blackness are there. And not for nothing: Simões remembers that Brazil received 70% of the slave ships that left the African continent, becoming the main destination for the African diaspora. And yet, in the international debate that arose around 50 years ago about Afro-diasporic art, Brazil had been, until then, a “complete absence”, noted by the curator in art publications, exhibition catalogues, collections and programs of museums around the world, in the research he undertook with materials from 2001 to 2022. Given this scenario, Simões asks: “How is it possible that, anywhere on the planet, one intends to discuss the idea of an Afro-diasporic art without Brazil not only taking part, but also occupying a leading role in the debate?” The right to form exhibition thus constitutes a bet in the midst of this trajectory.
But, in addition to the political relevance established in this exhibition from the point of view of representation in the field of Afro-Brazilian art, it includes something more. There is a specificity in its proposal: it is about going beyond the figuration of the black body, which has frequently characterized black painting in Brazil, towards also exploring formal abstraction. “Is it possible for a black artist to abstract?”: this is a question raised by artist Juliana dos Santos, taken up and expanded upon by Simões in the exhibition’s presentation text: “Are formal investigations that do not fall into figuration possible for the Brazilian black artist?”
It is in this context that the Atlantic, oceanic dimension of the exhibition that particularly appealed to me stands out. It is no coincidence that Beatriz Nascimento's epigraph (“I am atlantic”), as well as the presence of aquatic, coastal features in several of the works present there, are eventually materialized in the Atlantic itself: in Underlying these, other cities and To whom do lighthouses serve? from the series Sismographies or maps of the now by Thiago Costa; in Desire-ruin by Luana Vitra; in Topographies of the buried tide by Rebeca Carapiá; [3] in Divisor III by Ayrson Heráclito; in When color arrives in Blue by Juliana dos Santos.
Desejo-ruína, de Luana Vitra
Créditos: Daniel Mansur. ©Instituto Inhotim. Usado com permissão.
Topografias da maré soterrada, de Rebeca Carapiá
Créditos: Ana Martins. . ©Instituto Inhotim. Usado com permissão.
Quando a cor chega no Azul, de Juliana dos Santos
Créditos: Daniel Mansur. ©Instituto Inhotim. Usado com permissão.
Simões confides in us: before arriving at The right to form, the names thought up for the exhibition were, first, Form and the ocean and, later, Vortex, in reference to the flows, the movement of the tides, a movement that swallows.
In this sense, at least two layers of this reference to the Atlantic are decanted in the exhibition. The first of them connects directly with the experience of the African diaspora: “Any discussion of Afro-Brazilian art is transnational, because it is Atlantic”. It is an art that, even though it is produced from a territorial perspective – Brazil, organized by the fiction of the nation-state –, “necessarily connects with the Atlantic experience”. What is at stake is the diasporic character implied in the experience of forced navigation of black bodies between Africa, Europe and America, which shifts their horizon of belonging towards a space located among these continents and bathed by the Atlantic itself. Simões leads us in this direction: “The Atlantic is an experience that does not have a pre-determined model, because it has to do with flows, with exchanges. It is not purely African, it is not purely European and it is not even purely Brazilian. But it happens based on flows that have been produced over centuries.”
This displaces any remnant of metaphysics from the substance that would seek to essentialize a supposed “black place”. Simões emphasizes, for example, that the work of artist André Ricardo, present in the exhibition, brings codes and experiences from European art, at the same time that it is in deep dialogue with the Brazilian Rubem Valentim, in addition to being “the result of the production of a Brazilian black artist who doesn’t necessarily need to deal with issues of racialization, and that was very important to me.” In his statement, the curator seems to assume a political position that takes us to a terrain freed from the “obligation to relate to an identity” – the way Jacques-Alain Miller (1997, p. 428) once named the discursive function of the master signifier (S1).
And here we come up against the second layer of the Atlantic involved in the exhibition, insofar as the right to form ends up touching also, and more fundamentally, the right to the formlessness: that which exceeds form, identity and figuration, therefore referring to the dimension of the opaque and unlimited, of radical otherness, of what does not fit into any box. For this dimension, the Atlantic seems to offer valuable metaphorical support. It was for this reason that Simões said it was very important for him to start the exhibition “with a representation of the ocean. Of the oceanic issue, more than of the ocean. Something that dealt with things that are together, that interpenetrate one another, but maintain their contours. That is the work of Ayrson Heráclito”, entitled Divisor III. Starting the exhibition with this work was taking the debate exactly to this point of formlessness.
Divisor III, de Ayrson Heráclito
Créditos: Daniel Mansur. ©Instituto Inhotim. Usado com permissão.
His first contact with this work occurred in the early 2000s. In fact, it was its predecessor, Divisor II, a work measuring 3 meters high, exhibited at a Mercosul Biennial: “I always think of this work as a great synthesis of this debate: an artist dealing with materials that have a memory, that have a tradition, salt, water and palm oil, reporting on an issue that had many images, most of them images of violence, but that does not make use of these images. He presents his work in a deeply contemporary language. But he brings these sets, these three elements, which are in constant dispute between maintaining their own limits and what happens when these limits explode, because they mix. It’s just that they take a long time to mix.”
At this point in the conversation, faced with a question regarding the title of the exhibition, I proposed to Igor the category of formlessness, which seemed to me to be much more the effect produced by the works than form itself. Moved by the question, the curator states: “I am convinced that the right to form is the very possibility of formlessness”. And he continues: “Speaking of the right to form is also speaking of the right not to even think about form, the right to go beyond form”. In his view, “advocating for the possibility of different paths for Afro-Brazilian artists touches on this formlessness”, due to the heterogeneity that appears there – outlining what we can consider as an open set, one that does not have a formation law that can be applied equally for all its elements; you need to check one by one.
This is what we see, for example, when following this route described by Simões: if we follow in a straight line, starting from the center of the exhibition, we begin with the oceanic work of Ayrson Heráclito, pass through the Banners of Castiel Vitorino and arrive at the Electric Field of Rebeca Carapiá, who proposes short circuits between the materials and the body of those who are there. “We are talking about this lack of limit (deslimite) of what a black artist can do. Because there are three completely different paths”, in terms of materiality, scale, artistic language.
Campo elétrico 01: raiva, sal, saúde e tempo, de Rebeca Carapiá
Créditos: Daniel Mansur. ©Instituto Inhotim. Usado com permissão.
Beside it, the paintings by Ana Cláudia Almeida and Lucia Laguna “deform the landscape”, while the egungum costume by Eneida Sanches (Dance of the Dead Egunguns), which emits sound projections, “seems like the shape of the thing, but it is just the exterior of the thing” – a kind of hollow form. For Simões, this is an exhibition that “blurs”; and which aims to blur, particularly, preconceived ideas, previous expectations about Afro-Brazilian art.
Dança dos Mortos Egunguns, de Eneida Sanches
Créditos: Tiago Nunes. ©Instituto Inhotim. Usado com permissão.
Under the effects of our encounter with The right to Form exhibition and with Igor Simões, perhaps we can use this not-whole dimension that informs Afro-Brazilian art to return to the Freudian metaphor of femininity as a dark continent, not without the latest aspects of Jacques Lacan's teaching. For today, it is a matter of going beyond the much too unitary idea of a continent, which ends up giving the impression of a possible unification – of the feminine, of blackness – where there is none. In this regard, the exhibition can teach us to contrast this image through the heterogeneity, multiplicity and singularity implied in Afro-Brazilian art – more similar to the logic of the not-whole –, by giving way to that which of this experience is placed beyond the limits of identity and essentialization.
It was in this sense that the two layers of the Atlantic involved in the exhibition stood out to us: on the one hand, through the marks of the diaspora, the Atlantic includes the inerasable dimension of identity; but, on the other hand, there is also something beyond, through movement, through flows, which points towards non-identity, a dimension at play in artistic creation and, particularly, in formal abstraction. This is the coastal dimension present in the exhibition: between center and absence, between form and the ocean, between Africa and Brazil.
From this perspective, the exhibition might teach us to consider not only Afro-Brazilian art, but blackness itself, through the not-whole, through that which does not offer itself to totalization/generalization and which refers to the opacity inherent in the speaking being, here unveiled by the Afro-diasporic artistic experience. Ultimately, The right to form highlights a record of alterity in which one is not just Other to others, but particularly Other to oneself. Here, formal abstraction in Afro-Brazilian art seems to concern the possibility of the black artist to be able to connect with her/his own extimate alterity, without needing to refer to alterity at all times through social domination, thus allowing her/him to approach her/his own formlessness.
References
BALDWIN, J. Notas de um filho nativo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020. (Trabalho original publicado em 1984[1955]).
MILLER, J.-A. Lacan elucidado: palestras no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Ed., 1997.
Notes
[1] Beatriz Nascimento was an important black Brazilian intellectual and historian, born in Sergipe, but who settled in Rio de Janeiro. She lived from 1942 to 1995.
[2] Along with the exhibition Making the modern, building the contemporary: Rubem Valentim, also on display at Inhotim, The right to form is part of the Abdias Nascimento Program and the Black Art Museum.
[3] It is worth noting that this work by Rebeca Carapiá belongs to the exhibition Making the modern, building the contemporary: Rubem Valentim. However, Igor maintained that the exhibits are interconnected; that the back wall of Rubem Valentim's exhibition is also painted an oceanic blue somehow announcing what was to come in The right to form.
English version by Ana Helena Souza.
