Page 97 - ARTE!Brasileiros #58
P. 97
patuás is, nonetheless, a contemporary Afro version of photographs and prints made by photographers and perpetrated by the colonisers and their executioners on [PAGE 10]
the loci memoriai, the places of memory of mnemonics. artists, mostly travellers or emigrants, made in Brazil in the the Black bodies, which can be found in textbooks in Brazil
In this tradition, memoria rerum, memory for things, 19th century are printed. On some of these “patches” are (producing an association that naturalises the relationship
is joined with memoria verborum, memory for words. images of azulejo tiles, representative of the Portuguese between the “black body” and the “violated body”). Rather,
The imagnines agentes, that is, agents of memory, are colonial architecture and city (just as can be seen in she chooses inaccurate stitching, to show the fragility of [PAGES 11 ANd 12]
placed in certain places to narrate histories imagetically many works of another important Brazilian artist who this body of people, who have been objecti”ed by slavery,
(Yates, 1966). There is a movement in Paulino’s work of develops the theme of colonial violence, Adriana Varejão). photography, science and voyeurism.(14) The images of
appropriation of elements of memory – of a memory Paulino’s 2018 piece Musa paradisíaca [Paradisiacal “enslaved bodies” in the 19th century present to us Black
that is close, familiar, but also distant, associated with muse] reproduces the same photograph by Marc Ferrez bodies in these two forms only: work or suffering. Rosana [PAGES 13 to 15]
a rupture, a drift, of knowledge and a way of being in the three times (“the most important of the photographers Paulino chooses to make an assentamento, in the sense of,
world that, in a certain way, the artist recognises as her working in Brazil in the 19th century” Lago, 2001, 14), a ritual of homage, of redressing, impossible but necessary,
own. As in the words of Musa Michelle Mattiuzzi, Rosana known as “Uma vendedora de banana” [A banana seller] with the past that does not pass away. Heart, womb and
Paulino seems indeed to “inhabit the ruins of coloniality,” (Ermakoff, 2004, 116), alongside reproductions of three roots do not restore life or heal wounds, but serve to shift
she presents herself as someone who knows how to “scienti”c” representations of botanical subjects, an x-ray our way of approaching these phantasmatical images of
“inhabit and revive the ruins of this Afro-Atlantic plurality.” of a pelvis and a white patch with inscriptions in red capital the past, allow us to begin a dialogue with the dead and
Photography has become a fundamental metaphor letters of varying sizes, quoting the well-known carnival open a veranda over the ocean, contextualising slavery
in contemporary art and, in Brazil, it has been at the root march “yES, NÓS tEMoS BANANA.” Here we see a touch in the Afro-Atlantic world. Restoring roots to those who
of the production of artists who deal with memory and of irony in Paulino’s work, but one that is also sarcastic, have been cut off from them, giving them ancestry and life,
even more with oblivion. I recall Hélio Oiticica, with his with regard to the clichés constituting “Brazilness.” When even if it is one of survival [sobre-vida], is a delicate work
Bólide Caixa 18 “Homenagem a Cara e Cavalo, from sewing these “patches,” shards of history assembled to which Paulino’s art has been dedicated in an original
1966 or his famous seja herói, seja marginal from 1968. by the artist, again she picks apart the structures of and powerful manner.
(13) Photography, especially analogue, has a moment colonial imagery. performing what I would like to call an
of “printing” (it is worth remembering that Rosana “anarchiving” of the colonial archive. The photographs and aline motta: refleCtions on a (mis)enCounter
Paulino has a bachelor’s degree in and is a specialist in colonial images of Black people frame them in an imagery In the last two decades, Afro-descendant art in Brazil
engraving; Lopes, 2018, 171). Photography re-updates other that seeks to reproduce oppression. These images are has sought to establish a current of memory that at the
metaphors of memory, such as writing, a metaphor equally cover-up images – Deckerinnerungen, according to same time bridges the ocean to Africa and embraces
fundamental in the aforementioned tradition of the art of Freud. This anonymous woman photographed by Marc the Brazilian territory in its long history of slavery (and
memory with its idea of mnemonic inscriptions. After all, Ferrez around 1885 was also framed by him in a double never fully realized liberation). In the case of the artist
photography is literally a writing of light. But it also refers frame, next to another Black woman dressed as a “Bahian Aline Motta from Niterói, for example, with her trilogy
to the psychoanalytic view of our memory as layers, some woman.” We are, therefore, from Bahian to the “samba of video installations, this becomes clear. Her works,
more some less conscious. The inscription of trauma has mulatta,” at the source of a powerful construction of the “Pontes sobre Abismos” (08:29, 2017), “Se o mar tivesse
also been compared to the photographic !ash. Photography image of the Black Brazilian woman, her body and her varandas” (09:11, 2017) and “(Outros) Fundamentos” (15:47,
as a portrait also has a corporeal and phantasmatical behaviour. This cliché (photographic and in terms of social 2017–2019) present – through a voice-over narrative by
element: the photographic portrait ambiguously literalises role) goes up in smoke with Paulino’s stitched montage. the author and images captured in Sierra Leone, Nigeria
appearance and disappearance, presence and absence, Another work with similar resources is A ciência é and in several places of her origin in Brazil – the story of a
the desire to see and the image fading. In her work/ game, luz da verdade 3? [Is science the light of truth 3?], from quest for fragments of the past with the aim of establishing
Paulino also becomes the one who deals the cards in 2016. It is made up of three “patches” sewn together. a “settlement” (to come back to Paulino’s image) in the
the presentation of Black bodies. Like Eustáquio Neves The two at the end spell out, in the same red letters as present. Her works come about from a moment of rupture,
and his portraits, she asserts herself as the agent of her in the previously commented work, the sentence that from the breaking of a “secret,” from a layer of hard
images and no longer as an object represented, bereft gives this work its title: Is Science the Light of Truth? In silence that still kept its origin in the shadows in the
of her own voice. The work manages, at the same time, the centre we see a photomontage that superimposes 19th century, in the practice of an aristocrat’s son who
to be extremely contemporary and to quote pasts that two skulls, one above the other, onto an image of azulejo raped her great grandmother. Her grandmother’s birth
are more or less close. It is a hole in time; it creates a tiling. The theme of science is recurrent in Paulino’s work certi”cate lists only her mother’s name and the quali- “er
metaspatiality and other chronotopes. Photography is and largely refers to eugenicist doctrines (defended by a “natural daughter.” From this discovery of repressed
treated as a fragment, a shadow, the survival of a shipwreck, Nina Rodrigues), as well as to some of the photographers violence, from this negative origin, Aline’s work unfurls
and it is around appropriated photographs and their copies, and artists who were around in Brazil in the 19th century. like a huge, swollen river, gushing but also over!owing
cut-outs and inversions, that much of Paulino’s work is Thus, her work Atlântico vermelho [Red Atlantic], from with family photographs that, in her videos, literally !oat
built. But it does so without romanticising some lost origin 2017, assembles (11) pieces of fabric, and in the upper left along the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the rivers of
or establishing some identity-based ontology. Rather, the corner we have a famous anthropometric photograph Brazil and Africa. In these works full of transparency,
technical reproduction of the photographs deconstructs taken by August Stahl. water and mirrors, of surfaces that re!ect for us to re!ect,
any essentialist aim. It is about making room for imagining Paulino’s 2013 Assentamento [Settlement] series the artist searches for the paths that can reconnect the
alternative origins and narratives to those constructed by returns to one of Stahl’s photo groups from 1865. The broken threads of her family history and those that also
colonial discourses. three life-size photographs, recovering their human connect the continents on either side of the south Atlantic.
In her 1997 series Bastidores, she sews the eyes, throat, dimensions, were each cut into “ve strips and stitched At the end of her work “(Outros) Fundamentos” we see
mouth and forehead of photographic portraits of Black back together irregularly. In the front photograph of the scenes in the city of Lagos with people on canoes and
women collected by her in her family albums. As in many naked woman, Paulino inserts a painted heart, like an on the riverside, carrying small mirrors in their hands.
of the works by the aforementioned Rosangela Rennó, external organ, from which red threads “of blood” run. In The narrator says:
these photographs are programmatically precarious, the pro”le photograph, she inserts a picture of a baby in
so as to identify effacements, losses, subtractions, but the womb, but again as something external, transparent. If belonging is “ction, can I point a mirror towards
also to identify that these women are, at the same time, In the photograph of the same character, always naked, Nigeria and see Brazil? Is the opposite possible
unique individuals and all those women who identify with her back to us, the artist does not sew on the lower too? Beyond the ocean, one points his “nger at
with them. The act of the artist is always twofold: when part of the photograph, corresponding to the end of the other and asks: is it really you? What took you
sewing the mouth and neck, she asserts herself as her leg and feet, and instead sews a fabric upon which so long?(15)
an agent of speech, unpicking the stitches from her veins have been stitched, resembling roots that branch
mouth and that of those who admire her work. When out, as if the portrait were growing roots. These three ConClusion
sewing the eyes, she establishes herself as an agent in photographs are part of an installation of which stacked As in Rubem Valentim’s “Manifesto Tardio,” Aline Motta
the construction of images and of the counter-colonial pieces of wood, as if awaiting a “re, are also a part. On the also punctuates this temporality of “delay,” the après
imagery, unpicking the stitches from her eyes and those ground, next to the two “bon”res,” two small monitors show coup, which, as we have seen, is nothing more than
of those who see her work. When sewing the forehead ocean waves breaking on the beach. It is also important the temporality of trauma, with its characteristic delay.
she asserts herself as a thinking agent and not as a to remember here the double meaning of the title of the The time of trauma is a time that passes through us,
thought object dissected by science and crushed by work: assentamento, which in Portuguese is the act of which makes the slave trade, the violence of almost four
servitude, unpicking the stitches from her brain and that laying decorative tiles or !oor tiles, among other things, centuries of slavery and the eugenicist and genocidal
of her spectator. In a nutshell, she asserts: “I own my and is an act of construction, therefore, which refers policies against Blacks that exist until today part of
body, the black woman is in charge of her body, this in to the body of those who have been building in Brazil the same present. This is a past that does not pass.
a society that is still colonial, phallocentric, racist, which since the 16th century, who have laid, among others, the Contemporary Brazilian Black art – which I have tried
oppresses as much black as female bodies or those that azulejo tiles to which some of Paulino’s works refer. On to present here from its dif”cult birth and which rose
do not correspond to the cisgender standard.” In naming the other hand, assentamento can also be a place that up against so many effacements, repressions, deaths
her work Bastidores [Backstage] she plays with the receives the landless [settlement], the category of many and incidents of violence – in a certain way dwells in this
multiple meaning of the term: on the one hand, she clearly Black people expelled from the work-force in Brazil, heirs “delay” of which Aline speaks. To inhabit the delay always
expresses the backstage of this society with her gesture to the burden of the “liberation” of the slaves of 1888. implies an urgency to speak, to register in”nite stories yet
of sewing on the faces of these portraits. But bastidor Lastly, in Candomblé, assentamento is a set of objects symbolised, yet imagined, not yet translated into images.
[also meaning rack or frame in Portuguese] also refers placed in a speci”c place to honour an orisha deity. This The works of so many artists mentioned here, as well as
here to the weaving frame on which these photographs is where the strength of the orisha is based [assenta-se those not mentioned, are veritable hybrid constructions,
were printed. Instead of sewing “well-behavedly” and in Portuguese]. We can ruminate on how these meanings marked by montage, by stitching, by being collected
doing her weaving so as to ful”l the “feminine” role that circulate in Assentamento. This work explicitly deals with from shards and rubble, by being installations, graphic
society imposes on women, Paulino shifts the frame, the traumas, the wounds opened by slavery – wounds or photographic prints, performances and theatrical
breaks with its role as an instrument of gender control that do not close. The word “trauma” comes from Greek scenes. The strength of these artistic devices lies in
and turns it into a device of her eminently political art. and means wound. There is no suturing that could ever being works of memory that create and open before us
More recently, the artist has been working with stitch up the wounds of four centuries of slavery or the new territories, help to erect new houses for us to live
stitching together fragments of fabric, which I will call violence of the slave trade. Paulino tells us about this beyond homelessness and discomfort. Like pickaxes,
“patches” to emphasise their element of fragmentation violence, but without reproducing the famous images of these devices break down walls of forced oblivion and
and precariousness, in which some of the most iconic Rugendas and Debret, which portrayed the torturous acts silencing. As I stated at the start of this text, the impressive
97
25/03/2022 11:00
Book_ARTE_58.indb 97
Book_ARTE_58.indb 97 25/03/2022 11:00