Ways of Liberation and Survival

Centro Cultural São Paulo presents its 31st Exhibitions Program in 2021, and the projects selected by the curatorial committee affirm a decisive commitment to democratic and decolonial values. Fortunately, these values have gradually come to guide the actions of institutions most directly engaged in building a society in which debates and struggles for racial, gender, and class equality are not concealed. This laudable ambition is the most evident result of the struggle waged by those excluded until now. In our country, as we know, public and private policies supporting the production of art and knowledge have historically been scarce. This shortage is not accidental; it forms part of a set of long-established strategies intended to safeguard the privileges of social groups favored by a culture of white heteronormativity.

It may be presumptuous, from my position and experience as a Black, working-class, cisgender man, to imagine any intellectual device capable of decoding the poetic practices of sculptor Rebeca Carapiá. In all her complexity, this Black lesbian artist from the periphery constitutes herself as a survivor who, in her own emphatic words, was a kind of “boat made to sink.” What she and other divergent people represent is a provocation to reactionary forces that refuse bodies unlike established models. The challenge their presence poses is met with epistemicidal brutality and the resulting ethnocide to which those who do not conform to the ethical, aesthetic, or biological standards and ideals of self-declared hegemonic groups are exposed.

For this reason too, Rebeca Carapiá’s aesthetic, and inevitably ethical, project commands attention. Like any body of work with great poetic depth, it carries multiple appeals and interests. One arises from the artist’s interpretation of her own history and everyday life, her experiences and affective exchanges with the human, material, and immaterial elements of the territory she inhabits, ultimately expressed through the production of knowledge and poetic unfoldings. Her territory, Salvador’s Cidade Baixa, is likewise translated into her artistic practice.

The way the artist structures her work, and the results she obtains from the operations she performs, produce a profoundly personal visual vocabulary that distinguishes her and, importantly, simultaneously enshrines the history of an entire collective of women and men who, because of ethnicity, gender, and class, have been excluded from the history that claims hegemony. The artist affirms the qualities particular to this human and geographic territory, a place that imbues with power those who live there without evading it. This power, however, can be understood only if we engage with the epistemological paradigms produced there. If, until recently, the adjectives Black, lesbian, working-class, and peripheral designated social vulnerability, deprivation, and deficit, today, by contrast, they signal a latent state of agency and assertiveness, grounded in resilience, that allows us to aspire to emerge from the “great night” established by colonialism.

The raw material of Rebeca Carapiá’s work is iron, the emblem of Ogun, the orisha of this mineral. Ogun is the orisha of war, agriculture, and technology, and the protector of artisans and blacksmiths. Iron rebar is central to Carapiá’s production: the same rebar used at the outset of construction, which, once covered with concrete and cement, forms the columns that distribute a building’s weight between floors and walls. Carapiá’s work has an affinity with that of the metalworker, blacksmith, and builder, professions generally assigned by sexist convention to men, a convention Carapiá also subverts. It is her dialogue with iron, the “questions” she asks of it, that shapes her poetics. The materials in her works are thus imbued with qualities and truths of their own, while remaining subject to the artist’s singular experience. Only the misogyny so pervasive in daily life could find strange her use of this or any other material that interests her.

What we in Brazil’s Southeast generally understand as Constructivism, and even Neo-Concretism, does not provide the precise terms needed for a fuller understanding of this artist’s work, unless that notion includes at least some consideration of the work of Rubem Valentim, who was also Black and from Bahia. A merely biographical, necessarily sociological approach does not fully translate the artist’s experience either, though it cannot be disregarded. The sensitivity with which she chooses, handles, and assigns a destination to her materials is also grounded in a longstanding relationship without academic roots; her experience working with these materials far predates her present use of them. The construction of space projected by her sculpture also has a graphic and architectural character. This projection, a graphic architecture, we might say, shelters and welcomes, but does not confine those who approach it.

The artistic and intellectual achievements of excluded segments of the Afro-Atlantic population within Brazilian territory, people who have suffered and continue to suffer the consequences of racism, misogyny, and homophobia, cannot be properly understood without also understanding the social and geographic contexts in which they are formed. This is another reason to celebrate works such as Rebeca Carapiá’s, whose complexity informs us about fundamental experiences that must be sought beyond the southeastern axis usually favored on such occasions.