Our Ghosts Have Come to Collect: Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Brazilian Art

Abstract

This text expands, deepens and comments on the essay “As Práticas Artísticas Contemporâneas no Contexto Ibero-Americano e o Pensamento Pós-Colonial e Decolonial” (Contemporary Artistic Practices in the Ibero-American Context and Postcolonial and Decolonial Thought; Sales & Cabrera, 2020), where we comment on the work of the artists Yonamine, Grada Kilomba, Jota Mombaça, and Daniela Ortiz. In the text cited, we work on the problematic discussion around the emergence of a field of thought called “post-colonial” and a decolonial project and how poetic practices interested in the discussion around the colonial legacy are configured in the Ibero-American space. From a historical approach, we try to understand how postcolonial studies produce influence in Brazil and the decolonial turn and thought consolidated in Latin America to understand how to produce responses from the Brazilian art field to decolonization issues. In postcolonial studies and the decolonial project, the decolonization of art is related to the questioning of a Eurocentric thought matrix from its racialized and subalternized world representation schemes deeply related to the performative character of the one who narrates. In other words, the decolonization of art and thought, and the ways of being and existing in the world, are not dissociated from the emergence of artists, writers, and intellectuals. These intellectuals dispute the right to self-representation, self-presentation, and the creation of non-colonial narratives and images or those who stand completely outside the Eurocentric imaginary and worldview. This text establishes a deep interest in the Brazilian context, appropriating the important discussion around the constitution of a decolonial field of thought, analyzing the work of contemporary Brazilian artists such as Jota Mombaça, Juliana Notari, Michelle Mattiuzzi, and Paulo Nazareth.