Vermelho Vivo: Affection, Resistance and Curating as Insurgent Cartography in Lusophone Territories

Abstract

This article examines the exhibition Vermelho Vivo: Amor & Revolução (Vivid Red: Love & Revolution), curated by Ângela Ferreira (also known as Berlinde), as a large-scale curatorial and transmedia project presented in northeastern Brazil at the Museu da Imagem e do Som Chico Albuquerque (Chico Albuquerque Museum of Image and Sound) in Fortaleza. The exhibition integrates political memory, aesthetic insurgency, and radical affection across Lusophone territories. Anchored in the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and the 60th anniversary of the military coup in Brazil, the exhibition is conceptualised as an insurgent cartography. It invokes shared histories of anti-colonial resistance, feminist struggle, and emancipatory imagination, spanning contexts shaped by colonial violence, dictatorial repression, and ongoing processes of democratisation. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, and Indigenous artistic practices, Vermelho Vivo emerges as a living archive that rejects linear narratives and monumental forms of memory. This article conceptualises curating as a situated, relational, and sensitive practice, understood as a gesture of embodied artivism that mobilises images, archives, poetry, and sonic elements to reactivate collective imaginaries and generate critical shifts in the present. Engaging with authors such as bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Suely Rolnik, Édouard Glissant, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, this text examines affection, desire, and opacity as political and epistemological forces that challenge hegemonic regimes of visibility, knowledge, and representation. The exhibition is analysed as a site of tension between past and future, where memory is not fixed or monumentalised but activated as a field of contestation, attentive listening, and reinvention. Through the articulation of feminist insurgencies, Indigenous cosmologies, and revolutionary legacies, Vermelho Vivo positions curating as a critical practice of care and confrontation. The exhibition situates art as a site of active resistance in response to contemporary crises of democracy, ecology, and political imagination.