Bahia afrofuturist: Bauer Sá e Gilberto Filho: Textos: Ayrson Heráclito & Beto Heráclito

ANTI-RACISM IS THE PLACE OF THE FUTURE

Ayrson Heráclito & Beto Heráclito

The idea of Afrofuturism relates to a complex and controversial field of dissident intellectual, political and artistic positions. The term is often associated with the idea of antiracism, ancestry, the future and techno-cultures. The practices of Afrofuturism are driven by the realization of the historical and ideological invisibility of black people in Western societies, demonstrated by the lack of black representation and centrality in literature, the arts, the sciences, in history and science fiction narratives. In this context, Afrofuturism suggests the existence of a black mankind, in a world not determined by racism and oppression. A post-racial world.

The term Afrofuturism was coined by writer Mark Dery in 1994 (Black to the future) and spread by African-American thinkers and artists who criticize enslavement as a mechanism for erasing black lives. It informs a set of intellectual and artistic practices aimed at constructing realities that are not marked by racial supremacy.

A peculiar view of this debate can be found in the theorist Achille Mbembe, in his text Afropolitanism (2005). For the Cameroonian author, there is a pre-colonial African modernity that was devastated in its materiality and memory by colonialist practices. From this perspective, the Afrofuturist vision consists of unveiling modernity in an ancestral past, which is still present in social spaces that are reminiscent of it, such as the sacred territories of Afro-diasporic religions and quilombola communities.

The exhibition Afrofuturist Bahia: Bauer Sá and Gilberto Filho, by promoting a dialog between two black artists with distinct poetics, intends to present different approaches to this new aesthetic, committed to black activism. The languages chosen by the artists—photography and sculpture—serve as a strategy for experimenting with concepts such as corporeality and spatiality from an affirmative and Afrocentric perspective.

Bauer Sá comes from a tradition of black men from Bahia who made a career as photographers or photojournalists. However, what is peculiar about his production is the inclusion of his photography in a refined circuit of visual arts institutions and collections, a circuit that was, by the way, mostly white in Brazil.

In Bahia, Bauer de Sá and Mário Cravo Neto are contemporaries and part of this mainstream that helped to elevate photography to the status of work of art, though racism managed to build different paths and privileges for each of them.

A first issue must be highlighted when thinking of Bauer’s solitary creative process: the way in which the black body is politically crossed by the subject condition in his elaborate imagistic constructions. Bauer is one of the pioneers, as a black artist, of the anti-racist art in Bahia. His work is a sharp critique of the long ethnographic tradition of representing the black body as thing-body (enslaved body). In this way, we can link it to Afrofuturist concerns.

His images are constructed by using synthetic and precise methodological elaborations in order to refine his visual discourse. That explains his choice of black and white photography, technique learned while he was an assistant at his father’s laboratory. In his work, there is a formal control that is at the service of the narrative refinement of the images. Usually his works articulate two elements — a black model and a precisely selected object — that perform a provocative and political action.

His talent produces meticulously constructed and elaborate visual patterns. The shaping of the light on the black background creates a soft glow on the surface, revealing a rare play of light and dark on the black skin. Such esthetic accomplishment represents a technical challenge in the grasp of the image and of black people as photogenic people.  The racist statement that black people “burn the film” is recurrent in common sense. Bauer destroys this infamous idea. The fulfillment of his sophisticated creative process justifies the choice of studio photography, where it is possible to have strict control over the image produced.

In Bauer, the black body, in a fine irony to the Western racist tradition, is also naked. However, in his photos, nudity doesn’t objectify or hypersexualize the black body. In his work, nudity is cutting, political and revolutionary. It is the prerogative of a black mankind that denounces inequalities and claims the condition and place of subject for those unsubmissive bodies. Bauer Sá does guerrilla photography. His aesthetic can be understood by the “black radical tradition”, where the thing-body gives way to the image-body, promoting the death of ethnological photography, so common in Bahia. This stance gives him a prominent place, although on the margins, in the history of Bahia’s art. His work has an impact due to the violent objectivity of the messages it conveys. His images, of rare insurgent poetics, reveal a work that is as critical of the present as it is suggestive of a future where black mankind is possible.

Gilberto Filho (1953) began his artistic career as an apprentice joiner in his father’s workshop in the historic city of Cachoeira, located at the region of the Recôncavo Baiano. This city was once the home of America’s first rural aristocracy, a condition that made it a strategic place for the confluence of African populations coming from slavery. The large concentration of people of African descent has turned the city into a main reference point for afro-Brazilian culture. This explains the presence of numerous black artists who produce wooden sculptures and who enjoy prestige for the quality of their works, usually depicting saints, candomblé deities and other popular themes.

In Cachoeira’s art scene, Gilberto Filho’s work stands out for its complete divergence from the themes of his fellow countrymen. His production creates an erasure in the concept of temporality. He evades Western notions of past and present, putting the linear idea of time in jeopardy through a disruptive imagination that builds cities that are futuristic daydreams. Gilberto re-signifies the future in an ancestral modernity, conceived as a system of knowledges and beliefs from the past that guide our understanding of the world.

In the colonial landscape of the city of Cachoeira, the artist promotes a poetic estrangement by building Afrofuturist megalopolises out of pau d’arco, jacarandá, sucupira, angelim, laurel and other hardwoods. The artist also uses demolition wood to create the future over the ruins of the past. A past seemingly overcome by grandiose architectural constructions, reminiscent of the cities in science fiction stories.

We recognize various traditional woodworking techniques in his manufacture, such as marquetry, carving and cut-outs. With the help of chisels, lathes, saws and hammers, he gives life to skyscrapers, laboriously crafted in their towers, pediments, domes, balconies, window frames, pilotis and countless floors. His constructions, of refined geometric precision, should not be mistaken for models, for, as the artist informs us, “they are not copies of buildings”.

Its scale measures up to 2.5m in height, establishing itself spatially as a kind of installation, and transporting us to imaginary and distant places, dissolving buildings and façades into an almost abstraction. Gilberto creates worlds, imposing himself on the space where his sculptures are assembled. It’s quite curious to contemplate the contemporaneity of his futuristic sculptures in the old colonial halls of the prosaic city of Cachoeira.

At first glance, it seems contradictory to use wood to build future worlds, since they have always been associated with the latest synthetic materials and cutting-edge technologies. However, if we consider the issue from the perspective of African ancestral modernity, perhaps Gilberto Filho’s artistic procedure becomes more understandable. According to this conception, the elements of nature are charged with energies that act on the order of the world, the odus[1] and destinies. That’s why we understand that a cosmic memory lives in each log, pointing the way and guiding ecologically harmonious futures. Therefore, in order to build a future that overcomes the inequalities of the present, there is nothing better than being guided by this ancient wisdom. Only in this way will an absolutely new world be possible.

Gilberto’s cities, on the other hand, go beyond modernism’s utopias of social equity. His buildings seem uninhabited, waiting for the ideals of justice and equality that are to come and that will promote an effective horizontality of social stratification. The artist invites us to fly over an anti-racist society, where his sculptures serve as inspiration for Afrofuturist narratives. A city where a black humanity can fit, a Brazilian Wakanda.

Thinking about the production of Bauer Sá and Gilberto Filho is an exercise in comprehending different anti-racist confrontations, at a time when we are joining forces to rewrite the history of Brazilian art in a diverse and inclusive way, highlighting the centrality of black and indigenous people. Breaking with stereotypes imposed by Western society, black art has been gaining important ground and black artists have been breaking the secular ideological invisibility, asserting themselves as the authors of an artistic poetics that is necessary for thinking of culture in Brazil.

“Will we be able

       to convince hope

not to abandon us when

          the world is happening?

Will we be able to push it

         up the mountain,

at the constant risk of

             its weight collapsing all over us?”

—    Ricardo Aleixo