by Naymare Azevedo

Afrotonizar arises from the concern to bring discourse into practice, and is therefore an act of tuning in, multiplying, adding up the experiences of racialized people in their different contexts of cultural and social realities, in an attempt to trigger processes of individual and collective identification. It is a healing energy/gesture that arises from an individual process that would not be possible without the collective, without the exchange with my equals or without the mirrors that made me see myself as Black. It comes from trying to repossess my body and all other non-white bodies. It arises from the effort to put together the pieces scattered about me and those similar to me. From the moment I began to envisage the Afrotonizar platform, I wanted it to be a project for the multiplication, connection and formation of networks of creatives and racialized people who, through the technology of encounter, wanted to have and to exchange experiences beyond shared violence. I wanted to build a space where racialized people could feel free to make art and celebrate their cultures.

The act of afrotonizing is only possible thanks to the trails that ancestry has left, the paths that have been traveled since long ago and those that we have yet to follow. Through this action-concept, I explore the afrographies¹ of my memory to reconnect with the capacities of organic existences. Thinking about a society without colonial frames makes it possible to imagine a world where all people can live with dignity without the mediation of colonial violence. That they can be free, liberated from the violence of the ordered world and its conception of modern society, where sequentiality² promotes the interaction of bodies and separability organizes cultural and economic relations between people.

Between escape and capture, it is possible to imagine ourselves in ways other than those imposed by determinability and to self-reference beyond colonial violence. If in this space-time the practice that remains to us is that of creation, we must be strategic when it comes to deciding what freedom we want for our practices of coexistence, what are the collective paths to be traced so that liberation actually happens? As Denise Ferreira da Silva reminds us, the debt is unpayable and collecting it is perhaps just a way of tiring us out and distracting us from what is most important: being amongst ourselves.

What if we could create a world where we only used our creative energy to live freely? And what would that world be like where we could only live beyond determinability? Could we live in co-creation, despite our differences? In a world of so many possibilities, when a racialized subject chooses to live and not just survive despite colonial trauma, they determine that perhaps it is not the logic of Chronos that governs their life, but probably that of Iroko, the orisha who governs their own experience of time and its contours. And that life, which in itself is already determined and negative, can be infinite.

The Afrotonizar platform is an invitation to those who feel ready to commit to radical imaginative freedom. Since its inception, we have understood the importance of building safe spaces for racialized people to exist and create, open spaces for colonial trauma and wounds to find respite and understanding. Since our founding in 2017, we have worked hard to weave these networks, with a special focus on young creators who manifest the diversity, legacy and cultural richness of their communities and territories.

Our main objective is to promote the liberation of the creative and imaginative capacity of racialized people, forming and promoting liberation strategies for the construction of new images of (im)possible worlds. For this reason, we invest in creating environments that encourage radical imagination and the exercise of innovative narratives and artistic practices. We believe that dreams and intuitions can be seen as technological devices, tools that can transform realities and promote social justice.

I call practices of liberation in the arts all those that act along the lines of encounter, of creation, that undo or break the logic of separability and determination of Western philosophies. When I think of a strategy of deliverance, I think of a mandinga, a spell, a break, a patuá, a prayer or any other evocation of care and protection. We need to subvert the logic that our creation is a product of the ordered world, distorting the perspective that makes us believe in the progressive and democratic linearity of the manufactured being. In a world where autonomy becomes real, difference becomes a connecting link and not one of separability, sequentiality and determinability. Therefore, to propose the act of afrotonizing as a strategy for liberation is to walk through ancestral designs. I believe in change as a strategy for transforming what we want to destroy and build as freedoms. To afrotonize is to create connections that allow us to encounter what moves us towards autonomy. It means recovering the strength of our dreams and acquiring the powers that allow us to face life in the mutation of imaginings that transcend Western molds.

By boosting creativity and supporting these voices, we seek not only to offer a space, but also to enable racialized people to have access to spaces for artistic training. We believe that these practices contribute to a fairer and more inclusive society, although the debt is unpayable, we recognize that for many of these communities, whether Black or Indigenous, the act of creating is also an act of resistance and affirmation of the memories and lives of these groups and their cultures. That is why, as a platform for the articulation and dissemination of possibilities and access, we are committed to developing methodological approaches that encourage imaginative connection and the formation of networks, promoting the exchange of experiences through the technology of encounter, which go beyond the traditional boundaries of imposed artistic making. Our approach is counter-colonial, we move beyond the frames of the world as we know it.

For quilombola thinker and master Antônio “Nêgo” Bispo, the countercolonial functions as a colonial antidote, refusing to affirm or accept the process imposed by the violence of the Eurocentric hegemony project and positioning itself as a subject with agency and decision-making power over its life. In this way, the concept suggests that counter-colonization is the constructive movement that allows the racialized subject to have autonomy, subjective freedom and decision-making power over their life and that of their collective.

With this in mind, in 2021 we held the first edition of Afrotonizar.Lab, in a very unlikely scenario caused by the unprecedented times of the pandemic, the collective showed itself to be present and eager to share. The idea behind the project is to promote networking and share experiences between artists, curators and researchers. During a period established by the educational program, interested participants apply and are selected to take part in immersive activities that bridge practice and theory and contribute to personal and collective artistic and creative development. In addition to meeting other artists and professionals in the sector, the project’s aim is to create possibilities for inclusion in the contemporary visual arts circuit, understanding the importance of creating dialog with art institutions in the country. In the first online edition, we received more than 450 entries from Black and Indigenous artists from all over Brazil and, in the selective process, we chose 50 artists from the North and Northeast of the country. Even in an online format and across screens, the moments of exchanging experiences meant that the participants’ process was important enough to reverberate in their creative practices.

Waleff Dias, Vai e vem [Back and Forth], 2021. Script and editing: Waleff Dias; camera: Irlan Paixão; production: Aritiene Sonandra; soundtrack: Jerônimo Sodré

During the creation process in the lab, many were able to experiment with different mediums, sharing their creations with each other and creating new works made collectively, breaking the idea of a single auteur that the art system usually establishes. At Afrotonizar.Lab 2021, Wallef Dias from Amapá developed studies that led to the research for his short film Vai e vem [Back and Forth], whose soundtrack was developed by Jerônimo Sodré. In this research, Dias used memory as a common thread for his creation, through his childhood memories and his relationship with the hammock where his father used to rest. In this way, the artist activated, through words, images that referred to the games he used to play as a child and how this memory permeated his formation as an individual. For Andrielle Mendes, from Rio de Janeiro, photography was the device that reconnected her with memories that wanted to be forgotten, because they were directly linked to processes and pain caused by colonial trauma. The series Embaralho, created by the artist, represents the possibility of using art as a device to create what seems impossible, yet not to the imagination.

 “The feet in the doorway represent my maternal grandfather, who ran away from home in his youth and when he returned decades later, married my grandmother. My mother arrived in the family a while later, brought home weeks old by him. I never met him.”

Andrielle Mendes

“I was five years old when she refused to go to the Mother’s Day event at school. What would the other children say when I arrived at school without my mother? In the end, she decided to go. But she refused to come any closer for the photo [Using a technique I call emotional collage, I removed the spaces with scissors and brought those who were separated closer together].

Andrielle Mendes

As such, I believe that today the Afrotonizar platform has become a place of study and experimentation. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney³, Black study allows us to investigate our connections and weave our dark cloaks – it is about encounter and belonging. By proposing the exercise of collective political imagination, we are also spreading our seeds, searching for fertile soil for our dreams and crossroads where we can lower our creative offerings and connect with our peers. Black study is a strategy of liberation that makes it possible to activate the black light that allows us to reach what is ordered by the colonial and hidden by it. Through the encounter and experimentation of revisiting memories, it is possible to create technologies and tools that operate in other logics of life in society. Imagining the world in another way is a practice of liberation, where a model of society is conceived in which cultural difference is not organized by separateness.

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

During this time when I am constructing and writing stories, I want to dig into this skin-world for the dreams that have been protecting me. Beyond an initiative of cultural production, Afrotonizar, for me, is a spiral movement that allows me to be connected and combine things among my own. I hope that, from this gesture, we can somehow dismantle the tools that keep the world in the perverse logic of separability. Because, despite the statistics and flags of representativeness, I continue to try to move under the divine energy of creation, where my imagination allows me to live beyond capture. I do not only wish for the end of colonialism, but for the destruction of everything that makes sense in it. It is not just a game of fitting pieces together, it is about that which is struck, that which can transcend reason and move within what the system says is impossible.

¹ Leda Maria Martins, Afrografias da memória: o Reinado do Rosário no Jatobá. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 1997.

² For Denise Ferreira da Silva in A dívida impagável (São Paulo: Oficina de Imaginação Política e Living Commons, 2019, p. 38). 38), modernity guided by the powers of reason was structured around three ontological pillars: (a) separability, i.e. the idea that everything that can be known about the things of the world must be known by the forms (space and time) of intuition and the categories of Understanding (quantity, quality, relation, modality) – all other categories about the things of the world remain inaccessible and therefore irrelevant to knowledge; and consequently (b) determinability, the idea that knowledge results from the capacity of Understanding to produce formal concepts that can be used to determine (i.e. decide) the true nature of the sensible impressions gathered by the forms of intuition, and the notion of (b) sequentiality, which describes Spirit as movement in time, a process of self-development, and History as the trajectory of the Spirit.

³ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Naymare Azevedo holds a master’s degree in Culture and Society from the Milton Santos Institute at the Federal University of Bahia and is a Public Policy Manager at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. She is the director of the short films “Terreiro de Memórias” and “Criativos do RN.” Founder and general coordinator of the Afrotonizar platform. Director and founder of Ayabá Produtora Criativa e Audiovisual. Co-founder of MIMB – Mostra Itinerante de Cinemas Negros and Executive Producer of Centro Afrocarioca de Cinema. Creative and executive director of Recôncavo Afrofestival. Coordinator of Gira Afro.Lab, which develops projects by Black filmmakers.