Afro-baroque

My relationship with Afro-Baroque is aesthetic, but it is mainly of a political stance, drawing on the memory of objects by re-signifying them while retaining their original features. Contemporary furniture lacks any details that would interest me purely for the purpose of creating a work of art. I am interested in the Baroque in the literal sense, as well as being influenced by it, because Salvador has a strong Baroque presence. I also lived in Minas Gerais, where I visited Mariana. In my assemblages, I often use arabesques and wooden scrolls derived from Baroque furniture, similar to the carvings seen in churches in Bahia and Minas Gerais.

However, the key issue in this choice is to question and highlight who actually produced this Baroque style. Art history in Brazil often overlooks the fact that the great woodcarvers, sculptors, and artisans who practiced these trades and crafted this furniture were Black. This is where the concept of Afro-Baroque arises: I am a Black man from the favela who chose to work with this material, in which the Baroque style is most fully expressed. Afro-Baroque, for me, lies precisely in the ancestral heritage of those who made this furniture and built these churches, fragments of which are still available in antique shops or, more often than not, have been discarded.

Objects

The raw material for my work comes from scrapyards, garbage dumps, antique shops, or direct donations from my community. I walk the streets and salvage hardwoods such as jacarandá and imbuia, which have been summarily discarded because modern society has grown accustomed to consuming what I call “furniture without memory”. What draws me to these fragments, whether they are chairs, iron railings, machetes or forks, is firstly their design, and then foremost the marks of life they bear.

My work essentially involves gathering these forgotten materials and reconfiguring them according to an Afrocentric logic. At the Bienal, my work Falogun is a good illustration of this alchemy. I structured the piece by combining an antique display cabinet door, an industrial tap, tiles, keys, and a pocket knife. The knife takes centre stage in the work for a clear reason: it represents Ogum, the orisha responsible for introducing metallurgy to urban culture. I created a flow of blue and red beads coming from the tap, to symbolise Ogum’s vital energy gushing out into the world. By placing the key next to the machete, I am invoking a direct symbolic technology: the power to open paths and unlock doors.

The same relationship with memory informs my work Ancestrais, in which I arrange two wooden shoe lasts on a wall-mounted tray. When I evoke the ancestors, I am referring to those who have walked this material plane and passed away. For us, Black people of the diaspora, whether in Brazil, Cuba, or Haiti, the power of our ancestrality resides essentially in our feet. This is the visual translation itself of the concept of Sankofa: moving forward while keeping our gaze on those who have stayed behind. After all, every step we take towards the future is and always will be sustained by the steps of those who came before us.

Self-education

I make a point of emphasizing my self-taught background and the entire framework of knowledge that constitutes me as an artist, without having attended university. I am a Black, working-class, nordestino Brazilian multidisciplinary artist in my 50s who works as a furniture and jewelry designer, and who also works with illustration, printmaking, sculpture, and video art. My first great teacher was my own family: I am the grandson of a cabinetmaker and the son of an exceptional artisan, seamstress, and embroiderer, who made the furniture in our home and filled the walls with paintings and drawings.

However, self-education requires unparalleled discipline. We sometimes think that self-education is more relaxed, but it can be quite rigorous because we have to go the extra mile to tackle issues that we didn’t learn about at school. It was with this rigour that I took valuable courses at MAM Bahia, studying under Zu Campos – my eternal mentor, who passed away two years ago.

In this process of technical and theoretical development, it must be said that my creative process and my research are not solely focused on the subject of the orixás. I am indeed a man of axé: I have served as an ogã for 30 years and have been a member of the Ifá worship for 24 years. However, my research expands beyond this to encompass an Afrocentric worldview. This perspective shapes my reflections on the cosmos and religiosity, but my work does not deal exclusively with interpretations of the orixás or entities associated with Candomblé.

My work deeply explores themes such as violence, the Bakongo cosmogram, Afro-ancestrality, and the complex interweaving of Brazilian ancestrality, which involves Black and Indigenous participation in the face of the forced involvement of the white European colonizer. It is very important to address this in order to dispel the limiting notion that we, as Black artists, only speak of the orixás. While this presence and perspective certainly exists in our work, we also explore and research universal themes that affect us and which we consider important to discuss.

Itinerancy

Movement of the work is what keeps it alive. It is very important that these works keep moving–that they go to Brasília, come to Salvador, and then travel to Chile and Mexico. I think it’s fantastic that these sculptures are seen by people from different places and in other regions. Art comes to life through the friction of the gaze of others. That people have their own aesthetic experiences in contact with the works and bring us new solutions or interpretations of the works they see–all of this enriches the work. Each new territory offers a new reading of the material I work with, and this itinerancy is an integral part of the visual maturation of my process.