by Kleber Antonio de Oliveira Amancio

The canvas we are looking at is by Sidney Amaral (1973 – 2017). It will accompany us in this brief text so that we can think about the phenomenon that I am for now calling the ‘politics of visibility’. Before going into details, however, let’s take a look at the work. Let it lead us to the problems. After all, art, more than something we can research, is a form of knowledge production.

Gargalheira ou quem falará por nós? [Iron collar or who will speak for us?] (2014) features the shirtless bust of the artist in profile. He wears a serious expression, his eyes are closed and his head is slightly raised. His neck is encircled by microphones (of different shapes and types) attached to supports. The white background isolates the character from the environment. The contrast enhances our understanding of the details of the human figure (be it the texture of the skin, the lines of the skull, or the sparse, almost imperceptible beard) as well as the metallic nuances of the microphones. 

This image prompts a profound reflection on communication, exposure, and power. It articulates issues that concern black subjectivities in a world where identities are available as continuous flows of formation and transformation.¹ Through the symbolic use of microphones, the canvas suggests a tension between sound and silence, emphasizing how this process is shaped by forces that go beyond the control of the individual itself.

Sidney Amaral was a visual artist who often reflected on identities from his own image. His focus was on investigating, in addition to his own self-perception, the ways in which society perceived him. The canvas in question addresses the ways in which black bodies are seen within a structure of oppression, which connects them to a past in which they were not recognized as human beings. This impacts these subjects both in the way they think about themselves and in the way they are seen by others.

Afro-Brazilian art is evidently a complex, sometimes contradictory concept that has had different meanings depending on the context in which it is mobilized.² However, we are interested to learn that today’s black artistic practices have tensioned this debate and its contradictions, by claiming not only space, but also narrative and epistemic plurality. Artists such as Sidney Amaral, Rosana Paulino, and Jaime Lauriano have operated as agents of rupture, elaborating aesthetics and discourses that reposition the place of blackness in the history of national art. 

Whites have constructed their works and identities based on the unshakeable belief that they are expressing only what their subjectivity pursues, since, in the West, they are seen as the standard of self-proclaimed universality.³ This construction is anchored in the ghost of the absent black, that is, in the supposed historical and social absence of black figures, whether in the arts or in the intellectual world.⁴ When these artists think of the representation of Afro-Brazilian culture, they undergo a process of observation and identification of the ‘other’, which in turn reaffirms their identity as white. Even if the representation is mediated by affections, it reflects a power relationship.⁵ And this doesn’t just happen on a personal level, but within a framework of social and historical relations.

We are experiencing a sui generis moment in national art. Over the last decade we have seen the dismantling of white Brazilian art.⁶ This means that the centrality of white perspectives in Brazilian artistic history is under scrutiny. These perspectives have become hegemonic through a complex organism that has actively made many black works invisible while perpetuating a Mythopoiesis guaranteed by the pact of whiteness.⁷ We are therefore faced with the unveiling of the constitutive processes of this field. In this sense, one of the consequences of this movement has been the realization that the art of non-white agents has often been made invisible, just as in so many other situations it has only found a place in the midst of a plot whose structuring axis was exotification, marginalization, or apparent assimilation of established power dynamics.

Amaral’s canvas, in particular, denounces the devices of control that seek to circumscribe black subjectivities. The microphones, which can at first be read as instruments of amplification, operate as instruments of oppression, suggesting that visibility is not necessarily synonymous with emancipation. That said, the politics of visibility emerges as a field in full dispute: while whiteness has used the exposure of black bodies to reinforce stereotypes and consolidate its power, contemporary black artists give new meaning to this visibility through agency and reconstruction.

There is a collective effort to counteract white-Brazilian hegemony through the most diverse strategies. Instead of accepting the roles assigned by the logic of whiteness, these artists have constructed new narratives that interrogate the past, reposition the present, and project futures. This is associated with a new social perception of identities in the constitution of the nation and has local connections (such as the creation of Law 12.711 of 2012, known as the ‘Quota Law’) as well as global issues (such as the process of provincialization in Europe).⁸

It’s a process that goes beyond mere representation; it’s about affirming the plurality of black experiences and subverting the systems of exclusion that have historically shaped the field of Brazilian art.

Despite the obvious diversity of these subjects, the myth that positions whiteness as the radiating center of culture and universality is the main point of convergence. This myth is not only deconstructed, but also displaced, giving way to new centralities where Afro-Brazilian art emerges as the protagonist of its own narrative, capable of dialoguing on equal terms with other traditions, without subordinating itself to them.

¹ Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Jonathan Rutherford (org.). Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Londres: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. pp. 222-237.
² For a detailed reflection on this concept, see, among many others: Marianno Carneiro da Cunha, “Arte Afro-Brasileira” in: Walter Zanini (org.). História geral da arte no Brasil. São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles, 1983; Kabengele Munanga, “Arte afro-brasileira: o que é, afinal? = Afro-Brazilian art: what is it, after all?” In: Arte afro-brasileira, 98-111. São Paulo, Brazil: Associação Brasil 500 Anos Arte Visual: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2000; Marta Heloísa Leuba Salum. Cem anos de arte afro-brasileira = One hundred years of Afro-Brazilian art in François Neyt; Vanderhaeghe, Catherine; Munanga, Kabengele; Salum, Marta Heloísa Leuba. Arte afro-brasileira. São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 Anos Arte Visual: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2000. p.112-121; Roberto Conduru, Arte afro-brasileira. Belo Horizonte: C/Arte, 2007; Hélio Santos Menezes Neto. Entre o visível e o oculto: a construção do conceito de arte afro-brasileira. 2018. Dissertation (Master’s in social anthropology) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2018.³ Frantz Fanon, Pele Negra, Máscaras Brancas. São Paulo, Ubu Editora, 2020.
⁴ Aracy Amaral, “Um inventário necessário e algumas indagações: a busca da forma e da expressão na arte contemporânea” in Emanuel Araujo (org.). A mão afro-brasileira. significado da contribuição artística e histórica. São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo/ Museu Afro Brasil, 2010. Vol.II, p.10.
⁵ Benedictus de Spinoza. Ética demonstrada segundo a ordem geométrica. Tradução de Tomaz Tadeu. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2009.
⁶ Kleber Antonio de Oliveira Amâncio, “A História da Arte branco-brasileira e os limites da humanidade negra”, Farol, Vitória, v. 17, n. 24, pp. 27-38.
⁷ Cida Bento, O pacto da branquitude. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
⁸ Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

About the author

Kleber Antonio de Oliveira Amancio is an Assistant Professor at the Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB) and holds a PhD in social history from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). His research focuses on Afro-Latin American art, 19th-century Brazilian history, and Brazilian art history. He is the author of several academic publications, including the article “A arte branco-brasileira e os limites da humanidade negra,” and is a columnist for Alma Preta, a newspaper dedicated to art and the Afro-diaspora. He also hosts the podcast Gargalheira, which features interviews with Afro-Brazilian visual artists. Currently, he is a Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, where he is preparing his book on the Afro-Brazilian painter Arthur Timotheo da Costa. The book explores the artist’s critique of modernity and whitening projects in Brazil at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.