Paper short abstract:

Our proposal relates the work Mangue (1929) by Brazilian painter Di Cavalcanti to the barbaric murder of 8 people in a Brazilian slums, to inquire about the responsibility of art in the acceptance and uncritical propagation of representations used to dehumanize black men and women.

Paper long abstract:

On November 22, 2021, eight bodies were found in the mangrove of a Brazilian slums. According to the press, the deaths are linked to clashes with the police. This fact, while revealing the confrontations of urban violence, the unequal way in which Brazilian society was structured and the long networks of Necropolitics, is also due to a series of symbolic violence according the way black men and women are represented in Arts. This article, the result of our doctoral research, visits the work Mangue (1929) by the Brazilian painter Di Cavalcanti to investigate to what extent the way in which the bodies of black women are represented there are in dialogue with the eugenics values of his time, the who guided the photographs taken by the South African lady Saartjie Baartman. We take the contributions of authors such as Frantz Fanon and more recently, Achille Mbembe and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí to examine the scope of this painting, as a tool of Colonialism, both for the importance of the painter in the Brazilian art market and for its reproduction in school textbooks. An image that participates in the country's Visual Culture and that, therefore, acts in the propagation of the symbolic violence that defined the bodies that could be exposed and brutalized. We will investigate the place of this debate in contemporary visual art in Brazil and discuss the strategies adopted that enable the decolonization of the gaze.

References

At least 8 bodies are found in São Gonçalo. https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2021/11/apos-acao-do-bope-ao-menos-7-corpos sao-encontrados-em-sao-goncalo-rj.shtml FANON, Frantz. Black skins, white masks. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2008.

OYEWUMI, Oyèrónkẹ́The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse. University of Minnesota, 1997.