The Politics and Aesthetics of Absence: From Erasure to Repair through Refusal, Retreat and Retrieval Across the Feminist Black Atlantic

As part of the Brazilian Studies Lecture Series, Ana Balona de Oliveira, FLAD Visiting Professor at Brown University will speak on "The Politics and Aesthetics of Absence: From Erasure to Repair through Refusal, Retreat and Retrieval Across the Feminist Black Atlantic."

This talk charts theoretical, curatorial, and artistic circulations across a feminist Black Atlantic of sorts. It considers how a transnational Black sorority across linguistic and disciplinary borders has occupied major curatorial stages of global contemporary art on both sides of the North and South Atlantic: from New York to Venice to São Paulo to Luanda (including visual and sonic contributions from Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde, and Guinea-Bissau). These Black feminist gatherings have fostered critical conversations on past and present systems of racial, gender and class subordination and manifold forms of resistance and refusal, notably through retreat and retrieval – forms of strategic presence and absence, visibility and opacity, sound and silence, whereby ancestries have been shown to both refuse and inspire ‘impossible’ futurities.