SYNOPSIS
"Where there is a nation, there is brutality. And where there is brutality, we are the target"
Jota Mombaça
Is it possible to redeem a nation that once sought to exterminate the majority of its people?
In her immersive installation “Redemption”, creator Mariana Luiza critiques the ideology of racial whitening in Brazil, which was widely disseminated in the country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She offers a poetic, counter-colonial response to this project, symbolized by the painting “Ham's Redemption”.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
In 1911, during the Universal Congress of Races in London, Brazil unveiled its ambitious national project. Within a century, or three generations, the Brazilian population would be mostly white. Completely exterminating blacks and mestizos from its composition.
Featuring a black grandmother, a mestizo mother, a white father and their light-skinned infant at the center of the frame, the painting Ham's Redemption (A Redenção de Cam) was exhibited during the congress as a symbol of the racial whitening ideology in Brazil."The black passing into white, in the third generation, by the effect of the crossing of races".
More than 110 years later, creator Mariana Luiza, who identifies as a Black woman, critiques Brazil’s racial whitening policy and offers a poetic, counter-colonial answer to this painting in an immersive installation.
Redemption transforms space, image, sound and scent into a labyrinth. At the start of the journey, the space is flooded with archive footage. As the exploration continues, we find ourselves in a dark and deep hollow of Kalunga, or the center of the earth. Through a mirror of water, we find an alternative destination of Ham's Redemption and meet the cosmovision of the Bantu civilizational presences in Brazil. We feel the smoke, the magma, the skin and the mixtures of life and death. Here, the experience of time is no longer linear; on the contrary, as the Bantu believe, it curves and repeats.
WRITINGS FROM THE DIRECTOR
Bright sparks travel across the boundaries of dream and mystery in the struggle for life and belonging. Surrounded by the atmosphere of earthly encounters with the ancestral world, which govern the rites of permanence and resistance of the Black people against the forces that seek their extermination, water and fire are the life-generating elements that nourish the constant and endless struggle.
Children send messages to their ancestors through graphic writing, weaving sublimated communications of strength and endurance. Calls to war. Rebellion invocations. The enchanted from the forest, caboclos, Maria Padilha announce the fight. Black men and women take this country by storm, establishing the forest as their civilizing legacy, constituting a nation without borders or limitations for Black people, from whom the forces against the white nation project are invoked. The force of the leaves, the force that comes from the center of the earth, from the depths of the magma and the waters, makes the earth tremble.
Carl Von Martius defined the history of Brazil through the metaphor of the meeting of the waters. The Portuguese river, strong, "engine of the country" was fed by small Black and Indigenous tributaries. It turns out that the mighty river that Von Martius described devastated any possibility of a confluence with Black and Indigenous people. The Portuguese river was the engine of slavery.
What the German argument ignored is that the waters are the membranes of dreams. It is through the waters that the encounter with the ancestors takes place. The waters carry the beginning and the end of life. Just like magma, the primordial fire of the creation of the earth and life. The cycle of fire, smoke, embers, flame and ash leads the narrative of ancestor encounters and invocations. The primordial smoke heralds the end of times. The living flame eats away at the nation that wished to destroy us. The ashes announce the place of belonging. No nation, no borders, no family model.
TECHNICAL SPECS
fomat
IMMERSIVE INSTALLATION
year of completion
2023
country of origin
BRAZIL
type
DIGITAL VIDEO
lenght
26 MINUTES
specs
COLOR/WITH SOUND
world première
IDFA DOCLAB
supported bt
EMBASSY OF THE KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS
INSTITUTO GUIMARÃES ROSA DO ITAMARATY
KOSINIMA INC.
found footage archives
ACERVO ARQUIVO NACIONAL
ACERVO FGV
ACERVO WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY
ACERVO MUSEU DA REPÚBLICA
COLEÇÃO - FAMÍLIA PASSOS
ACERVO FIOCRUZ
BRITISH PATHÉ ARCHIVE
BOLETINS DE EUGENIA
FUNDAÇÃO BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL
ACERVO BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL
ACERVO HEMEROTECA NACIONAL
INSTITUTO MOREIRA SALES
ACERVO MESTRES DO SÉC. XIX
ACERVO GILBERTO FERREZ
ACERVO PEDRO CORRÊA DO LAGO
ACERVO SEBASTIÃO LACERDA
MUSEUS DA IMIGRAÇÃO DE SÃO PAULO
MUSEU HOLAMBRA
MUSEU NACIONAL DE BELAS ARTES DO RIO DE JANEIRO
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO RIO DE JANEIRO
ACERVO BIBLIOTECA DIGITAL DE OBRAS RARAS
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, theses defending a superior genetic standard for the human "race" prevailed in various parts of the world.
At the top of the scale, the white European man was the undisputed leader in terms of civilization, technology, intellectuals, economics, and politics, compared to the other ethnicities and "races", such as the "yellow" (Asians), the "red" (native people), and the Black (African).
The intellectual currents that supported these racist theses were varied and ranged from Henry Thomas Buckle's determinism, Spencer's social Darwinism, Auguste Comte's positivism to Gobineau's theories. They had a rather anxious way of relating to Time, looking towards the future, in the search for a nation, without noticing the jewels of the present. "Brazil, the country of the future", was built with concepts such as "social evolution", "progress " and "development".
In the 19th century, Brazil became a great laboratory for racial studies, widely visited by foreign naturalists, intellectuals and researchers. In 1869, the French philosopher Arthur de Gobineau came to Brazil on a diplomatic mission. In 1874, he wrote an article for the French periodical “Le Correspondant” entitled "L'émigration au Brésil".
Chichico Alkmim, 1910
According to Gobineau, Brazilians would be an extinct race in less than two hundred years due to the inferiority of mestizo (mixed race) and Indigenous populations.
"There is no longer any Brazilian family that does not have any Black and Indian blood in its veins; the result is stunted complexions which, if not always repulsive, are always unpleasant to the eye."
Arthur de Gobineau, L’émigration au Brésil, 1874.
In Gobineau's perspective, besides being "aesthetically repugnant", Brazilians had even more serious defects, such as being averse to work, addictions, infertile and physically weak, which would guarantee their reduction and annihilation in less than two centuries.
The article written for “Le Correspondant”, intended to attract to the Brazilian lands a "desirable" population, in order to replace the "degenerate" population that was heading towards disappearance.
In Brazil, miscegenation was seen in a different light. Pseudoscientific theses of social Darwinism and racial eugenics supported the defense of the whitening of the population as a necessary factor for the development of Brazil. The Brazilian oligarchy, which was and still remains mostly white, started to take for granted that the country was not developing because its population was mostly Black and mestizo people. European immigration became the ideal method to colonize and civilize the national territory covered by virgin forests (symbol of backwardness and savagery) and "improve" the Brazilian population.
"ON MESTIZOS IN BRAZIL"
The anthropologist and physician João Baptista de Lacerda was one of the main exponents of the whitening thesis among Brazilians, having participated, in 1911, in the Universal Congress of Races in London. This congress brought together intellectuals from all over the world to debate the issue of racialism, the relation between races and the progress of civilizations. Baptista took to the event an article entitled "Sur les métis au Brésil" (“On Mestizos in Brazil”), in which he defended miscegenation as something positive, in the case of Brazil, due to the superimposition of the traits of the white race over the other races, the Black and the Indigenous.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT IN BRAZIL
"The history of Brazil is schizophrenic" Beatriz Nascimento
In 1822, Brazil gained its political independence. History books tell us that on September 7, 1822, Emperor Dom Pedro I cried "independence or death" on the banks of the Ipiranga River. The image we have of this day is the painting “Ïndependência ou morte" by Pedro Américo. A faithful copy of ”1807, Friedland" by Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier.
The fact is that in Brazil, at that time, there were no horses, only mules (which were more resistant to geographical and climatic conditions). It is also known that Dom Pedro traveled in a small entourage of 4 or 5 people. The official image of Brazil's independence is a copy. Dom Pedro I's eternalized cry "independence or death" was also the official cry of the Haitian Revolution. Brazil copied Napoleon's image and the cry of the first Black republic in the Americas to found an independent, slave-owning monarchy.
The emerging nation desperately needed to invent its own history. The Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (IHGB), created for this purpose, invented an essay competition to solve a rather uncomfortable issue: "How should the history of Brazil be written?". It was about inventing a new history of and for Brazil.
The peculiar contest had a unique character as its winner, the Bavarian naturalist Karl von Martius (1794-1868). A foreigner who wandered around Brazil cataloging herbs and animals, he defended the thesis that the country was defined by its unique mix of people and populations. Using the metaphor of a mighty river, corresponding to the Portuguese heritage that would ultimately "cleanse" and "absorb the small tributaries of the Indigenous and Black races", he represented the country based on the singularity and scale of the mestizaje of peoples here.
The idea of a harmoniously mixed-race country only worked in von Martius' writing. Brazil's mixed race was the result of the mighty violence of Portuguese colonization.
RIO DE JANEIRO: FROM THE CITY OF PIANOS TO THE PARIS OF THE TROPICS
Brazil, which was born to perpetuate slavery, continued to mirror colonizing Europe by copying its culture and customs, even when these customs made no sense in tropical lands.
Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the empire, was for a long time known as the "City of Pianos", due to the abundance of pianos in the homes of many families who didn't even know how to play them. The instrument had become a symbol of status and alignment with a more cultured way of life, even when this wasn't actually the case. In the streets of imperial Rio de Janeiro, the majority of people were Black, enslaved and freed individuals who performed all kinds of manual labor: carrying goods, transporting people, selling fruit, sharpening knives and tools, trading household items, carrying water, handling waste, selling food, washing clothes, etc. In 1845-46, during his visit to Rio de Janeiro, traveler Thomas Ewbank wrote in his diary (which later became a book: “Diário de uma visita ao país do cacau e das palmeiras”): "The inevitable tendency of slavery everywhere is to make work a dishonorable activity (...). Black slavery is the rule in Brazil, and Brazilians recoil in horror at any manual labor. In the spirit of the privileged classes of other countries, Brazilians say that they were not born to work, but to command. If you ask a young Brazilian from a respectable family, but in poor economic conditions, why he doesn't learn a trade and start earning a living independently, and nine times out of ten, he will tremble with indignation, and ask if you want to insult him! Work? We have Black people for that. Yes, hundreds and hundreds of families have one or two slaves, whose earnings constitute their only source of livelihood."
In 1890, Brazil raised the republican flag and began a project of social and urban sanitation with the intention of removing and “domesticating” the Black population that lived in the city center and surrounding neighborhoods. The positivist motto "order and progress" was put into practice in the capital and in cities such as São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte. The proposal of the elite was to erase the colonial and slave-owning backwardness by revitalizing urban centers, industrializing the hitherto largely agrarian country and modernizing Brazil's cultural and social scene. In Rio de Janeiro, the capital of both the former empire and the new republic, the sanitation project was called "operation Bota-Abaixo". The operation to revitalize the city center involved demolishing hundreds of houses and residential buildings (tenements), where a majority-Black population lived, in order to build theaters, cafés, museums, public buildings and grand boulevards. The city was then divided into two parts: one central and one marginal. "One European and the other Indigenous". Indigenous, at the time meant native (and the natives were Black and Indigenous people as well as people from northeastern Brazil). The Black population living in the center were swept to the margins of the city, hidden by the urban project of the elites. And in just a few years, the "dirty and disgusting" city gave way to what we know as the "Marvelous City", or the "Paris of the tropics". Laws and decrees imposed rules on urban life with the intention of restricting, even after abolition, the free movement of Black people in the city center. Bathing in the sea in Copacabana had strictly regulated hours and attire. Popular parties, drumming and "shouting in the streets without being necessary was prohibited, just as it was forbidden for workers to go around shouting in the streets under penalty of 48 hours in jail". As a customary rule, it was stipulated that proper attire was required to walk on the boulevards of Rio de Janeiro: men in tails and gloves, women in voluminous dresses, corsets and petticoats. So much clothing under a scorching sun and a heat index nearing 40°C. Gradually, Brazilian customs, literature, music, fashion, and even cuisine began to resemble Europe.
However, while we wanted to belong to the "Old World", we boasted a rather peculiar title: the largest racial democracy on the planet. The only place in the world where Black, Indigenous and white people lived in complete harmony. The paradise of the races...
As long as Black people remained on the margins and white people stayed at the center of the nation.
A new nation was emerging in Republican Brazil. Schizophrenic, delusional and perverse.
THE SCHIZOPHRENIC NATION AND ITS LAWS
From the first constituent assembly in 1823 to the first decades of the republic (1945), the issue of national identity was discussed in several legislative assemblies that formulated laws with the explicit intention of building a society of white phenotypes and Eurocentric values, excluding and marginalizing the Black legacy of Brazilian culture and history:
Laws that orchestrated the expulsion of free Africans from Brazil, both in the slaveholding period and in the post-abolition period;
laws that encouraged the importation of European immigrants in order to maintain "in the ethnic composition of the population, the most convenient features of European descent" (...) "except the indigenous of Asia or Africa". (1870);
And even laws whose racist intentions are more explicit: "prohibit the entry of any Black person in Brazil (...) with the aim of improving the race" (1921);
Contemporary Brazil has much in common with the nation envisioned by the post-independence bourgeoisie. It is not rare to see the imperial flag flying in the windows of Brazilian homes today. Nor are rare the comments made by the president and some of his ministers praising the slaveholding relations and this project of an Europeanized nation. Two years ago, in one of his live broadcasts on social media, Bolsonaro said: "More and more, the Indian is a human being just like us”. And on the eve of the 2018 election, Hamilton Mourão, at the time candidate for vice president, stated : "People, let me go there that my children are waiting for me. My grandson is a handsome guy, see there. Whitening of the race". The thought of a superior white race that brings "progress and development to the nation" is still very much present in this country. And this is our greatest setback.
