Raphael Daibert – Lifting the Sky: Practices to Sustain Worlds Otherwise

In the search for practices and practitioners that encompass what I have been calling ‘sky lifting’ manners, with emancipatory and critical perspectives as well as other ways of being, I chose the important figure of Abdias Nascimento. His thinking and doings have historically built the ground for deviant existences and art practices to take place. The restoration of black Brazilians’ dignity is central to the intellectual, dramaturg, politician and artist. Throughout practically his whole life and oeuvre – as Abdias was active politically and artistically from the 1940’s up to the early 2000’s – Nascimento recovers the traditions and forms of social and political knowledge of black communities through theater, painting and political action and organization. In my research, I intend to look into the specific period of the Modern Art Week of 1922 and Anthropophagic Movement in Brazilian art history in order to understand if and how has Abdias’ work been a vehicle of critique and exposure of the long defended fallacy of Brazilian “racial democracy” – a term coined by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s positively conceptualizing about the racial miscegenation in Brazil. This miscegenation has been proved to be based on a violent whitening process of the population and has deep roots in various forms of subjugation of black communities. In considering land as an ancestral territory – not a transitional space or a commodity – indigenous and quilombola communities in Brazil share the need of care for themselves and their surroundings. Taking this culture-nature inseparability into account, and the fact that even if both communities ascend from different cultural and historical constitutions, they share common but different interests that coalesce within an “ecology of practices” – a central term in my research, drawn from philosopher Isabel Stengers: “an ecology of practices is constituted by different political practices which consider expressions of shared relations and possibilities of existence not necessarily sharing the same interests”. These communities, therefore, share an ontological disagreement of “the politics of sameness” – imposed by a white regime of thought, manners, aesthetics, etc. An opening towards other worlds carries with it the question of blackness. According to Denise Ferreira da Silva, as much as blackness can be considered as an “index” of an ongoing exploitation of black labor and the violent history of slavery (that cannot be separated from a history of settler colonialism), it also enacts a practice of expanding the imagination that goes beyond the colonial imagery through a “possibility for a radical departure from a certain kind of world.” Black studies, therefore, are important critical studies that enhance the imagining and making of other worlds. Writer C.L.R. James states, in this sense, that “the task of black studies is the dismantling of Western thought, moved to design ethical and epistemological programs that release the black body from the grips of commodity while at the same time exposing how violence enabled the expropriation of the productive capacity of enslaved and black bodies while the figuring of the thing as commodity interrupted the wholeness blackness holds.” Abdias Nascimento, therefore, introduces a black hero and their tragic and lyrical potential to the stages and literary dramaturgy of Brazil between 1941 to 1966, unveiling a “systematic unmasking process of the racial hypocrisy that permeates the nation”, as he describes in his book Quilombismo. In this period, he founded the Teatro Experimental do Negro – TEN (Black Experimental Theater), in Rio de Janeiro. In an article from 1949 – that I encountered in an exhibition text about the dramaturgy of Nascimento and Augusto Boal at Inhotim, Belo Horizonte – sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos affirms that the TEN of Nascimento stood out through centralizing black individuals on stage as well as denouncing racism in their actions. Throughout the TEN’s trajectory, a formative methodological process, based off of fiction to impact and act in people’s realities, was implemented. These efforts transformed different lives during this period, bringing into the theater illiterate and/or working class black women and men, contributing to their intellectual and artistic emancipation. Besides the black political theater, from the 1950s onwards Abdias Nascimento starts the Museu da Arte Negra [Museum of Black Art] project, “in an attempt to open spaces for Black art and artists that suffered the institutional indifference and were omitted from the official canon”, writes Elisa Alarkin Nascimento in Abdias Nascimento: A Panamefrican Artist’s catalog. Nascimento’s overall practice resonates with performance theorist Laura Harris’ reflections on blackness as a mode of being that neither the modern bourgeois subject, nor European thought, can accommodate.

Raphael Daibert is a Brazilian researcher, curator and artist based in Berlin. He currently holds a position of research associate at the Philosophy and Art History Department at Leuphana University Lüneburg and is a PhD candidate at the DFG Research Training Group ‘Cultures of Critique’ in the same university. Raphael holds a Master’s in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute. He is part of the curatorial collective Cruising Curators in Berlin and founding-member of the anti-racist working group “Third Space: Disordering the Mess” in Munich.