STATEMENT:The Discovery Of What It Means To Be Brazilian

I was looking at Aline Motta’s Video still, “(Other) Founations d#3”, from the group exhibition “The discovery of what it means to be Brazilian” uniting recent work of contemporary Black Brazilian artists, which is a tribute to James Baldwin’s famous essay “The discovery of what it means to be an American” (1959). It touched me deeply, because refers to one of the most sensitive aspects of diaspora, through slavery, creating a new anthropogeography and a source of wealth for the country. As the country with the largest African diaspora in the world and the last one to abolish slavery in the Americas, Brazil is now facing its colonial past and present. This artwork acts as a mirror in two times and levels, mirroring all the wrongs of the past, assimilation and identity, the way they are portrayed and transformed from generation to generation, what homeland means and what its real meaning is. The discovery of what it means to be Brazilian and the identification of the present and the past. Ultimately what diaspora means nowadays, how much pain can be revealed in a sad face or in a put-out hand asking for help and support, in a sea that sometimes saves and sometimes swallows-wipes off, which sometimes unites and sometimes divides the world into privileged and not(!), in powerful and powerless(!), to poor and rich(!) But mostly to stateless (!)-Efi Michalarou