Yes and I was lucky to go directly to the Goiás region, where a black community, known as Quilombo Kalungas, lives. I was among them, and I saw history before encountering what could come across as fake, standardized, or fabricated images. I arrived in a beautiful forest where people adopted me. I found myself among families where I felt proud to say “I am black.”

It’s a particular consciousness with a background of struggle—one that continues to be driven by a consciousness that marries indigenous knowledge, medicinal plants, the environment, and an assimilation to it. I didn’t feel like there was a difference between humans and plants, because of a shared and expressed imaginary. One depends on the other and supports its becoming with an essence of healing and observation. Together, they grow, simultaneously. It’s an alternative that embodies pride—one that I didn’t see in the Moroccan South or other parts of Morocco. To think of this nuance is delicate. A person that I can meet in Morocco, with the same skin pigmentation that I’ve seen here in Quilombo, would never accept to be qualified as Black.

I am at a residency in Goiânia launched by Dalton Paula who opened his home to welcome 25 black artists. It’s a place that feels like an urban extension of Quilombo—a refuge that exists outside of the occidental dictionary. It may be qualified as an escape, but it’s not. It’s a legitimized communal gathering.

You know, it’s the first time that I am in a country where I am not asked about where I am from. It’s a particular transparency. You are Brazilian by default. The ethnic landscape is so diverse. You are not asked about your origins until you speak up to say that you don’t speak Portuguese.

What I am suggesting as artwork, as part of the residency, is inspired by Dave The Potter, a black American slave in South Carolina. He was a poet who made art despite harsh conditions of slavery, and he engraved his art with verses from his poems. It fascinated me because I was also engaged in acts of materializing poetry in relation to M’barek Ben Zida (1925-1973).

The earth is a voice. The earth is a body: both a linking element and an agent of separation. I wondered about the possibility of multiplying voices. The project is called “We are what you don’t want to see.” I reunited multiple verses of poetry from Dave the Potter, M’barek Ben Zida, Abderrahman El Majdoub, Conceição Evaristo, Luís Gama, and other Black Brazilian poets including contemporary ones. I worked on them collectively as stanzas in conversation.

Originally they (poets) were part of communities that were engaged in oral history. Through writing, they enabled a prolonged act of archiving ancestral practices of tattooing and scarification. It matters to see the world as a flowing river and to stop dividing it horizontally and vertically in the geopolitical logics of North/South/East/West. We must believe in the fragility of the curved line, and of the oblique line, which profoundly resembles our own fragility(ies). We must accept that there existed unbound mediums of circulation and that despite our singularities, we remain similar. For instance, there is a misconception about the immobility of the earth. Did you know that earth/soil travels? In ports of South America or Africa, there is earth from other continents. Upon the delivery of merchandise across oceans, cargo-filled boats, if returning empty, are filled up with earth/soil, which is later poured into ports.

Pottery, as a process, embodies fragility from the initial conception of a body until the end. It demands significant attention, even when thinking through the logistics of transporting it. It’s a process in which there is a constant presence of elements: for instance, the air is used for drying purposes, and the earth needs it to breathe. For it to come together, water is poured, and fire as well. These are essential elements for life, and they make up civilization. Somehow, they are a bridge for everything that we do with our hands.

According to Djibril Diop, the destiny of young Africans is a form of circulation between a colonial library, an Arab-Muslim library, and a postcolonial one. We belong to populations that know how to draw fluid forms that are not shaped through a particular rationality. It’s not perfect. It’s democratic because it’s not rooted in exclusion. If we ask people to draw circles without a drawing compass, they will all be different and beautiful, yet they are all circles. But if we ask them to draw squares, that will be complicated. Two different logics. I believe I adhere to fluidity up until triangularity. I don’t know how we can materialize triangularity.

Yet a line is a separation: a marcation. A straight line is rigid, dûre…(laughs)

I am interested in forms of circulations that are extensions of culturally charged corporealities that can have resonances. It’s like physics: there is an alchemy that takes place in encounters, a collage, vas-et-viens, exchanges of what an idea is, and what space entails. We must seek opportunities that enable us to engage with our practices differently. If I had first gone to São Paulo, I would not have been able to dig. I would have probably spent my time in libraries and bookstores exploring a history that not everybody was involved in writing. In Quilombo, there is a history in motion, it’s transmitted and is being practiced. It’s a history that is lived.

I did think of the comment, the how. The only solution for me is to reactivate forms. I don’t want to duplicate models, but to depart from what is available in my village and reactivate it. I want to work with the idea of a common space in the ways in which it was practiced in the past; in its governance, and horizontal organizing.

In May 2023, I was in the north of Morocco with Omar Berrada in a residency on migration. I realized that I am actually interested in history. I am not an anthropologist, but I am attuned to the idea of cannibalizing history, the present, and the future. I went back to some villages like خندق الريحان –Khandaq Errihane in the Rif where there are black communities. I think they represent forms of marronage, which doesn’t even exist in Moroccan history or episteme. When interviewing the older generation, I discovered that theirs was a recent marronage, starting in the early 1960s. They went up to the mountains, agreed with another tribe to share the forest, and created their own village. Up until today, they are all related and are cousins to one another. They kept it close. It’s the idea of Quilombo.

We rarely speak of these forms of emancipation in Morocco or possibilities for community. They are still fighting to have a school and working infrastructure. They only started having access to electricity five or six years ago while their former “masters” who live down the mountains have had it for decades. You can’t find the village easily—it’s hidden because it’s also related to the nature of their economic activity which revolves around cannabis farming.

Marronage exists in Morocco, though we may not talk about it. For instance, Zawayas are also an example of safe zones, and this opens up an expansive landscape of exploration for me.

I might respond alternatively. I see two spheres: there is us, and there is “art.” The latter works as an extension of colonialism. It’s used by taking models, a way of thinking, and a vocabulary to mark boundaries between a civilized and a “non-civilized.” We are all in this sphere, and there are fights to be led. We must have the strength to transverse vertically or horizontally this burden that colors our bodies and roots. When you say “art” to communities, you impose your idea of a legitimate form. You stop them from everything they are doing to a state of “this is how it should be.” This positioning of re-inventing is necessary instead of unequal and asymmetric collaborations.

I recently appreciated how Abdoulaye Konaté, Director of l’Institut National des Arts de Bamako invited the musician Toumani Diabaté and other artisans to teach. Toumani doesn’t have a PhD and neither do the artisans. You see, it’s easy to denaturalise one’s self but this is the historical consciousness that we need today: we need to conjugate and multiply various forms of resistance. We should not create fake images of what we are not.