Encruzilhadas

Ismael David and the Foundations of Exu

Grounded in the foundations of Exu’s encruzilhadas (crossroads), Ismael David’s exhibition at Galpão Bela Maré in Rio de Janeiro challenges sensitivities and sensory hierarchies with works that explore multiple senses. By incorporating elements such as gourds and the sounds of atabaques blended with funk, David evokes Afro-Brazilian ancestry.

Ismael David, Series Lord of the Third Gourd (detail), Gourds, polypropylene rope, tereré beads, 2024. Photo: Rony Gomes

Ismael David, Ruídos 2: Mukumbu, Basins and speakers, 2024. Photo: Rony Gomes

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by Matheus Morani

Wed 17 Jul, 2024

The intersection between streets and paths forms a liminal space: the crossroads. The crossroads (Encruzilhadas in Portuguese) is also the name of a concrete metaphor of significant spiritual power of intersection, where desire is both obstinate and offered – a place where offerings are made to the Exus in Afro-Brazilian religions. It is a reclamation of autonomy in the simultaneity of being and not being, a moment of choice in determining which direction to follow. Antagonistic to the sociopolitical significance of borders in their function of ordering and separating to restrict movement, Encruzilhadas is fundamental to movement, a place where any excessively evident totality is distrusted.

Ismael David, m'bolumbumba, Wire, gourds, LED, rebar, and rubber, 2024. Photo: Rony Gomes

The acoustic excitement of the xequerê gourds present in most works, as well as the berimbaus in m'bolumbumba (2024), invites us to imagine a form of knowledge that does not depend on the distances systematized by sight—such as in the figuration of excess to the subjugation by racial difference—reinventing our common notions of coexistence.

Grounded in the principles of Encruzilhadas, Ismael David’s artistic research plows language through these many senses of ambivalence, investigating the effects of time and ancestry in the African diaspora, assuming that both what we carry and what guides us is mystery. Na cabaça estão todas as mirongas the title of Ismael David’s first solo exhibition at Galpão Bela Maré, introduces us to the encounter with the many networks of plots that diverge and converge to support bodies, gourds, horns, sounds, and memories. It also encompasses all the unknown that deconstructs the certainties of violent stigmas about racial difference.

O Galpão is located of one of the largest group of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Maré, in the northern part of the city, with a population of around 140,000 inhabitants organized into 17 communities. Situating institutional actions within this territorial and political context, curator Ana V took the core audience of Galpão, the children of Maré, as her starting point for curatorial choices. Dismantling the conditions under which we apprehend sensitivity, Ismael David develops a series of works contemplating the desires and anti-pedagogical potentials in the encounter of childhood with artworks. The children are drawn to the touch, sound, smell, and taste in David’s works, discovering the playfulness of eating candy in Doçura Ibejada (2024) or resting in Iya Mi, a grande rede (2024). We unlearn the world as we know it by dehierarchizing vision in favor of other senses, thereby dismantling the dichotomy of the “mind” prevailing over the “body.” The acoustic excitement of the xequerê gourds present in most works, as well as the berimbaus in m’bolumbumba (2024), invites us to imagine a form of knowledge that does not depend on the distances systematized by sight—such as in the figuration of excess to the subjugation by racial difference—reinventing our common notions of coexistence.

Ismael David, Ruídos 2: Mukumbu, Basins and speakers, 2024. Photo: Rony Gomes

In Ruídos 2: Mukumbu (2024), the etymological origin of the word Macumba, the sounds of atabaques mixed with the rhythm of Funk emanate from inside alguidares, containers commonly used for offerings in the practices of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religious tradition. In the track made in collaboration with beatmaker Pedro Vidal Griot, David reiterates that when the “DJ drops the big drum”—a typical phrase from MCs that marked the beginning of the Baile Funk nights in the 90s and early 2000s—it signals that the ritual is about to start, evoking a connection to Afro-Brazilian spirituality. The artist asserts that his first contact with African ancestry, particularly in sonic terms, was through funk. Composing the principal soundscape of Rio de Janeiro, the rhythm is resonant and insubordinate, inhabiting the experience and imaginary of all bodies, especially in the suburbs and favelas, areas where the majority of the Black population has historically been concentrated in a long process of resocialization at the margins after the period of enslavement.

Driven by the affectability of not reducing the complexity of the matter into a formal order, Ismael David performs Lá vem o Senhor e a Senhora (2024), referring to the Itan of Exu as the Lord of the Third Gourd. In this Itan (a mythical narrative of Yoruba culture), Exu is given the choice between two gourds to take on a journey to the Ifé market: one containing Good and the other containing Evil. He immediately commands the preparation of a third gourd, in which he mixes the two elements, making the contents of this third vessel the substance to govern the relational dimension of the world, establishing an alternative onto-epistemological parameter. In his research with light, opacity, and the body in space for performance, the artist produces black garments with points marked in pemba in collaboration with his partner Patricia David, imagining that the darkness of the night can offer answers because it does not conclude the questions. Linked by a bond with a gourd at each end, the performers wear mirror masks that dilute notions of otherness by reflecting the faces of those present on the body in action. The place of difference ceases to signify a prohibition and becomes a zone of contact, a dialogical trope, a recombinant chimera.

Ismael David, Here come the lord and lady, performance, Costume Patrícia David. Oxford skirt and mask, pemba and mirror, 2024. Photo: Rony Gomes

The place of difference ceases to signify a prohibition and becomes a zone of contact, a dialogical trope, a recombinant chimera.

Guided by this principle, David’s work revises, updates, and elaborates an ethical scene in which matter is positioned beyond the equation of value, erected by contagion, the subtraction of separability, and the mystery of the unknown. In order to reinvent the existing forms of communal life, the crossroads of Exu presented by David emerges as an abolitionist key to the end of the world as we know it, allowing us to encounter a world implicated and entangled in other dimensions, visible and invisible, of deeply interconnected human and more-than-human lives.

Ismael David (b. 1988, Madureira, Rio de Janeiro) is a visual artist and visual arts educator with a degree from the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He has undertaken independent courses at the School of Visual Arts at Parque Lage and participated in foundational art programs. David has developed work in the field of art education within museums, cultural centers, and NGOs. His current work explores African and Afro-Brazilian ancestry through a theoretical and practical investigation into ancestral “processes” and contemporary “making.”

Matheus Morani (b. 1997, Nilópolis) is a researcher specializing in curatorial, educational, and artistic practices that engage with non-hegemonic approaches to knowledge. Currently, Morani serves as an assistant curator at Solar dos Abacaxis in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Translation: Manyakhalé „Taata“ Diawara.

Bibliographical references
SILVA, Denise Fereira da & OTOCH, Janaina Notaga. (2019). Em estado bruto. ARS (São Paulo),
MBEMBE, Achille. A ideia de um mundo sem fronteiras. Revista Serrote, maio de 2019.