In Conversation with Charlene Bicalho

“Even without a key, I enter through the front door and plot escape routes”

Possessing her own unique form of visual thinking, anchored in collective experiences and popular know-how, Brazilian artist Charlene Bicalho skillfully dialogues with a wide variety of artistic languages, from documentary webseries to photography, installation and performance.

Performance piece “From dust is made vine” by Charlene Bicalho. Photo: Pedro H Ermida Cruz.

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by Duan Kissonde

Mon 7 Oct, 2019

Raiz Forte, a seven-episode web series, raises questions about the ways that Eurocentric aesthetics pervade the subjectivities of black women, from childhood and adolescence to adulthood. The relationship with hair is always an underlying theme in this work by artist Charlene Bicalho. Even in her performance pieces Gazuas: Bará do Mercado de Porto Alegre and Do pó se faz cipó, the artist, stemming from her interest in the so-called black territories of Porto Alegre, incorporates elements such as the symbolism of the seven keys of Orisha Bará, guardian of the market, and the subtlety of the ritualistic powder known as pemba, recreating them and giving them new life from a kind of Afro-futurist perspective, in constant dialogue with mythical and mystical objects of religions of African-origin in Brazil.

C&AL: You are an artist with an MBA, and your career intersects the visual arts, public management, and collective creative processes. How do you transition between these worlds?

CB: Yes, I am an artist with an academic background in business, from a certificate program to a masters degree. Artistic flow, however, permeates my practice both in my creative processes and in my career as a cultural arts manager. In my case, business management and the arts flow into one other like a river flows into the sea, becoming one. Since 2012, I have worked as creative director at Raiz Forte, a platform built on the three-prong foundation of the arts, culture and education, using the creation of audiovisual content, courses, study groups, interventions in cultural venue programming, exhibitions, encounters for creation/promotion, and residencies — all featuring Black Diaspora artists. I recently worked in public management from 2015 to 2018 as director of the Carlos Gomes Theater, a space associated with the Secretary of Culture of the state of Espírito Santo, where I also sat on boards for the selection and monitoring of artistic and cultural projects. And I see a confluence of waters across different areas. I am an interdisciplinary artist, and the art world allows me to bring together several flows.

C&AL: In your work, you dialogue directly with the street, but you also present your work in institutionalized spaces, such as museums and galleries. How do you manage this?

CB: Wandering the streets inspires me. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been able to spend hours watching people, wondering where they lived, what they did for fun, what they might say to me if they came over to talk to me. Over time, this wandering around has taken on new heights. I started wandering under the water when I moved from Minas Gerais to Espírito Santo, where I lived and spent time with coastal and indigenous peoples, where the Rio Doce meets the Atlantic. There, I died a river and was re-born the sea. In uncovered waters, I visualized other possibilities of existence. Still today I find myself wandering through the streets, rivers, squares, oceans, and markets.

Performance piece “From dust is made vine” by Charlene Bicalho. Photo: Pedro H Ermida Cruz.

My works entitled Do pó se faz cipó (From dust is made vine, 2019) and Gazuas: Bará do Mercado de Porto Alegre (Lock Picks: Bará of Porto Alegre Market, 2019), for example, came out of observations and conversations at the market. Later, both works were presented at the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art – MARGS. My transits and shifts are not decoded by the whiteness that reigns in institutionalized spaces, and feeling this firsthand fascinates me. Institutional racism, having lived with it for years as an employee of public institutions, has become one of my primary investigations into the composition of my artistic works. The way I am treated within these institutionalized spaces, how I am made invisible, how I am silenced, serves as raw material for my work. So, even though (apparently) without a key, I enter through the front door, I plot collective escape routes, I emerge and submerge according to the tides.

C&AL: Lately you have been participating in several residencies. I would like you to talk a little bit about how this process has been.

CB: This year I participated in residencies in Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Brasília. Those experiences, in different regions and temporalities, have permitted me other ways to reimagine my history, my work, and my views on the world. I think it is important to say that some of the residencies I participated in are arms of institutional racism, and so they replicate colonial gestures, thus perpetuating power relations if we think about who historically accesses public resources and how they are redistributed. Even in the face of these issues and the current political moment, where censorship and cyber-crime have become a constant, these flows have enabled me to work by calling up buried networks of artists, invisible to the eyes of whiteness. This month I’m embarking on my first international residency in Lima, Peru, to visualize possibilities for expanding networks with other African-Latin-American artists and researchers. I’m keen to join with other Black Diaspora artists who are interested in revising art history and constructing other counter-hegemonic imagery narratives.

C&AL: On the day of your performance Do pó se faz cipó, in Porto Alegre, one of the things that caught my attention was when you said that “what is given no longer interests you”. What does this phrase evoke for you?

CB: When I say “what is given”, I mean the colonial system and its current maelstroms, what is given and put in place does not include us. Thinking about art and institutionalized spaces, I first identify the maelstroms, seeking to foresee what is given, to think strategically about my next shift, reconciling artistic, poetic practices and practices of resistance. In Do pó se faz cipó, for example, besides occupying the MARGS, we produced knowledge by undoing silences, transforming silence into language and action, as Audre Lorde says.

We talked about affection, memory, shed light on our subjectivities and productions, we describe instead of being described. We created connections when we comprised the first panel with only black artists, we took care of ourselves and healed during the work, recognized ourselves and understood that we are not alone. Dressed in black and red, I positioned my body as if it were a reflection of the statue A Fuga, I asked permission from Bará, keeper of the crossroads and the keys that open up the paths. As we blew pemba together inside that building, we contaminated it with the breath of the diaspora, reclaiming that space as an ancestral right. We revisited history and art history, we departed with renewed breath from this plunge. Past, present and future flowing deeply into life and work, we are what is not given.

Charlene Bicalho was born in 1982, in Minas Gerais and is now based primarily in the city of São Paulo, where she creates projects in various spaces. She has been the artistic director of the Raiz Forte project since 2012 and has been an active participant in several artist residencies.

Duan Kissonde, a resident of Quinta do Portal, a neighborhood on the outskirts of east Porto Alegre, was born in 1993. He is a poet, composer, cultural critic, and studies History at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. He is an independent researcher on the black territorialities of the city of Porto Alegre.