Ana Pi: Knowledge does not disapear

On collaboration and intergenerational legacy

Ana Pi’s documentary film NoirBLUE (2018 – 27’) opens with a statement: “It’s important to know that what I am living now is the future that someone dreamed for me a long time ago.” This reflects the artist’s career-long commitment to collaboration with contemporaries, ancestors, and future generations. One of her most influential collaborators and mentors is Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), the US-American dancer and anthropologist who inspired the 1958 founding of New York’s the Ailey School. Though they never met, Pi clearly engages in dialogue with Dunham’s teachings as well as with the wisdom of other predecessors, whom she believes were intentional in their creative endeavors.

“I am very disappointed by the isolation that we can experience due to our existence in the hegemonic timeline,” she says, alluding to the intergenerational sacrifices that have allowed her to exist and create today. “Or when we say someone is the first to do this or that, especially when we know what was erased. No one can do resistance [work] alone in any way.” She expands her reflection to epistemicide, a term coined by Brazilian thinker Sueli Carneiro to describe the genocide of knowledge systems. “When you murder knowledge, you murder possibilities of life,” Pi explains in a soft but determined voice, insisting on the persistence of ancestral saberes (knowledges) even when white supremacy continues to invisibilize them. In her works, Ana reconfigures these ancestral codes thought to have been lost through genocide and trauma.

For ATOMIC JOY (2025), Pi is thinking about the transmission of knowledge to future generations. Inaugurating the Saison France-Brésil, the piece is set to premiere at this year’s Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis in France on June 4 and 5th and at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil from 23 to 25 August. By wrapping eight young dancers from freestyle battles of Greater Paris in layers of clothing, she will distort the gestures of war vocabulary into a choreography towards freedom, intentionally mocking the widespread fear that weighs on the present. Yet she intends for the piece to also show that joy is a path toward peace and an act of resistance. “Maybe people in 2050 will wonder what dance artists were doing in 2025. I want them to know that I was inviting people to talk about joy as vibration, resistance, and as a way of conceiving peace from a practical perspective,” Pi says. She looks straight into her webcam as she elaborates on her dancers’ costumes and firmly tells me: “If they are killing us and our knowledge, I want there to be fear of the vitality, the movement we uphold.”

Animism as choreography and spirituality

Pi explores knowledge transmission and vitality not only in people but also in objects. To reclaim cosmovisions that remain vibrant, such as Candomblé in Brazil, she expands this animist awareness to institutional contexts of contemporary art. An example is the kinetic installation Antena Ia Mbambe (2023) with Taata Kwa Nkisi Mutá Imê, for which she choreographed several metal rods. In 2023, Julien Creuzet invited her to collaborate on Zumbi Zumbi Eterno, an installation on Haitian zombification and quilombo leader Zumbi dos Palmares. By using motion-capture technology to transpose Pi’s movement onto digitized Bakongo statues that still await restitution, he encouraged her to imagine how they might dance. Her choreography allowed the entities to reclaim the vitality erased by centuries of colonial violence. “It wasn’t me, and yet the statues were dancing,” she recalls, explaining that knowledge doesn’t disappear but rather changes forms.

At Holland Festival in June 2024 in Amsterdam, I witnessed Ana Pi working with a robotic rover called Perseverance as her partner in her performance The Divine Cypher (2021). The piece was conceived during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the pair moved through a glittery, sugar-covered stage that made me think of a planet, Pi carrying a plastic barrel of water on her crown. Maya Deren’s documentary film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti played on a cellphone.

When Pi and I speak about the vitality of objects in October, she remarks upon the tension between the dismissal of spiritual Afro-diasporic cosmologies and the celebration of technological “achievements” under the guise of science and colonization. Those confining animism to an ethnography context often engage in a similar practice. “At one point during the pandemic we couldn’t go anywhere, yet NASA sent a machine [Perseverance] into space which sent us images of her hanging around another planet,” Pi says. By blending Afro-spiritual awareness and contemporary technology, The Divine Cypher challenges that contradiction.

On choreography in resistance and grief

Ana Pi’s works build upon each other over time, creating connections regardless of geography or viewing order. She sees her work existing within a “loop” – a continuum sustained by ancestral and cultural memory. In the video work Ceci n’est pas une performance (2017) for example, she links what she calls “peripheral dances” such as dancehall, krump, voguing, hip hop, and pantsula to imagery of the marginalized contexts from which they emerged. Six years later, the sculptural and performance work Algorithm ocean true blood moves (2023), by artist Julien Creuzet with choreography by Pi, expanded on those styles and their meanings. Set on an ocean-floor and in front of the video of Zumbi Zumbi Eterno –, including the Bakongo statues infused with Pi’s movement – seven young dancers from the Ailey School evoke the countless lives and immeasurable knowledge lost during the Middle Passage. When Pi sends me images of Algorithm’s staging in front of a thousand people at the closing of WAKE, the 15th edition of Dak’Art in 2024, I think of its force in the specific ancestral and cultural context of Dakar – and of the loop, now flowing in reverse, that nourished the work and brought it back to its source.

This exploration of loss and tenacity is intertwined with Pi’s own life. “A turning point was when my father went missing in 2018. His name is Julio de Oliveira.” Her career was precarious during that time, making it necessary that she return to the stage within a week after this tragedy began. Performing peripheral dances then helped her grasp their life force and seriousness. She says the trauma could have paralyzed her, turning her into a stone, if not something else. Seven years after her father went missing, Pi has begun to mourn him, now attributing his disappearance to murder. His case was recently closed, with the investigation lacking results that might have brought some form of justice. She has learned that movement is “not about being blasé or the cold, but about warming up. These [dances] are our lives”, she says.

Our conversation has stayed with me. The times I saw her and her works in places like São Paulo, Martinique, and Amsterdam, I was amazed by the presence and introspection they demanded of me. While writing this piece and relistening to our call, I felt the forces of animism, intergenerational exchange, loss, grief, and knowledge pulling at me. So I sat still. Then, slowly, I moved my chest in and out, while tapping it with one hand.

Ana Pi  is a choreographer and “imagery” artist, born, raised, and nourished in Brazil, working from France and navigating the world through the regenerative layers of the African Diaspora and its radical imagination. Read the full bio here. 

Marny Garcia Mommertz is a writer and artist who explores experimental forms of archiving within the Diaspora and delves into the life of Black woman artist and activist Fasia Jansen, a Holocaust survivor in Germany.  She works as the managing editor for C& AL.