The “OSSO exhibition – plea for the full rights to defense by Rafael Braga”, at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo, brings together works by various artists with the aim to give visibility to the emblematic case of black youth as victim of arbitrary Justice in Brazil.
Paulo Nazareth, Tommie, 2017. Mendes Wood DM Collection, São Paulo, Brazil.
Rosana Paulino, A Permanência das Estruturas, 2017 Mixed media on fabric and stitching. Artist's collection.
Thiago Gualberto, Maré Vermelha, 2017 Video installation. Artist's collection.
A victim of a tuberculosis outbreak in Rio de Janeiro’s prisons, placed under house arrest in September 2017, Rafael Braga Vieira has been incarcerated since 2013. After leaving prison in 2016, he was charged again and returned to prison. Young, black, born in 1988, garbage collector who was working when the 2013 demonstrations in the city occurred, he was arrested for carrying two plastic bottles containing cleaning products.
From the outset, seen by the judges and prosecutors as dirty and dangerous, the only witnesses to his case were police who accused him of possessing explosive material. Braga’s story summarizes what several studies of Brazilian racism call genocide of the Black population. The strategies of this long-standing genocide began with the enslavement of people, turning them into objects over the period of three centuries. And they persist. They continue, from the period following the abolition of 1888, with the exclusion of Black people from modern rights, to the spatial segregation, to the underemployed and the methods of turning these people into easy targets of police violence, hunger and misery.
Considered an emblematic case, the hatred of Rafael Braga gained high visibility with social movements in and out of social networks, mobilizing collective forces in favor of his rights and of his family, against a selective justice that consistently ends up criminalizing poverty. At ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro’s Art Fair, in 2017, artists Joana Amador, Lourival Cuquinha, Mariana Lacerda and Mariana Sgarione drew their inspiration from him to create the work One and Three Minus One Crimes, whose money from the sale will be given back to the young man’s family.
The campaign for Rafael Braga’s freedom put his face all over the Internet. Stickers, buttons, t-shirts, posters, cartoons, collages made him an iconic figure, updating visual protest strategies, like those created by Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party between 1966 and 1982. In this way, Rafael Braga came to occupy, in the field of imagery, the same position as the philosopher and activist Angela Davis and one of the leaders of the BPP, Huey Newton (1942-1989), occupied since their unjust arrests. Davis herself appears on the Internet holding a t-shirt with Braga’s image.
The exhibition “OSSO Exposição-apelo ao amplo direito de defesa de Rafael Braga” (“BONE Exhibition-plea for the full rights to defense by Rafael Braga”), at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo, between June and July 2017, accompanied by parallel programming, was inspired by this environment of demonstration against selective justice. With curatorship by Paulo Myada, the exhibition was carried out in partnership with the Instituto de Defesa do Direito de Defesa (IDDD/ Institute for the Defense of the Right to Defend). The works of the action-exhibition were made with minimalist elements, some of which are quite precarious, as if to say, against the consensus that kills, any opposing civil attitude is a gain.
Among the 29 artists of Bone, some are Black. The theme of racism, therefore, is sustained – as is the case with Rosana Paulino and Jaime Lauriano. These two artists are interested in Brazil’s past history, in that they rely on what can be called revisionist practice. In other words, they revisit the past and offer interpretations of events, not only to offer a new version, but inviting us to observe the persistence and continuity of violence that has not ceased.
Consequently, that which has been and should by now be buried returns to disrupt and explain the present, as in A permanência das estruturas (The permanence of structures), in which Paulino prints several times the title phrase of the work on two pieces of fabric sewn to other pieces that show images of the past used to sustain the allegedly positive “scientific theories” of racist discourses.
Also interested by what remains of the past in the present, Lauriano proposes in his Experiência concreta #3 (Concrete Experiment #3) that the visiting pubic gives continuity to a work in the process of being built. On two A4 sheets of paper, with ironic didacticism, he suggests: GATHER Portuguese stones you find on the street and bring to the EXHIBITION. POSITION the stones alternating the colors to make a CAGE. Now, the stones that can be used to build the cage can also be the weapon to pummel a poor Black body – the preferred targets of the Brazilian justice system.
In Selfportrait, by Moisés Patrício, a series of nine pieces measuring 5×3 cm each are affixed to the wall. Delicate, they combine abstract drawings made from strands of the artist’s own hair, which gives it organic movement. Formalist and minimalist – after all, he uses only the black of the hair and the white base on which he draws – this work departs from his well-known photographic images in the Aceita? (Do you accept?) series, in which his hands appear to be gesturing offerings.
Also small is the painting Cadeira calçada (Sidewalk Chair), by the artist from Goiania, Dalton Paula. The choice of these dimensions is aligned with the old practice of former vows, the form in which Catholics pay for a miracle obtained through bi- or tri-dimensional visual representations. In popular Black Catholic material culture and in Afro-Brazilian religions, the chairs accommodate crowned kings and queens in popular merrymaking, priests of the sacred meeting sites are seated in them, and it is not rare to see unauthorized persons forbidden to sit. In the way Paula treats it, the chair remains fragile, since what is holding it up are glass cups, which makes it only able to hold itself, and never to accommodate a body. In this way, they determine absence.
In Maré vermelha (Red Tide), an action video-installation by Thiago Gualberto, the artist shows a young man with his back to the viewer, dressed in black shorts, with short hair, listening to headphones. With no additional corporal ornamentation that could detract attention from his virile body, which through slow movements suggests a dance – ginga (rocking back and forth) – that “naturally” would emerge from the corporal experience of people from poor segments of Afro-Brazilian society. This movement serves as a metaphor for what the artist observes is not only the body as seen, but the view from the camera which, more than only seeing, frames and archives.
Paulo Nazareth, in turn, presents two works Tommie and Projeto/Coleção (Project/Collection): the title of the latter beckoning to a series of disqualifications of the phenotype attributed to him in places he has already passed through. An artist who blurs the boundaries between his origin and his own territorial dislocations, this work reveals the ways in which police authorities react to the corporal materiality of the artist: drug trafficker, thief, terrorist, bad guy, mentally disabled among other terms printed on a small sheet of newspaper produced by the editorial platform P. NAZARETH ED. / LTDA.
Sonia Gomes, of Minas Gerais, presented a piece from her series Torções (Twists), which teaches us something about how people are socially constructed. Interested less in the critique of the past and more in family memory and ancestral lineage, Gomes manipulates, among other materials, cloths that are left over from casual social rituals. Clothing that has had intimate contact with loved ones, pieces for the body and for the home in emotionally heavy moments. Tying, sewing and twisting, the artist reveals, through her pieces, the extent to which clothing produces bodies. Clothes, moreover, have the capacity to define who oppresses and who is oppressed. Judges’ robes in Brazil, bought with public money and reserved for this purpose, contrast with the clothing of rescued children in shelters, as they do with the beige uniform adults wear in overcrowded dirty penitentiaries, in violation of basic human rights.
Alexandre Araújo Bispo is an anthropologist, critic, independent curator and educator.
Translated from Portuguese by Sara Hanaburgh.