The exhibition Enciclopédia Negra^[1] opened in 2021 at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and, after having been shown at Museu de Arte do Rio in 2022, is now on display for the first time in Portugal, at the Exhibition Hall of Escola das Artes da Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Porto), as part of the research project Não foi Cabral: revendo silêncios e omissões, intended to question how history is built and how we can critically devise new mechanisms for reading and interpreting it.

Reflecting on the omissions and silences in Brazilian historiography, the exhibition, curated by anthropologist and researcher Lilia Schwarcz, historian Flávio dos Santos Gomes and artist Jaime Lauriano, magnifies the visibility of black individuals from Brazilian history who have not been widely known until now, in an attempt to rewrite a narrative that has been suppressed for almost five centuries and to encourage its visual representation. The work of African-origin populations in Brazil – a country that made slavery a social form of language – is systematically and purposefully silenced and hidden from view by the official history, and is now unveiled in a project described by its authors as an act of historical reparation, both tangible and symbolic, and as a politics of memory: ‘As stated by the theorist Frantz Fanon and, in Brazil, by the sociologist Mário Medeiros, black populations die twice. They perish physically and they perish in memory.”^[2]

Part of a wide-ranging project launched in 2016, the Enciclopédia Negra exhibition presents more than one hundred works by 36 Afro-Brazilian artists, based on the entries penned for the homonymous book, containing 417 entries and more than 550 biographies of black individuals. Consisting of two separate, autonomous and yet complementary bodies – the book and the exhibition -, the Enciclopédia Negra project is provocative in its very title, as it uses Diderot’s Enlightenment approach not to address the deeds of white societies, but to promote the leading role of black people in Brazil, from colonial times to today.

Obliterated by a traditionally white historiography, these individuals were given their own uniqueness and character in Enciclopédia Negra‘s rebuilding of a legacy of resistance and reinvention: ‘These were people who fought for the right to freedom; self-employed professionals who broke down the barriers of racism; athletes who challenged the shackles of their time; mothers who struggled for their families’ freedom; teachers who lectured their pupils on their origins; individuals who mutinied and staged uprisings; healers and doctors who rescued the sick; musicians who developed and expanded different ways of making culture; activists who wrote manifestos, founded associations and newspapers; religious leaders who reinvented different Africas in Brazil.”^[3]

Formed by portraits of historically important individuals who did not have their portraits made, Enciclopédia Negra attempts to revisit and provide a historical reparation, ensuring that henceforth there will be a ‘black pinacotheca’ and a more generous and diverse view of Brazilian history^[4]. Made by contemporary black artists from biografias falhas, memórias rotas cheias de silêncios, the visual biographies in the exhibition are all fiction, built on interpretation and on critical and historical fabrication^[5]. “Most of these entries are fictional, since we are not familiar with the images of these people and each artist developed their own resources to present this never-seen body during this historic occasion in which it is portrayed.”^[6] By tackling head-on the policy of suppressing black populations, the Enciclopédia Negra exhibition offers a more inclusive and plural vision of Brazil, unveiling the complex, manifold and profound history of the Brazilian black community through six thematic sections, a narrative described by Jaime Lauriano as not only a struggle for emancipation and forced labour during slavery, but also one of agricultural practices, art, religion and political organisation.

Asserting itself as a territory where harmonies come together, the exhibition leads us into a conceptual, aesthetic and visual realm in which a range of media and artistic voices prevail, with portraits that are complicit in the idea of freedom and experimentation. Photos, drawings, paintings and sculptures line the walls of the Exhibition Room, carefully designed in terms of setting and presentation, as evidenced by the portrait cluster which, in the centre of the room, is displayed on three tables as if it were a documentary and archival collection. As we move through the exhibition, we become familiar with its different areas: Negras minas (Black girls); Projetos de liberdade (Freedom projects); Personagens atlânticos (Atlantic characters); Religiosidades e ancestralidades (Religiosities and ancestry); Artes e oficícios (Arts and crafts) and Rebeldes (Rebels). Dedicated to women of African origin, the Negras minas section tells the story of women who took centre stage, campaigned for freedom and reclaimed their visibility, such as Catarina, Josefa e Vitória, African women reinterpreted by the artist Elain Almeida as the leading characters in the fashion magazine Vogue, a pictorial work that draws a relationship between black bodies and contemporary society. Reiterating the importance of activists, intellectuals, craftspeople, artists, scientists, among other Afro-Brazilian professionals, we come across the Artes e ofícios section, in which we find Oga Mendonça’s Retrato de Jandyra Aymoré, a well-known singer from Companhia Negra de Revistas, the first theatre company in Brazil entirely formed by black people. The Rebeldes section features individuals who did not agree to be dehumanised by the slavery industry, such as Malunguinho, a quilombola leader from the Catucá forest and a symbol in the fight against slavery, portrayed with his face covered by the artist Micaela Cyrino, with one half gold and the other half skin, for, as they sing in the streets of Recife, ‘Malunguinho is King! Malunguinho is King!’. In Personalidades atlânticas, we meet representations of people who retraced their paths in a new country, black characters who moved around the economic, political, social and cultural realms between the African and European continents and the Americas. In the section Religiosidades e Ancestralidades, we get in touch with leaders of African and Afro-Brazilian religions who have honoured different roles and helped to bolster a sense of community and belonging. Projetos de Liberdade redeems the utopias and expectations of black populations in a slave society; with this in mind, we emphasise the story of Caetana, a nineteenth-century mucamba who resorted to the legal system to void a forced marriage. Caetana’s resolute and tenacious refusal to accept the dictates of her masters is reflected in Juliana dos Santos’ photographic work Caetana e nossos Nãos, in which the artist’s mouth reenacts the character’s impactful no, in an artwork permeated with fragments, cut-outs and both concrete and symbolic ruptures.

Ana de Jesus, Joaquim Pinto de Oliveira, Xica Manicongo, Trajano Cunani, numerous names and faces are revealed in the Enciclopédia Negra exhibition, the living history of a people and of Afro-Brazilian individuals who helped build Brazilian culture and society. As Lilia Schwarcz argues: ‘The encyclopaedia is a utopian dream of bringing back memory, good memory, memory as an agency, memory as a different form of representation and representation is a right, it is justice, it is presence, it is inclusion and it is participation.”^[7]

The exhibition runs until October 4 at Escola das Artes – Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto, curated by Flávio Gomes, Jaime Lauriano and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz.

^[1] Featuring works from the collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the exhibition, which opened on June 20 at Escola das Artes da UCP, will be on display until October 4, 2024.
^[2] Quote from Lilia Schwarcz’s address at the conference Escravidão e reparação: nosso passado do presente, held at Auditório Ilídio Pinho (UCP) on June 21, 2024.
^[3] Gomes; Lauriano; Schwarcz – Introdução In “Enciclopédia Negra: Biografias Afro Brasileiras”. First edition. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2021, s/p.
^[4] Idem Ibidem.
^[5] Dealing with the void left by centuries of a historiography that ignored and effaced the voices, minds and bodies of black people, writer and African-American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman devised the ‘critical fabulation’ method – a theoretical workaround for overcoming or navigating gaps in slavery archives -, combining historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative, proving how powerful imagination can be in challenging and undoing the grip of white academic voices and viewpoints.
^[6] Quote from the address by Marcelo Campos, chief curator of Museu de Arte do Rio, at the opening of the exhibition Enciclopédia Negra at MAR, in 2022.
^[7] Quote from Lilia Schwarcz’s address at the conference Escravidão e reparação: nosso passado do presente, held at Auditório Ilídio Pinho (UCP) on June 21, 2024.