This is not about death or the body as a form of resistance, struggle or vigilance.^[1]
This is about love.
All About Love^[2].

These words express the leitmotif and subject matter of Petra Preta’s exhibition at Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista, not only because they can be found on its introductory writing, but also because they reveal all that the artist sets out to do and accomplishes. They also behave as a prelude to her work, which is rather similar in its pictorial approach to bell hooks’ literary proposals, questioning All About Love and its representations in black bodies, just like the homonymous book by the aforementioned writer.

In this exhibition, Sara Fonseca da Graça, or Petra Preta, brings together a three-part overview of her artistic output over the last three years. In other words, it offers a trilogy of some of her cross-disciplinary pieces that form her library of ‘images’, which have been solidified by an aesthetic (and ethical) healing process, guided by the production of a Black Gaze. This library of images – succinctly encapsulated in this trilogy featuring the series Humor Negro (2021), the work Manchê Bom (2024) and the installation Voltar para a minha Terra (2024) – is indeed her own. I say her own in the same spirit as bell hooks warned about in Facing Differences: The Black Female Body^[3] (1995) when she pointed out the lack of an imagination that could represent black freedom and lightness: “Creating counter-hegemonic images of blackness that resist the stereotypes and challenge the artistic imagination is not a simple task. [It is essential] to map a new terrain – one chat can emerge only from an imaginative inventiveness, since there is no body of images, no tradition to draw on.” In fact, her library is assembled by creating counter-images, undertaking a re-signifying mission. Nonetheless, this exercise is more than just an iconographic subversion: Petra Preta reclaims the power of representation, just as she reclaims the power of presentation – that is, the process of defining reality. Black joy is not just a tool for subversion, it is a reality, which, despite not being presented to us (due to repression), nor represented (in the majority of contemporary artistic imagination) – exists outside of any attempt at decolonisation. In a 2021 interview with the newspaper Público, Dori Nigro also touched on the present-day circumstances for black production and imagination: ‘sometimes I want to make art without having to mention racism, but I do not have that privilege. I’m caught up in this reality. On the other hand, institutions and curators see me through that lens. I find myself in some spaces just to comply with a bogus racial quota designed to satisfy an illegitimate idea of decolonisation.”^[4] The argument made by Dori Nigro and pursued by Sara Fonseca da Graça is that decolonisation is not achieved (only) through representativeness, but through representation, not as mimesis, but as a presentation of a cultural sensorium that eludes Western reality.

The representation of a joyful blackness is the cultural sensorium that the artist chose to present – now – as a way of decolonising the perspective throughout her career, and this exhibition was no exception. The pieces also tell us that this is a healing process, not one of grief: “és(curo) [A portmanteau expression that splits the Portuguese work escuro (dark) into és+curo (you are+heal). I write in the dark, not only in my room, but in my soul. And so I heal myself,”^[5] says the happy and colourful self-referential canvas Black Habits (2020-22), where the artist depicts herself rehearsing her Humor Negro series, surrounded by the portraits she did in honour of O Camões Preto and Achille Mbembe^[6] – also mentioning them on the back of her paintings.

As in the chapter of Mbembe’s book “Descolonização Radical e a Festa da Imaginação”, this exhibition is precisely about that, about forging an imagination (because imagination is individual) of liberation. I must warn you about the word liberation, because its fulfilment is the means of reclaiming (self) signification. Sara Fonseca da Graça sets out to do this in different media – on small ceramic pieces, she outlines “Notas para lembrar que ‘o prazer é uma medida de liberdade’ (2024); on canvas, she draws broad smiles on black faces, bigger than her own; on paper, she depicts (her) habits of blackness; on audio, she questions the relationship between black bodies and non-human elements, such as water (oceans, seas, lakes, rivers) and the earth: “I often ponder this relationship with the natural elements, (…) thought is reproducing the logic of the body and the body is reproducing the logic of a system that fails to contemplate it (…) and re-claiming the power of unacknowledged feelings”; on fabric – in a piece that runs alongside the aforementioned sound installation -, she dyes these bodies submerged in a deep blue with the sea, envisaging a different imagination (joyful) from the one they are associated with – in a lengthy history of diasporas – : “can I sail that far back and return the bodies to the land and their songs to their bodies? I’m tired. (…) As I attempt to fall asleep, I wonder what could have happened if my ancestors had had space to rest, if they had had the right to this space of profound imagination”. In an almost multi-naturalistic imagination, a symbiosis between bodies of water and bodies of blackness, the artist iconographically re-signifies the traumatic or problematic relationship between both entities. Finally, Petra Preta also presents the installation Voltar para a Minha Terra (2024), in which hope, memory and belonging become the tools of the healing process: “there is a land to which one can return, or at least that is where hope lies.”^[7]

This is a litany for the survival of the spirit, and isn’t that All About Love?

Por quanto tempo mais terei que nadar? Uma litania pela sobrevivência by Sara Fonseca da Graça, curated by Melissa Rodrigues, is on show at Galerias Municipais – Galeria da Boavista until October 20, 2024.

^[1] The quotation in the title is transcribed from the sound installation at Sara Fonseca da Graça’s exhibition.
^[2] From the exhibition text.
^[3] Hooks, B. (1995) ‘Facing Differences: The Black Female Body’, in Art on my mind: visual politics. New York: The New Press, p.96.
^[4] Duarte, M. (2021) “Há um Brasil a fazer perguntas difíceis a Portugal”. Ípsilon. Público, ed. 11.242, p. 2-8, February 5.
^[5] Graça, J. (2020) Rasgos: O Camões Preto. Lisbon: Infinita editorial.
^[6] Ver: Mbembe, A. (2017) “Descolonização Radical e a Festa da Imaginação”, in Políticas da Inimizade. Translated by Marta Lança. Lisbon: Antígona.
^[7] From the exhibition text.