Se Ele Mudar Meu Nome / If He Change My Name. BW, 35mm, 2016 - present.
Work in progress statement:
I go back to Rio de Janeiro Downtown every now and then. I was born there, in Rio. Overtime I am drawn to the atmosphere of Rio de Janeiro’s downtown churches built in the 18th c.
Historic narratives and manuscripts, as well as academic studies, point to the Catholic Church ownership of enslaved people. Not only ownership of their bodies, but of their spirituality as well.
There is a North American gospel song entitled I Told Jesus It Would Be All Right If He changed My Name. The lyrics refer both to the ritual of rebirth through baptism and to the oppressive strategy of robing someone of their birth name as a form of identity erasure. This work's title is a direct reference to that song, and more importantly to the colonial dichotomy that mixed spiritual salvation and identity erasure imposed by Catholic and Protestant Churches on enslaved people. I, an African Brazilian woman living in the U.S., use this song’s title to connect African Diaspora throughout the Americas and more directly Brazil and the U.S.
In Rio de Janeiro, colonial dichotomy is taken further to include two churches dedicated to African and African Brazilians. One of them is the Nossa Senhora dos Pretos.
In this work I use traditional photography documentary aesthetic - 35mm, black and white, grainy (Ilford 400 film), high contrast - in addition to creative writing and letter press to articulate visual questions about geographic spaces and spaces of memory, of history, of spirituality, of light and darkness, of colonial oppression and decolonial liberation.
The text is written in English, the language of the land where I currently am based, and the language of The U.S. - the second country that received most African enslaved people besides Brazil. The text is then loosely translated to Yoruba, one of the many languages of enslaved people brought to Brazil and to the U.S. Language that suffered a direct attempt of erasure - as changing names - to reinforce colonial oppression.
I go back to Rio de Janeiro Downtown every now and then. I was born there, in Rio. Overtime I am drawn to the atmosphere of Rio de Janeiro’s downtown churches built in the 18th c.
Historic narratives and manuscripts, as well as academic studies, point to the Catholic Church ownership of enslaved people. Not only ownership of their bodies, but of their spirituality as well.
There is a North American gospel song entitled I Told Jesus It Would Be All Right If He changed My Name. The lyrics refer both to the ritual of rebirth through baptism and to the oppressive strategy of robing someone of their birth name as a form of identity erasure. This work's title is a direct reference to that song, and more importantly to the colonial dichotomy that mixed spiritual salvation and identity erasure imposed by Catholic and Protestant Churches on enslaved people. I, an African Brazilian woman living in the U.S., use this song’s title to connect African Diaspora throughout the Americas and more directly Brazil and the U.S.
In Rio de Janeiro, colonial dichotomy is taken further to include two churches dedicated to African and African Brazilians. One of them is the Nossa Senhora dos Pretos.
In this work I use traditional photography documentary aesthetic - 35mm, black and white, grainy (Ilford 400 film), high contrast - in addition to creative writing and letter press to articulate visual questions about geographic spaces and spaces of memory, of history, of spirituality, of light and darkness, of colonial oppression and decolonial liberation.
The text is written in English, the language of the land where I currently am based, and the language of The U.S. - the second country that received most African enslaved people besides Brazil. The text is then loosely translated to Yoruba, one of the many languages of enslaved people brought to Brazil and to the U.S. Language that suffered a direct attempt of erasure - as changing names - to reinforce colonial oppression.
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