Enciclopédia Negra : Galeria Fundação Amélia de Mello, Lisboa

An embarrassing silence invades the archives of slavery, textbooks and collections of visual works. In them, references to the immense black enslaved population that ended up in Brazil - practically half of the 12 and a half million Africans who arrived in the country from the beginning of the 16th century until more than halfway through the 19th century - are still very scarce. There is also little mention of the protagonism of black men and women who lived through the post-abolition period; the one that followed the Golden Law of 13 May 1888, which, far from being an isolated act, corresponded to a collective process of struggle for freedom, led by blacks, freedmen and their descendants. 

 

The Enciclopédia negra exhibition is part of a wide-ranging project that began in 2016 and which aims to raise the profile of black personalities who are little known to date. It was supported by the Companhia das Letras publishing house, the Ibirapitanga Institute, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Soma and the 36 artists who joined the call and made it a reality. The exhibition features more than 100 works based on the entries written for the book of the same name by Flavio Gomes, Jaime Lauriano and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, which contains 417 entries and more than 550 biographies. 

 

Narrating is a way of bringing the dead back to life and each canvas brings a beautiful story: people who clung to their right to freedom; liberal professionals who broke through the barriers of racism; mothers who fought for the freedom of their families; teachers who taught their pupils about their origins; individuals who revolted and organised uprisings; activists who wrote manifestos, founded associations and newspapers; religious leaders who reinvented other Africas in Brazil. 

 

The great utopia is to return imaginaries and histories that are more plural in terms of race, generation, region, gender and sex. This is a way of qualifying democracy, no longer discriminating against sectors of Brazilian society that correspond, at least in Brazil, to a "minoritised majority" in social representation. 

Enciclopédia Negra also aims to contribute to ending the genocide of this population. Because making these stories better known and giving faces to these personalities contributes to the reflection behind the statistics that we are used to reading every day in the newspapers, "naturalising" stories that have been brutally interrupted, either physically or in memory. 

 

Flávio Gomes, Jaime Lauriano and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz