Arriving at the foyer of Galeria Francisco Fino, in Lisbon, we immediately see a self-portrait of Rio de Janeiro-born artist Panmela Castro in which some of the main elements of her work are apparent: the trickling that results from quick brushstrokes that attempt to capture the instant (a tradition of modern impressionist painting); the ability to capture the air surrounding the portrayed person; the plants, the lighting, the atmosphere of a garden – in and of itself a type of space carrying a series of historical layers that also include 18th century European artistic tradition, with its conflicted vision of nature either as controllable by human action or as the place of in-submission. But this is not just any garden. The brushes, the palette, everything reminds us that this garden is the artist’s place of process and creation. In her self-portrait, Panmela is at once relaxed and absorbed. Her eyes are on the pages of a book. But not any book! In her hands is a copy of Gayatri Spivak’s seminal work, whose title consists of a rhetorical question which has oriented most thinkers who are keen on founding a different way of understanding the world: Can the subaltern speak?
There is another clue that can guide us across the exhibition. The garden does not occupy a neutral place. Neutrality does not exist. Therefore, it is impossible to disregard the fact that the series of paintings featured at the gallery were made in a garden in Lisbon, in a Portuguese garden. The fact that the artist is holding Spivak’s book in Portugal changes everything: What is at stake when black Brazilian artist Panmela Castro crosses the Atlantic and decides to encounter black, white, Afro-Asian, cisgender, trans, non-binary, Portuguese, African, migrant people in Portugal? That is precisely the moment when an ocean starts to appear among the architectures of the garden.
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We all know that the Portuguese colonial enterprise translated into the removal of people from their homelands and their forcible displacement to other crown-controlled territories; African lands were taken from their original owners and turned into places of dominion, extraction of wealth and labour to serve the Portuguese empire. The ocean was the road used by Portugal to submit a whole part of the world. But we should also remember that any attempt at submission must deal with the in-submissive, with that which does not bend.
Gradually, the Atlantic Ocean also became a space that no longer submitted to the notion of national borders established by Europeans who saw themselves as the discoverers of that which had always been there. A series of traditions was created both above and below the water. And that was how a world of practices, languages and cultures was woven in murmurs, exchanges, survival strategies. In the course of this flow Panmela Castro’s country, Brazil, gradually ceased to be the main Portuguese colony to become the main destination of black men and women, who endured the largest forced displacement process ever witnessed by humankind: the African diaspora.
Unavoidably, these detoured lives did not merely occupy the territory under domination. They also countered the dominators, threatening their supremacy at the very core of their ancient cities, streets, houses, gardens. Portugal and the city of Lisbon saw the appearance of people that evaded their European models and, along with them, came voices and knowledges that were relegated to a place of subalternity. However, the subalterns who arrived (and keep arriving) can speak. And not only can they speak. They create and recreate artistic languages, modes of existing, ways of redrawing life.
- Igor Simões (Curator)
