MASP

Rosana Paulino chose ethnic, social and gender issues as topics in a way that makes her work carry a political streak of denouncing the racism and contradictions of Brazilian society. In A permanência das estruturas, she appropriates the image Plan and Sections of a Slave Ship (1789) by James Phillips (1745–1799), often reproduced and used by slave traders, and later in abolitionist campaigns. The patchwork technique also employs images of craniums (alluding to the craniometry that measures the potential of races based on brain size) and Portuguese tiles, as well as snapshots by German-Brazilian photographer Auguste Stahl (1828–1877). Stahl’s pictures record the full bodies of naked Brazilian Black people, and also their profiles and backs. The photographs were found by Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a Swiss scientist who had migrated to the US and advocated for a race hierarchy based on supposedly biological bases. The title of Paulino’s work indicates how much of that thinking remains persistently widespread in Brazil, where racism is structural.

— Adriano Pedrosa; Tomás Toledo

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