Rosana Paulino Resources

The Black Diaspora Archive at LLILAS Benson has acquired three works by leading Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino to mark the launch of Archiving Black América, an initiative that focuses on acknowledging and redressing the violence and anti-blackness of the archive.  

The insistence in Paulino’s work on slavery’s afterlife in Brazilian society is without precedent in the country’s artistic scene. For over 25 years she has been troubling the national project of racial democracy and the visual regime it produces. Paulino obtained her PhD in Visual Art from the University of São Paulo and has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation (2006-8), the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Brazilian Ministry of Education, 2008-11) and the Rockefeller Foundation/Bellagio Center (2014). In 2019 she became the first Black woman to have a retrospective of her work at the Pinacoteca in São Paulo, one of the most important spaces for visual art in the country. She is a source of inspiration and a mentor to an emerging generation of Black artists in Brazil. 

In this series of lithographs titled “Assentamento” (Settlement), Paulino contemplates the violation of body and personhood that turned captives into property. She re-imagines photographs taken by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz’s team during the Thayer expedition to Brazil in 1865-66. The expedition recorded somatological and phrenological characteristics of so-called pure racial types among African ethnic groups in support of Agassiz’s thesis on their inferiority. He and his team also travelled to Manaus in the Amazonian region to produce documentation for his argument on the undesirable effects of racial miscegenation. Paulino’s work pays homage to the labor in which enslaved women and their descendants engaged to create forms of knowledge and lifeways that asserted their humanity and connected the past with the present in sustaining ways.  

In this “Assentamento” series, Paulino imagines Black women as the seeds and roots of society and culture in Brazil; it is their suffering and their achievements that have “settled” the land and birthed other universes that continue to oppose colonialism’s world order. In Portuguese assentamento means “settlement”, but also the ritual of turning the earth into sacred ground in candomblé religious practice. It involves planting the collective energy of the community there, to create a space of connection with the orixás. Assentamento can also refer to the laying of a foundation, a land occupation, and the act of recording or registering information. Paulino’s work therefore offers us assentamento as a form of Black archival production. 

This process of settlement and struggle plays out under a horizon of death that haunts her work. Genocide and terror built the nation-state and continue to characterize Black Brazilians relationship to it. Paulino’s work historicizes the ongoing devalorization of Black lives and represents a frontal attack on an official narrative that persists in telling stories of slavery with nostalgia, and as the felicitous foundation of Brazil’s mestiço civilization. Her art and the ways of thinking and seeing that it proposes dismantle long-standing and powerful visual regimes that naturalize antiblack violence.  

Lorraine Leu, LLILAS Core Faculty & Co-Chair Archiving Black América 

Leu and Paulino at the Benson, February 2020