It was now, in this last carnival, the first of the Carnivals in which she said she had truly abandoned herself to the revelry, that an exceptional moment – to say the least – happened. It is not for me to tell here all the details – besides, I don’t have them – but what really matters is to know the moment Tadáskía was bitten on her leg by a lacraia. In a quick search I did, lacraia is an animal like this: it has a long body, a flat back, and may be called centipede; it has numerous pairs of legs and may or may not be poisonous.

I wasn’t (as you aren’t, perhaps) familiar with the word lacraia, but I was struck by how it had become key to helping me describe Tadáskía’s practice, an artist with whom I have been engaged in extended conversations – especially after her participation in the 35th São Paulo Biennial in 2023. And it was in one of these encounters that Tadáskía used the lacraia episode to explain what she describes as “apparition”: a moment of revelation that has as one of its principles the belief that “something is going to arise; it is already arising, it already exists,” even if the moment of creation is a lacraia.

The fact that she processes an event as a “hidden revelation” is based on the artist’s ability to read ordinary situations beyond their obvious and fast meanings. In the case of the lacraia, for example – between its most diminutive and extreme degrees of significance –, Tadáskía launched herself into a chromatic approximation of the chilopod with the figure of Exú – a deity in Afro-Brazilian religions who, due to the artist’s long evangelical trajectory, has never been so intimate to her, as well as her celebration par excellence, Carnival.

Listening to Tadáskía and reflecting deeply both on my commitment to written history and her commitment to things created to be impermanent, I added to the lines of the French writer Annie Ernaux in The Years (2021) – which I had read on the eve of Carnival – the thoughts of the American writer Saidiya Hartman about Black women’s ordinary lives and the monumental nature of their everyday experiences. Together, the two led me to consider the overlaps in the relationships between photography and performance, events, permanence, and disappear- ance. All this motivated by the fascinating answer I had when I asked Tadáskía about how her photographs happen: “Things show up,” she answered. “And what I don’t know, maybe is in the notebooks.”

Lacraia is the title with which she baptized her 2024 notebook. A notebook that, at the time of writing this text, does not yet exist, but which was already happening and, therefore, appeared, in another notebook entitled Sacola de viajante [Traveler’s Tote Bag], as Tadáskía would tell me, after I insisted. This fact is important as, since in many of her interviews, the relationships between doing and not knowing, showing and hiding, drawing and not seeing are fundamental in her way of working. The ideas and forms appear and reappear. They arrive through different channels. Just like the many images, orientations, instructions, sketches, and observations that have already begun to take shape in Lacraia, her works to show to hide (2020), Corda dourada [Golden Rope, 2019], and Hálito [Breath, 2019] sprang to life through a similar procedure performed through notebooks.

In to show to hide, the mystery of apparition tells us about the complexity with which the artist faces the issue of representation. “I believe that not everything can be revealed, not everything can be delivered. When you think about photography of Black and low-income people, there is always something to try to represent, to document, to bring an identity, an identification. However, that is not what moves me. With these photographs, if on one hand I felt the need to show the reality I came from – which, at first, seems to be a super precarious context –, then on the other hand, the photography provided me with the chance to show what it itself is hiding: it’s the moment when you are going to find a treasure, a certain wit of life as well as all of the conflicts that still haven’t been resolved.”

Using the same Yashica 35mm camera that her father used during the artist’s childhood, in outings to Aparecida do Norte, in São Paulo, Tadáskía created in 2020 a series which shows her interest in the idea that something can appear in a photograph based on this belief in apparition. Because she stops looking at her notebooks after she creates them, the photographs arise from the pages of her imagination, and they come back almost like a prophecy. As the apparitions are not rehearsed or literal, the nature of her work leaves the documentary aspect and goes to the performative one, mainly because of the importance of a poetic and fantastical writing, present in many of her writings, like Ave preta mística [Mystical black bird], a series presented in the 35th Biennial.

As she performs with and against the camera, Tadáskía often invites the presence and participation of members of her family. The daily life and the symbolic, affective, epistemological repertoire fill her cognitive framework. In to show to hide, a family of sculptures is created to be performed by people in their family. The names of these sculptures are Zumbidas [Buzzings], Rastejantes [Crawlers], Rabos [Tails], Trepadeiras [Creepers], and Gruda-gruda [Sticky-Sticky]. By trying to show and hide, it is by performing with these wearable sculptures that the work ends up camouflaging or masking the widely expected image of everyday Black life. The play and the dialogue between two families show and hide the ordinary and the alien in an interaction in which her relatives appear not only as a theme within the work, but also as the protagonist of a broader artistic project of redistributing abundance.

Between notebooks and family albums, the presence of a golden thread that ties, connects, sews, stitches together and “redistributes the center”, in addition to being the foundation of Golden Rope, is also present in Suco preto e carne dourada [Black Juice and Golden Meat, 2020] and Corda dourada com minha mãe, Elenice Guarani, minha tia, Marilucia Moraes, minha avó, Maria da Graça, e minha tia, Gracilene Guarani [Golden Rope with My Mother, Elenice Guarani, My Aunt, Marilucia Moraes, My Grandmother, Maria da Graça, and My Aunt, Gracilene Guarani, 2019].

In these works, thinking about the redistribution of accesses and resources as an aesthetic methodology and an ethical procedure (perspective also recurrent in the practice of many other Black and original people) made me remember the following statement: “Of all the art forms photography is the one most susceptible to a discourse of rights, for good reason. And the right it most invokes is the right to ownership,” as American professors Stefano Harney and Fred Moten state in Fade of the Black Family Photograph (2023).

This discussion about photography and property present in the text interests us to discuss both the compulsory and generative state of dispossession and expropriation of the Black life and the relationship between the subject and object “that resists the ends of gaze and image.” The fundamental ethics of Tadáskía’s photographic project include sharing any earnings with the family members present in the images, as well as undertaking a range of economic reparation projects. As such, the photographs seem to confirm a family pact that says we can have some ownership, even being owned: “On January 10, I invited my family and friends to appear at 1 p.m. to eat a golden meat and a black juice […] I served the golden meat and the black juice into the hands of each person using a wooden spoon. After eating, we put away the towel and the objects for our second apparition. On the same day, at 4 p.m., we appeared in front of the door of Cavalariças. And as soon as we heard people saying olha o passarinho [watch the birdie] as they photographed us, we rolled our eyes. Each person in their own time.” That’s is how the artist describes the apparition entitled Olha o passarinho! com minha tia, Gracilene Guarani, minha mãe, Elenice Guarani, meu pai, Aguinaldo Morais, meus primos, Breno Moraes e Lucas Moraes, e minhas amigas, Aline Besouro e Lorran Dias [Watch the Birdie with My Aunt, Gracilene Guarani, My Mother, Elenice Guarani, My Father, Aguinaldo Morais, My Cousins, Breno Moraes and Lucas Moraes, and My Friends, Aline Besouro e Lorran Dias, 2019], recorded by Gabi Carrera in Lage Park, Rio de Janeiro.

Differently from many family pictures abandoned or thrown away, the economy of visual ownership and the relationship between owning and being owned connect Golden Rope with history. An image which, for many people, can be tied by a progressive linearity with other artistic movements but, for Tadáskía, is a work that has never been tied or meant to make any kind of quote, update or even a direct reference to other works, very prominent artists or great historical narratives. As we will see, for Tadáskía, the past of this photograph is the present as well as the history of Black existence.

By incorporating knowledge into its daily life, the rope revealed itself as an apparition, she tells me, when she realized gold and fortune can’t simply be summed up in material measurements. The performance, then, arises as a gesture that expands reality’s objective need: to realize an act in which gold is ritualized and is prophesied as an image for the future. She considers family as a commodity that resists its own photographic objecthood and competes with history’s own reproducibility. She considers family as a property that, even if it is surrounded by exposed blocks without plaster or by an architecture that reveals poverty, promotes the creation of a prolific visual vocabulary in which the relationship with memory and property is remade under her own terms.

In the text “Tempo negro: abstração e racialidade na arte contemporânea brasileira” [“Black Times: Abstraction and Raciality in Brazilian Contemporary Art”, 2021], I addressed the complex debate about the ways in which relationships with historical time and ancestral time colored the afrodiasporic experiences. I thought, however, that perhaps it is worthwhile to make a brief comment again about these processes of alienation and affiliation with the history of art. Even if we run the uncertain risk that historical visual references make up our memory place, they are (also and, sometimes, above all) “the memory places, their oral and bodily repertoires, gestures and habits,” explains Leda Maria Martins in the essay “Performances do tempo espiralar” [“Performances of Spiral Time”, 2002], which feed several cognition processes. It is not-possessing that challenges and exceeds criticism, capable of reading many times only the representation of an icon. As Hilton Als comments in the text “The First Step of Becoming an Art Historian” (1985), “to see, it is necessary to have a language that directs the look to that which is being noticed. The language of perception, particularly of the black experience in art, is difficult to acquire.”

Perhaps this change in perception is among the difficult gifts that Moten and Harney speak of in relation to the image of the Black family. Thinking about donating the image and the violence that exists in giving and receiving, they assume that it is the chemestry of the Black family photo: “Existence insists upon this blur of wound and blessing. It’s the aspiration of our dying breath, the substance of being unseen in always being seen, which, secretly, selflessly, we see with ourselves, not seeing ourselves but seeing something else in seeing with, as if seeing was everything, as if everything were just a practice, just how we do on a Sunday evening, evidently.”

It’s also with a sigh and a breath that Tadáskía meditates on the brutal event that lit up the news in 2018: Matheusa Passareli, a non-binary student of Uerj (University of Rio de Janeiro State), was murdered, dismembered and had her body burnt by drug dealers in Rio de Janeiro. At 10 a.m. on May 30, after the artist’s death was confirmed, Tadáskía built a small fortress to hide in. “I wear a red dress in honor of Matheusa Passareli,” she recalls. In Atrás do muro (homenagem à Matheusa Passareli) [Behind the wall (homage to Matheusa Passareli), 2018], Tadáskía builds a wall with blocks, in which she passes a plastic bag through the hole in the fortress where it fills, empties and breathes into the bag between the wall. Passareli is also family, and this breath of life appears in different scenes. “Every breath with its bag,” hiding within us in the light of what becomes a photograph of a family that was destroyed, dispossessed of its family image, an image of a family that no longer exist. Or could it be another kind, our kind, the kind considered possible for a family album?

In Hálito [Breath, 2019], Tadáskía, her mother, her father, her grandmother, aunts, and cousins breathe into bags stuck together by fire in the artist’s house. It is the duration of the life that creates the portrait. The photograph, Harney and Moten write, “is commissioned against but also under the terms of a contract of civil butchery.” Hálito may be what the artist calls “an elementary exercise in vitality” or “a temporary meeting that wilts.” “Resisting, broken, protected – the chemistry of stolen moments is our true and terrible and beautiful black sharing,” as Harney and Moten say and continue: “This chain of viewing (looking, looking like, seeing with, seeming, unseaming) is a chain of handing. There’s violence in being held on the verge of being hidden. Being treasured is all but being lost. Nothing found in being sought. Common breath is gone and we can’t reconstruct it. And, anyway, what’s this presumption of family, and its rights and its brokenness, all that is being confirmed in the snapshot’s uncanny, untimely career? Can there be such a thing as a Black family photograph? Should there be?”

The breath of life of Tadáskía’s photography, as a whole itself a sweaty and hot photography, stems from her insistence on the animating power of transformation and resistance, through the conscious use that this is the language of perception that we possess in order to be possessed. Between “the interminable flash, the undefinable moment of being stolen,” and the fact that “we are disappearing,” the Exú-like lacraia renews the artist’s commitment to believing that “not all dangers are lethal,” and in our own belief that apparition is an act of faith. We need to take stock of shallow and banal images. I return to the prophecy of the artist’s notebooks: “We belong to the family of the Mystical Black Birds. We are also known as the Enchanted Chickens. Inspired by Sankofa. Friends of Magic.”

All the images will disappear. Will there be someone who recognizes us? ///

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Text originally published in the printed edition of revista ZUM #27.

Tadáskía (Rio de Janeiro, 1993) is an artist, with a degree in visual arts and a master’s degree in Education from UFRJ. She presented the exhibitions Sob as cinzas, brasa [Under the Ashes, Embers], at the 37th Panorama of Brazilian Art (Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, MAM-SP, 2022), and Projects: Tadáskía (MoMA, 2024), in New York. She participated in the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023).

Diane Lima (Mundo Novo, Bahia, 1986) is a curator and writer. She was one of the curators of the exhibition Vuadora [Flying], by Paulo Nazareth (Pivô), and Stella do Patrocínio: a história que fala [Stella do Patrocínio: The Story that Speaks] (Bispo do Rosário Museum), in 2021. She was co-curator of the 35th São Paulo Biennial (2023).

Captions: p. 125: Golden Rope with My Mother, Elenice Guarani, My Aunt, Marilúcia Moraes, My Grandmother, Maria da Graça, and My Aunt, Gra- cilene Guarani, 2020. p. 126: With the Golden Rope, 2020; Golden Rope with My Father, Aguinaldo Mo- rais, 2020. p. 127: Golden Rope with My Sister, Hel- len Morais, 2020; Golden Rope with My Mother, Elenice Guarani, 2020. p. 128: Breath with My Aunt, Gracilene Guarani, and My Cousin, Breno Moraes, 2019; Breath with My Mother, Elenice Guarani, My Grandmother, Maria da Graça, My Aunts, Gracilene Guarani and Marilúcia Moraes, and My Cousin, Lucas Moraes, 2019. p. 129: Breath with My Father, Aguinaldo Moraes, and My Mother, Elenice Gua- rani, 2019. p. 130: Breath with My Mother, Elenice Guarani, 2019. p. 131: With Breath, 2019; Breath Flower, 2019. p. 132: to show to hide Buzzings and Crawlers with My Grandmother, Maria da Graça, My Mother, Elenice Guarani, and My Sister, Hel- len Morais, 2020; to show to hide Buzzings with My Sister, Hellen Morais, 2020. p. 133: to show to hide Crawlers and Buzzings with My Sister, Hellen Mo- rais, My Grandmother, Maria da Graça, My Mother, Elenice Guarani, 2020. p. 134: to show to hide Crawl- ers with My Mother, Elenice Guarani, 2020. p. 135: to show to hide Crawlers with My Sister, Hellen Morais, 2020. p. 136: to show to hide Sticky-Sticky in Our House, 2020; to show to hide Crawlers and Sticky-Sticky in Our House, 2020. p. 137: to show to hide Crawlers in Our House, 2020.

Tags: Artigos online, performance, Revista ZUM 27