Covered with palm oil, mercuro-chrome, ceremonial powder, mud or annatto, bodies pulsate in all the pages of ZUM. In the self-portraits of María Magdalena Campos-Pons, the body is the sea that embraces the Afro-diasporic identity of Black Latin American women, while in the offerings of Ayrson Heráclito, the body embodies the spirituality of the tropics, conceived between Yoruba cosmologies and the rituals of Bahian candomblé.

The photos of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie are evidence of lovers’ bodies, images such as the writer’s cancer tests, which reduced the disease to visible symptoms. In the work of the painter Luiz Zerbini, the photographic body dissolves in the research process until it appears again, reincarnated in pigments of color and light.

The negatives of Milagros de la Torre hide bodies which would be revealed by box camera street photographers, in an operation that points out to the much-desired social distinction and recalls the racial erasure they suffered.

In the photographs of Rosa Gauditano, women affirm their autonomy through bodies that vibrate with pleasure and freedom. In Zahy Tentehar’s films, her body is the geography that reconstructs the expropriated identity of the original peoples. Freedom and memory also meet in the performances of the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld, who challenged the spaces of power and repression with her body in the midst of the military dictatorship. For Congolese artist Sammy Baloji, the photographic album is not an affirmation of subjectivity, but the restoration of bodies that fell in the collective resistance.

 

Thyago Nogueira, Rony Maltz and Elisa von Randow

 

Cover and back cover: Freedom Trap 3 and 1 (2013), by María Magdalena Campos-Pons.