White blackness
Roberto Conduru
Refino and Passar em branco, the performances that Tiago Sant’Ana presents with photos and videos in Casa de Purgar have a common element: a black man carries out repetitive actions amid ruined environments. Another constant in these works is the color white. As David Batchelor demonstrated in Chromophobia, white is anything but an insignificant color. It’s multiple, plural.
Among white things, refined sugar has a special feature. In Refino, white is the sugar that the artist sifts, with which he covers himself, the floor and the altar of the ruined chapel of Engenho Paramirim, covers and discovers a book to hide and reveal images by Jean-Baptiste Debret with captive men pressing sugarcane. As in Refino, white are Saint Anne’s clothes in Passar em branco, as well as the costumes that he unwrinkles and tidies up geometrically with contemporary equipments, indicating the persistence of the ruin beyond the manor of Engenho de Oiteiro, in Terra Nova, one of the many in the Recôncavo region that produced sugar for Bahia and the world.
In Brazil, since the 16th century, manufacturing and trading sugar generated a particular material culture, mainly classy: sugar mills, manors, temples and many other things. But sugar was a source of pleasure and pain, requiring tools imbued with perversion. Necessary to the production of wealth, these environments, buildings and utensils also destroyed. It’s not by chance that many of them are banned. They are machines created to destroy too, especially people from Africa and their slaved descendents. In this sense, the white of sugar is black; whether because of the Africans and Afro-Brazilians consumed in the sugar mills or the sinister processes and effects of the culture of this sweet, sophisticated and white powder.
The color white is usually seen as a symbol of purity and perfection. However, from these performances by Sant’Ana, it’s possible to understand it as a means of oppression, strain, disregard and extermination of its opposite: black – the color and most of all, the people associated to it. Besides critically unveiling what was intended to be kept hidden, the artist draws upon practices of Afro- Brazilian religions and uses the color white as a purifying element, aiming at purging places and things of the evil embedded in them for centuries.
Demeaning work, black body, ruin and dominant white are elements related to the issues that Sant’Ana discusses: colonialism, slave trade, slavery and its persistent effects in Bahia since the implementation of the sugarcane economic exploitation system and cultural domination. And he reveals the amplitude of his actions at the same time critical, purging and poetic.
Obviously, these series by Tiago Sant'Ana are connected to Ayrson Heráclito’s work, who started in the 1990s to artistically explore palm oil, sun dried beef and sugar, materials from Bahia with historical and anthropological meanings, as well as, more recently, Afro-Brazilian religious rituals as forms of critique and emancipation in slave trade, slavery and colonization sites. As the great Willys de Castro says: “In art, those without father are SOBs”. However, as Carl Einstein observed in Negerplastik, when analyzing the relationship of the so-called cubists with a kind of art from Africa, “acquiring historical importance is always a role of the immediate present”. Presented publically in this exhibition, the artistic partnership between Heráclito and Sant’Ana is a two-way street, more exactly one river, the Paraguaçu in its flow into All Saints’ Bay towards the Atlantic Ocean. Given the fundaments of the practices of the two artists, we may say that they share, cultivate and expand an axé, a family, an artistic terreiro – place to purge, create and transform. If, on one hand, Heráclito’s work is composed of formative and curatorial actions, on the other hand it’s affected by the further exchanges that welcome, support and project, but don’t foresee or control. Sant’Ana confirms and reiterates, but also unfolds and expands the decolonial critique through a poetic nurtured with art and religious values. In Refino and Passar em branco, he questions from the ruining of constructions to gender conventions and a variety of oppression forms; thus, giving us the blackness that belongs to sugar, to the white.