It was presented during the artistic residence at "Casa Sueli Carneiro" as an exchange part of the Master's Program:
. 2021 - Exhibition: "Ocupação Sueli Carneiro" at Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brasil.
It was presented inside of the exhibition: "Gives-on-and-with: Decolonial Moves of the Transcultural"
. 2021 - Exhibition: "Gives-on-and-with: Decolonial Moves of the Transcultural"
Artists: Ayman Alazraq, Luanda Carneiro Jacoel, GLAM Collective, Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Zinnia Naqvi.
Curated by Noor Bhangu.
Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Video - Performance KLGA ENttS
Kalunga Entities, a body in transit, that carries with it entities; traveling through temporalities, evoking archives and playing with the unknown. The artist explores bodily movement and visual elements to create install – actions in spaces.
The video - performance is a collaboration between Luanda Carneiro Jacoel and the visual artist and musician Azul Filho de Luiz.
Credits:
Concept//Performance by Luanda Carneiro Jacoel
@map_luacaja
Video//Music//Azul Filho de Luiz
@azullima
Sound designer//Music//Mathias Ferkjær
Duration: 12:47 minutes
Year of production: 2021
Place: Norway
It has been commissioned and presented at “Art Connects” curated by Vancouver Art Gallery, Canadá 2021//Norwegian Theater Academy. And presented at the exhibition “My Hair Loves BAD weather”by Kiyoshi Yamamoto at Trøndelag Center for Contemporary Art, Trondheim, Norway, 2021.
Audio - Slideshow. Artistic Research // Performativity 3 Ethics// Seminar 2//
"Expanding the Edge: An experiment for sharing". Presented at Black Box Teater, Oslo, Norway 2022
I speak from a body that dances its multiple voices, layers and identities.
A body entwining information
networks, updating its memories.
Surfing traces, always in a state of becoming.
A living archive, which carries on history, culture, ancestry, memories and temporalities.
Becoming a medium; a vehicle of my work as a performance artist.
These archives are dynamic and they are operating on multiple perspectives of time and coexistence.
My practice has been crossing boundaries between avant – garde; dance; ritual; installation; instant composition practices and video-performance.
In my latest works, I developed a series of performances inspired by Kalunga.
Kalunga is present in the dikenga dia Kôngo cosmogram. A cosmogram from Bantu – ethno-linguistic group, located mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Bakongo Cosmogram is a circle divided by a four-point cross and follows the path of the sun. The celestial scope is metaphorized, for the Bantu-Kongo and their diasporic descendants as a human-ancestral infinite, circular, spiral trajectory of life. Kalunga is the horizontal liquid membrane of the cross: the sea. Is the boundary between the living world and the world where the souls of the ancestors meet. Which presides over the metamorphosis body-spirit-body. Kalunga is a symbolic place of transition. Where the body communicates with the water archive and with the earth archive. There is a transformative aspect of the space, that is Kalunga, the activation of life, the force, the manifestation, the mutual communication, the call and response of co-ontologies that operate above and below Kalunga.
The visible and invisible.
The tangible and the non-tangible.
It's the time and it´s temporalities.
The presence, the change, the entrance and exit for potentialities to be, to exist, to become, to become, to become.
The research searches for a new path, a new journey inside of history, archives, legacy, and cosmologies. An Afro-Present body; an Afro-Diasporic body entangled in the transatlantic slave trade history. The accumulated history of the Black Atlantic is a space where the Afro-diasporic body calls for and remembers what is lost. Through ritual performance practices the ancestral archive Kalunga is an entity of transitional aspect of belonging.
A being; belonging to traces. Dialoguing with collective memories and archives that were carried by the body and expressed in culture, symbols, philosophy and ways of living. Generating co-narratives; co-creations; call-responses in a spiral temporality.
Performance - Lecture sharing extracts of performance works in dialogue with a text of the philosopher Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau a leading scholar of Bantu-Kongo cosmology—to explore how the references in this work unfold in her practice. Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau; African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo: Tying the Spiritual Knot: Principles of Life & Living; 2nd Edition; 2001.
Inside of the exhibition// “Gives-on-and-with: Decolonial moves of the transcultural”
Curated by Noor Bhangu // at Vancouver Art Gallery.
Kalunga Unspoken – The transit of a written text in other medias exploring co-narratives across body-movement, voice, sound, video and space.
Text by Sueli Carneiro, extracts from her doctoral thesis:
“The Construction of the Other as a Non-Being, as a Foundation for the Being”
(original title: “A Construção do outro como não ser como Fundamento do Ser”)
PhD. Sueli Carneiro is philosopher, writer, black feminist and anti-racist activist.
She is founder and director of Geledés – Institute of Black Women in São Paulo, Brazil and considered one of the main authors of the black feminism in Brazil.
Kalunga Unspoken – Sopro is a collaboration between the visual artist Azul Filho de Luiz and Luanda Carneiro Jacoel.
Video/Music: Azul Filho de Luiz
Duration: 05:09 minutes
Year of production: 2019
Place: Norway
performance artist @luacaja
Olga’s research
#1stOrbit
Luanda´s research
#kalungaentities
Phase 1 at Norwegian Theater Academy // Residence at Casa Sueli Carneiro
Sueli Carneiro - Exhibition
Ancestry, memory and temporalities
Is a performative action in dialogue with my mother´s history and legacy inside of the exhibition that carries her name: “ Ocupação Sueli Carneiro” in São Paulo, Brasil.
PhD. Sueli Carneiro is a philosopher, writer, feminist, anti-racist activist and one of the names that opened the paths of Brazilian black feminism.
The collection of photos, videos, documents and objects are entities that contain memories itself. Entities that mobilize symbologies, history and temporalities.
Entities that cross me. An intimate encounter with the invisible.
I feel you
I experience you
You move me
I dance you
Photos by André Seiti
Ancestry, memory and temporalities
Is a performative action in dialogue with my mother´s history and legacy inside of the exhibition that carries her name: “ Ocupação Sueli Carneiro” at Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brasil.
Video: Natália Carneiro
Performance Kalunga Entities // Performativity 3 Ethics// Seminar 2//
"Expanding the Edge: An experiment for sharing".
Presented at Black Box Teater, Oslo, Norway 2022
Photos: Christian Bermudez Aguilar
Sueli Carneiro - Mother - Home
Sueli Carneiro, it's my first home, my mother. After inhabiting her womb, I grew up in our house, located in the Butantã neighborhood of São Paulo.
The proposal to create Casa Sueli Carneiro fulfills a dream that my mother and I have always dreamed of together. To create, in our house, a memory space for Sueli Carneiro's legacy and also a space for continued research in black epistemologies.
Sueli Carneiro's house was a fundamental space for the production of her extraordinary intellectual contribution to thinking and acting into racial relations in Brazil.
Our family and community relationships have always been led by quilombola* principles inherited from my grandfather, José Horácio Carneiro, my mother's father. These principles have always been present in our upbringing and socialization as a blood family and as extended family of friends and aggregates. Fundamentals that guide the trajectory of Sueli Carneiro and the greatest heritage that our family inherited.
I believe that these are the fundamental principles for the functioning of the activities of Casa Sueli Carneiro. Casa Sueli Carneiro is home to a living and dynamic archive that aims to update the history, legacy and trajectory of Sueli Carneiro and its developments.
Sueli Carneiro is a legacy in motion!!!
Residence at Casa Sueli Carneiro
This historic house was the home of Brasilian philosopher, feminist and anti-racism activist, Sueli Carneiro for over 40 years.
Throughout those years, this space was a central meeting place for intellectuals and activists from both the Black movement and the Black women’s movement in Brazil and is now open for new generations of activism and Black legacy building.
Casa Sueli Carneiro is an institution facilitating cultural events, activism, Black thought and critique in a mission to expand the visibility and scope of Black activist-intellectual traditions from within Brasil and beyond its borders.
The purpose of this Residence is to open a space of encounter, exchange and reflection for students from different areas. The aim is to provide theoretical and practical approaches concerning legacy, memory and black epistemologies. I'm very interested in the opportunity to do a residency at Casa Sueli Carneiro; for being a space that shelters theoretical material to support my artistic research that is centered on issues related to memory and culture. Also the Residence Program provides: Access to discussions forums and courses; access to the archive and library; participation in projects in development and evaluation programs and participation and creation of cultural activities together with the communication team of the Institution. As a performance artist I see the artistic work as a channel of dialogue between theoretical and practical approaches. A platform where both perspectives can intertwine and operate in correlation, amplifying the possibilities of art as a source of knowledge itself.
Theoretical sources offered:
- "Cycle of Conferences on Black Epistemologies"
This cycle of conferences aims to reflect on the production of knowledge by black and black Brazilian intellectuals.
Finding out about multiple ways of being, being, relating, and acting, in addition to Eurocentric ones, can contribute to practices and research in different areas.
Dedicate to the life and work of Conceição Evaristo, Edson Cardoso, Muniz Sodré.
- "Black memories makers", a course run by Casa Sueli Carneiro in partnership with the Rosa Luxemburgo Foundation, proposes to transform the very experience of organizing and making available the memory, collection and legacy of Casa Sueli Carneiro into a training process, creating and/or strengthening capacities and conditions so that other similar experiences can take place and connect and contribute to the revelation of black memory in Brazil.
Publication of the e -book:"supplies for anchoring black memory".
Iroko is the name of a sacred tree found in Africa.
The iroko tree (Milicia excelsada) is re-symbolized in Afro-Brazilian rituals with native Brazilian trees.Iroko is the tree of creation and also represents the Time. It is a deity worshiped both in Africa and in Brazil.
Ancestry, memory and temporalities
Is a performative action in dialogue with my mother´s history and legacy inside our house in São Paulo, Brasil.
Video: Natália Carneiro
“Kalûnga then became the symbol for force, vitality and more, a process and principle of change, all changes on the earth (Kalûnga walûnga mbûngi ye lungila yo wayika se n´kîngu wa nsobolo). And by cooling the mass in fusion (zenge - zenge/ladi diambangazi) solidified itself (kînda) and gave birth to the earth. In the process of cooling, (mvodolo/nghodolo) the matter in fusion (luku lwalâmba Nzâmbi) produced water, (luku lwasânda) whose rivers, mountains, etc., are the results ( Fu - Kiau, 1969). The world, (nza), became a physical reality floating in kalûnga (in the endless water within the cosmic space); half emerging for terrestrial life and half submerging for submarine life and the spiritual world. The kalûnga, also meaning ocean, is a door and a wall between those two worlds. Kalûnga became also the idea of immensity, (sènsele/waywa) that one cannot measure; an exit and entrance, source and origin of life, potentialities (n´kîngunzâmbi) the principal god-of-change, the force that continually generates. Because kalûnga was the complete life, everything in touch with the earth shared that life, and became life after itself. That life appeared on the earth under all kinds of sizes and forms: plants, insects, animals, rocks, human beings, etc.”
(African Cosmology of the Bântu-Kôngo: Tying the Spiritual Knot : Principles of Life & Living; Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau; 2nd Edition; 2001)
“The senses through which the person interconnects itself with the holy, drives the person to react symbolically. We perceive that the quality of the physical structure makes the reception of the symbolic field possible, quite like the sensitivity in the apprehension of symbols, forwards the body into assuming this structure."
(Rodrigues, Graziela; Bailarino, Pesquisador, Intérprete; Funarte 1997:43)
Install - Action
Sau.d(ar).ações
a body in transit, that carries with it entities; traveling through temporalities, evoking archives and playing with the unknown.
The artist explores bodily movement and visual elements to create install – actions in spaces.
//Scrapbook Performs// Performativity Scrapbook //Scrapbook Performance//
evoking archives.leaving traces.playing with the unknown.a body(in)transit.navigating temporalities.present.pr(e)s(s)ence.afro-presente.
The scrapbook Å Bli* intends to perform as a multimedia living archive of texts, photos, video and audio inspired by the Bakongo Cosmogram (dikenga dia Kôngo) cosmologie and the vital force Kalunga that is part of this cosmologie.
* Å Bli - “To become” in Norwegian language
// How to translate ** a cosmologie, a philosophy?// How to translate it from an artistic perspective?//
** Translate - transitive verb. 1a : to turn into one's own or another language. b : to transfer or turn from one set of symbols into another : transcribe. c(1) : to express in different terms and especially different words : paraphrase. (2) : to express in more comprehensible terms : explain, interpret.
As a performance artist I work from the perspective of the body as a living archive that carries with it history, culture, ancestry, memories and temporalities. These archives are dynamic, moving along time in coexistence and permanence. Reflecting on the Black Atlantic history and the Afro-Diaspora that results from it. The research searches for a new path, a new journey inside of history, archives, legacy, and cosmologies. An Afro-Present body; an Afro-Diasporic body entangled in the transatlantic slave trade history. A being; belonging to traces. Dialoguing with collective memories and archives that were carried by the body and expressed in culture, symbols, philosophy and ways of living. Generating co-narratives; co-creations; call-responses in a spiral temporality.
// to reveal is to offer// traces that reveal // a way of thinking that moves // displacement with coherence// tangible - intangible // visible - invisible // spoken - unspoken // co - existence // dance - Duo// co-narratives//
The dikenga dia Kôngo cosmogram precedes a cosmology that perceives the world not just in its immediate physicality, but as a network of interacting energies. All beings of nature, animate and inanimate, manifest themselves with different gradations of vital forces, which interact with each other, always seeking for balance. The notion and cultivation of ancestry are well known as the main source of maintenance of individual and collective vitality. Within a circle divided into four parts by a cross, we experience the stages of life, in a spiral perspective of time. The cosmogram is the representation of the trajectory of life, between the spiritual and human worlds.
Kalunga is the threshold between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Above Kalunga is the world of the living, the physical world and below Kalunga the world of the dead, abode of the ancestors. Kalunga is represented by a liquid, permeable horizontal line, the sea, infinite movement that adheres to flows and transits. Kalunga is a set of creations that overflowed from the void. The set of where things start to become. The universal source that made all things happen in the past, makes things happen in the present and will make things happen in the future. Life itself. integrity of being. Liquid state. Movement. Interaction. Interaction as a manifestation of a way of existing in the world. Transitional place. States of becoming.
// dynamic// concepts// play// artistic creation// overlays// mosaic// multimedia//
She moves textual and visual archives.
I move, she moves, entities, traces, the unknown.
She moves orality, word, magic, the unspoken!
Extended dialogues, sharing stories, ancestral principle, source.
I move, she moves, our senses move, through vibrations, sounds, voices, memories, affections, internal and external reflective movement. Call and response, playing with black epistemologies.
Install - Action:
re. visiting “Kalunga Extended”
Performance by Luanda Carneiro Jacoel
Live Music: Ben LaMar Gay #benlamargay
Live Projection: Temi Odumosu @drodumosu
Original Video Caption: Deise Nunes
Production: Golden Mirrors Arts Norway
2019
#kalungaextended
"Install- Actions embraces the concepts of displacement and nomadism.
A body (in) transit, that carries with it signs-entities of independent existence and that can travel in time and space, becoming others forms or expressions. The idea is to bring movement, visual elements and objects to create install – actions in spaces" Luanda Carneiro Jacoel
(...) “When we think of black cosmologies, we will grant that other matrices were built, through diasporic flows, that is, we do not have in the Americas, if we want, only fragments and vestiges of existential narratives from parts of the African continent. New systems, languages, new materialities, immaterialities and impermanences were created; unfinished creations were made, as Paul Gilroy reminds us. Black men and black women concern a resumption of subjugation embedded in the word so that, in a radical sprain, its setback can be proposed as a positive power to the act “ (…)
“Translation, Interactions and African Cosmologies by Tiganá Santana
Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil.”
Assemblage
"The approach of “Assemblage” is based on the principle that all materials can be incorporated into a work of art and create a new object without losing its original meaning. By using an interdisciplinary perspective, the assemblage can be a place of encounter, exchange and co - creation between artists artists to share their diasporic experiences. The idea is to explore the concept of assemblage as a facilitator of the performer to incorporate several aspects of the post-colonial experience in order to highlight the conflicted relation to places, identity, migration and heritage present in the post-colonial body. It can result in a collage of preserved objects and mediated possibilities for new dialogues among artistic fields".
Luanda Carneiro Jacoel
As Fanon says: “ (... ) colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it. (Franz Fanon, The Wretched, 1961)”.
Intertextual/Intermedia
"Explores the interrelation between word and image as a place of speech. Searching for a synesthetic experience by exploring visual arts, sound, text and movement and installation in site-specific locations". Luanda Carneio Jacoel
Performance “Kalunga Entities”
Invited by the artist Kiyoshi Yamamoto to perform in the opening of the exhibition "My Hair LOVES BAD Weather" at Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art.
April 2021
Photo: Monica Anette Svorstøl / Trøndelag senter for samtidskunst
Workshop: "Room of Invented Memories" at Norwegian Theater Academy (NTA)
* Adverbials are words that we use to give more information about a verb. They can be one word (angrily, here) or phrases (at home, in a few hours) and often say how, where, when or how often something happens or is done, though they can also have other uses.
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Bring an object that is an archive for you
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Bring or come with clothes that inspire you to move, to perform, to interact with, that somehow works as an extension of your body. The same with shoes; Or you can also be barefoot.
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If you play an instrument and want to explore it, you are welcome. The instrument does not need to be your archive object.
These are some questions for our mindset during this journey in the workshop:
( you do not need to answer them, feel free to use them as you feel or even ignore them)
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How do you feel about these specific hours in your daily life?
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06:00
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12:00
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18:00
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00:00
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Do you love your motherland?
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How to move a memory?
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Is it home the place you left?
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How many cities do you have in you?
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How does the body archive ?
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What is identity for you ? Where in your body ?
“As we work, it is necessary to look for the origin, the essence and the history of the gestures, fleeing from the mechanical repetition of empty and prefabricated shapes. Only in this way will the work result in an original creation, in a technique that is the vehicle and not the destination – as a technique is only useful when it becomes a second nature of the artist.” (Vianna, 1990:58)
As the Afro - Brazilian philosopher Katiúscia Ribeiro says:
“Ancestry as a philosophical principle is a coronary order that makes it possible to recognize and continue a legacy that is born all the time and remains alive in the pulse of our existence materialized in various actions and orality practices”(...)
“Our ancestry makes us perceive, makes us feel, makes us think. It is printed as a representative force of a living that reinvents itself, a life force more creative than death, than the diaspora or enslavement. Ancestry is the mother's womb, it is the breath of life that is woven into our mother's womb by ancestral blood, it is the music that makes our body cells vibrate and dictates the rhythm of the heart, it is the poetry that soothes and disturbs , it is philosophy and its wisdom combos, it is the struggle for life and resistance to death, it is the nature and manifestation of life, it is movement and walking, in each one of us, in each person who breathes there is a mark of ancestry. Thinking about ancestry is not about understanding the meaning of life, from the complex text and difficult terms, but about living in motion with life, this eternal becoming, it is a wheel, without end, because the future it is ancestral.
(“O Futuro é Ancestral “by Katiúscia Ribeiro @anpof_oficial )
