For a loving confabulation of the world

Abstract

What unfolds in the following pages is a conversation around the relationships of words and images with constructions of meanings (both negative and positive) about what a black person is. Faced with the urgency of thinking about race in a markedly racist, terrorist, and genocidal society, we developed an exercise of writing and imagination, between the months of May and July 2023, on these themes and their crossings in art and visual culture. We made an initial move towards understanding the context that is set, to situate and protect ourselves from threats and traps. However, as the exercise deepens, we move on to a loving confabulation of the world. Not of another world, but of this world, in which we live, and which is also ours, even though it is often denied to us. This is the world to which we lay claim. Our writing, which begins fragmented and sometimes in the first person, takes the direction of creating a common place, of encounter, exchange, and healing – in an unrehearsed movement, of which we could realize only when we had finished the exercise that we set out to develop. With this text, we intend to contribute to the processes of recognition and overcoming the colonization of seeing, saying, thinking, feeling and being, assertively placing ourselves, as black people, beyond the (failed) standards that try to define, name, and stereotype us.