As our series on Brazil’s young black photographers continues, we profile Rio native Caio Rosa
In O Poder do Machado de Xangô (The Power of the Shango Ax), a 1975 episode of the Brazilian TV programme Globo Repórter, the story of the Bahian Candomblé priest Balbino's trip to Africa is told. We learn that through communication with their ancestors, it is in the language of the Orishas that Africans and Brazilians recognise themselves as equals and share an identity that breaks territorial boundaries.
In the same vein, in his 2020 series Visões de Um Futuro Perdido [Visions of a Lost Future], Caio Rosa relates clovis masks (a common accessory to carnival experiences in Rio de Jeneiro) with African mask cultures such as Likumbi Lya Mize from Zambia, in order to create cultural and spiritual connections. The emerging Brazilian photographer’s series builds a fictional dystopia where the survivors of the current chaos protect the community from foreigners and what tomorrow can be, both by teaching history and marking socio-cultural limits for the new generations.
One of the questions his work considers is what the world emanating from Africa or Latin America rather than the Global North could be. “We must think of the idea of north and south as a way of relating to the world and not just as a geographical separation,” Rosa says. “The reality of the Brazilian outskirts is the result of an afro-diasporic worldview in relation to Native Americans that culminates in circular ideas that enable us to escape European/monotheistic methodological bonds. The art born in the favelas is essentially free of any classification, even if the north insists on trying to put us in boxes.”
“The art born in the favelas is essentially free of any classification even if the north insists on trying to put us in boxes”
The Praça Seca neighbourhood of Rio is the birthplace of important names in black Brazilian culture in Brazil such as the samba singer and poet Clementina de Jesus, but makes the headlines for the intense conflicts that go on there between factions and the police. It’s this infamy that Rosa intends to dispel of his home. In his 2019 series O Outro Lado da Infância [The Other Side of Childhood] for example, he addresses the culture of popular street games that are being lost due to the evolution of urban violence, especially in the last 10 years.
In addition to his ancestry and locality, his family heritage is the main constituent not only of his work, but of his essence. His parents have a deep interest in performance and research in the areas of art education and African culture in Brazil and in socio-racial activism. Honoured in an untitled series this year, where the photographer documented the collection of African musical instruments of his family, his parents also inspired him to establish the platform Of Color and his musical exploration as a DJ that dives into the South African rhythms Gqom and Amapiano.
For Rosa, in conclusion: "We need to continue reconstructing the forms and ways of creating and reflecting on arts in and from Brazil. We need to rewrite our history from the point of view of the native peoples, and Africans who settled here as enslaved, because only the appreciation of this experience will cause a turn in the heads that promote and create spaces for dialogue in the artistic circuit.”
Words Ode
Visit Caio Rosa
From Brazil, With Love And Optic Games is a Nataal series spearheaded by Ode, a São Paulo-based stylist, writer and independent curator. Brazil, which has the largest black population outside the African continent, is home to a new generation of young black photographers who are creating fresh perspectives on fashion and art. This series of interviews sees Ode explore how their work both expands ideas around representation and participation and challenges Western perspectives that ignore the Global South as part of black life and diasporic conversations
Read our other stories in this series here.
Published on 11/11/2020