Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #12

Common Grounds

Quilombizing the Subject, the Museum, and the World to Inhabit It.

by Filipe Lippe

January 12, 2023

In recent years, claims for epistemological decolonization and justice for social minorities in several societies have become unavoidable agendas for Western art. Although social issues centered on anti-racism, feminism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ+ rights have driven museums to diversify their collections and include artists from social minority groups in their exhibition programs, while counter-hegemonic notions of art and aesthetics have been intensely debated by academics, artists, and curators, effective political and epistemic changes in the global contemporary art system has not yet happened. On the contrary, following the current neoliberal instrumentalization of identity-based agendas, the art system has assimilated these agendas through a process that, being driven mainly by the art market, de-potentializes and commodifies them.^[1] So, while social minorities eventually gain representation in the art system, their political demands as well as their identities and traumas are put at the service of the dominant order. This paradoxical consequence highlights the need to create independent political actions and establish cultural relations that are capable of undoing colonialist and capitalist structures still operating within the art system.

I faced the impact of coloniality and neoliberalism in an art institution during my own first visit to a modern art museum in the early 2000s. When I visited the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) for the first time, as a “mixed race” working-class teenager living in Duque de Caxias, I had the feeling that the collection of the museum was vibrating as a tragic and paradoxical modernity before my eyes.^[2] It is well known that Brazilian modern art, from anthropophagy to Tropicalismo and the Cinema Novo, was informed by the desire to problematize, understand, and create a modern tropical national identity that takes into account the complex ethnical and racial diversity of the country. This impetus brought into the institutional space of MAM Rio the visual presence of the lower classes and marginalized racial groups, within the artworks on display. However, there was something strangely resonating at the museum that prevented me from establishing a concrete identification with the collection and the museum itself. First, the intelligent architectural project developed by Affonso Reidy amazed me by its sophisticated modernity and integration with the landscape of Rio de Janeiro. V-shaped columns hold the museum in the air, in order to allow visitors to see Guanabara Bay and the recognizable silhouette of the peak of Pão de Açúcar. The columns also lift the museum to create a broad space underneath for social interaction, connected to the garden created by Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx and the nearby Flamengo Park. Inside the museum, the large rooms containing broad windows situate museum-goers and artworks within the landscape around the building, reminding us that we are in the tropics. The question this aesthetic experience prompted me to ask was: What kind of Brazil is this? The aesthetic sophistication and wealth I found in the spatial design of the museum did not look like the reality I was used to seeing in Duque de Caxias. Secondly, the museum’s collection introduced me to a Brazil that seemed to be shaped by a foreign look. Although all the exhibited works were created by iconic Brazilian artists such as Anita Malfatti, Antônio Dias, Hélio Oiticica, and Anna Bella Geiger, the view that these artists had of Brazil was not the same one I had, since they were white middle- and upper-class people. There were obvious class and racial confrontations between these artists and myself. So, while looking at the works exhibited at the museum, I felt like a foreigner in my own country. This feeling was not new to me, because I often feel like a stranger in Brazil when in places where people from the elites usually frequent. However, the MAM Rio as an institution was telling me that I did not deserve Brazilian modernity. The feeling of non-belonging was so strong that I felt like a worldless being.^[3]

Years later, when I was an art student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, I found out that in 1965 at the opening of the group exhibition Opinião 65 at MAM Rio, Hélio Oiticica was prevented from finishing a work he planned along with members of the samba school Estação Primeira de Mangueira. On this occasion, Oiticica intended to enter the museum’s exhibition space accompanied by musicians and dancers from the samba school, who were supposed to play and dance samba while wearing the “Parangolés” created by the artist. Nonetheless, the direction of the museum prohibited the artist and the members of the samba school from entering the museum. The problem was not Hélio Oiticica, who was one of the exhibiting artists of the show, but the members of the samba school. They were working-class persons of color and residents of Mangueira Favela who, because they did not correspond with the social standards the museum demanded in 1965, were prohibited from entering the building’s modern environment. In response to the prohibition, Oiticica decided to continue his intervention outside the museum, transforming the place into a carnival party open to all (fig. 1).

It was only in 2020 that MAM Rio appointed a person of color as artistic director, emphasizing how, for decades, people of my social class and dark skin colors were allowed to enter the museum only as subjects of works or as employees in subaltern positions, but never as protagonists.^[4] For me, the non-protagonism of the lower classes and persons of color in art museums was translated as a feeling of non-belonging. However, this feeling was only the symptom of a historical problem that I was not fully aware of at that time—the continuity of colonialism as a social trauma that structures the Brazilian state.

Fig. 1. Hélio Oiticica and the members of Estação Primeira de Mangueira at the opening of the Opinião 65 exhibition at MAM Rio in 1965. Photo: Desdémone Bardin

My observation is specific to Brazil and indicates a historical problem that is endogenous in Brazilian art museums. Racialized poor boys from other countries would perhaps have a different approach to Western art when visiting a museum for the first time. I honestly cannot say precisely how a poor black Dutch boy would feel when seeing the works of Rembrandt, Mondrian, and Viviane Sassen exhibited at an art museum in Amsterdam. The (hi)stories of peoples and their cultures intersect and hybridize, composing new cosmopolitan cultural identities. But still, each place has specific (hi)stories, knowledge, and traumas that make sense in their precise contexts. It is for this reason that I decided to begin my argumentation by narrating personal stories which refer to Brazilian social issues. I wanted to clarify that my understanding of Western art, as well as my understanding of political theory and society, are shaped by my social condition and culture.

In the Brazilian context, one alternative to the colonial-capitalist-neoliberal logic that informs the functioning of art institutions lies in collective social organization and actions based on the concept of quilombo. For centuries, the quilombo—an autonomous form of community created by fugitive enslaved Afrodiasporic people—configured a radical alternative to colonial Brazilian society. The quilombo, as I understand it, is not only a dissident community but also a process which expands beyond its territory and turns into a becoming. The quilombo models a way of being and a collective form of social organization that generates new relations between different knowledges, ethnics, and cultures, creating other subjectivities and modes of life that differ from the models imposed by coloniality and neoliberalism. Hence, the process of “quilombization” of being and of societies, as I propose, offers an alternative that can strategically begin from the application of “quilombism” as an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist principle in the arts and art institutions.

Quilombism as a Possibility of Cohabiting the World

Quilombos in colonial and postcolonial Brazil were communities organized by fugitive enslaved people. These communities were created primarily as a means of resisting the violence suffered by enslaved people in the plantations. Quilombos were in constant conflict with colonizers, and quilombola people (the inhabitants of quilombos) needed to be active in defending against capitães do mato and military campaigns.^[5] However, quilombos also had an aggregative identity that allowed Amerindians and white people who were not committed to the colonial system to join these communities.^[6] This aggregating characteristic made the quilombo a point of convergence where different cultures entangled and hybridized. This was a relationship driven by a suffering provoked by the experience of losing identity and humanhood, the experience of being trafficked to another continent to be enslaved. Quilombos are therefore a diasporic experience whose diverse ethno-racial and cultural unity established a way of being without the direct mediation of the colonizer. More than a community, quilombo is a way of surviving, a struggle, and a way of belonging collectively to a territory.

In his book Quilombismo: Documentos de uma militância Pan-Africanista, Brazilian author and activist Abdias do Nascimento identified quilombo as a principle of social organization and resistance which implicates a sense of aggregation and community based in recognizing the humanhood of the other. For Nascimento, the function of ensuring the survival of oppressed peoples is the ethical foundation of what he called “quilombism.” By applying quilombism as a political principle, Nascimento argues for an autonomous theory and practice based on the experience of the oppressed and not directed by external concepts which aim to adapt the oppressed to the dominant social scheme. According to him, quilombism must be an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist principle that means “fraternal and free encounter, solidarity, coexistence and existential communion.”^[7] Quilombism is then a possibility of transforming society that “represents a stage in human and sociopolitical progress in terms of economic egalitarianism.”^[8]

Dissident settlements were created in all regions of the American continent where the slave system operated.^[9] Brazilian quilombos originate from the Imbangala people of Angola. In her essay “O Conceito de Quilombo e a Resistência Cultural Negra,” Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento explains that the nomadic characteristic of the Imbangalas, added to the specificity of their social formation, allowed their community to integrate foreigners as long as they were initiated through a ritual. The Imbangalas created then an institution called Kilombo, which served to unite peoples of diverse origins into a community that was designated for military resistance against slave trafficking.^[10] The individuals who were integrated into the Imbangala’s group would be instituted as Kilombo.

In the 1989 essayistic film Ôrí, Beatriz Nascimento argues that, due to constant persecutions and battles, quilombola people had to adapt a fugitive way of life. Although the foundation of the quilombo is the land and quilombolas identified themselves deeply with the land, they had to learn they were the land, they were the quilombo.

This characteristic of the quilombo defines this type of community as a becoming, a continuous and unfinished history, an open memory of ancestral struggles, a process of identification forged in the relation/action between individuals who join together in order to fight for emancipation and for the possibility of inhabiting the world. The becoming is, in this sense, the ethos that guides the effort of quilombola individuals to inhabit the world and belong to it. Unlike the colonial-capitalist-neoliberal rationality that identifies the land as a private property that must be exploited, in a quilombo the individual recognizes the community and the land as part of its identity. A quilombola does not see themselves as the owner of the land, but as someone who belongs to the land. This outlines the non-predatory way quilombolas relate to the territories they occupy.

The quilombist model of communal organization is not a system defined by rigid norms of control and centralized power. It is an open and dynamic system structured in order to handle individual and collective needs. The kind of self-governance it applies is defined by mutually supportive relations, establishing a mode of power that differs from the Western one. Also in Ôrí, Beatriz Nascimento states that “research about the quilombo is partly based on questioning power. However much a social system dominates, it is possible that a different system is created within it, and that is what the quilombo is. But the quilombo’s mode of being does not enact state power in the sense that we understand it as political power, power of domination, because the quilombo disallows this perspective. Each individual is the power, each individual is the quilombo.”

The kind of power Beatriz Nascimento is referring to is non-oppressive. She is arguing about a form of potentializing the subject that differs from neoliberal empowerment, because it aims to promote the welfare of a community and not the individualization of power. The quilombola individual is, from this perspective, a collective individual and its potentiation strengthens its social group. Then, when quilombism is applied in a specific sociopolitical context, it functions as a potency that codifies a way of coexisting and cohabiting spaces.

While Abdias do Nascimento recognizes quilombism as a principle that can be used as an instrument of sociopolitical decolonization, Beatriz Nascimento identifies quilombo as an identity and a form of (co)existing in the world. This understanding of quilombism as an identity provides tools to challenge the coloniality of being.^[11] Therefore, the quilombization of social spaces will only be effectively accomplished if it leads to the quilombization of individuals. Nonetheless, the quilombization of societies and of being should not aim to become a universal model. Quilombism must be instrumental in creating the conditions for individuals to coexist in the world without having their ethno-racial and cultural differences suppressed. Universalization is a mistake that has already been made by the West. There is no need to repeat it.

Fig. 2. Filipe Lippe, Weltwehmut – The Modern Atlas Is a Worldless Man (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), 2021. Pencil on paper, 42.2 x 24.5 cm

Quilombizing the Museum and the Subject

In the colonial era, it was in the quilombos that oppressed populations found space to protect their cultures, habits, and religions from epistemicide. Even with the independence of Brazil in 1822 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, African and Amerindian cultures remained marginalized. These segments of society needed to create breaches through which they could keep their cultures and traditions alive. The quilombos remained as a subterfuge where cultural traditions could be maintained at the same time the quilombo way of life was spreading to urban centers and acquiring other settlement formats.

Based on this, Abdias do Nascimento classified two types of quilombo. The first is the “illegal quilombo,” which were the settlements in the forests established during the era of slavery in Brazil. The second is the “legal quilombo,” which consists of places of culture such as samba schools and terreiros founded after the abolition of slavery.^[12] With this is mind, I propose that quilombism also be applied to art institutions. The aggregative identity of quilombos can inform the reformulation of these institutions, transforming them into places where diverse social groups converge, as well as cultures and knowledges intermingle. By adopting the quilombo’s autonomous model of self-governance and communal participation, museums may challenge their structure, implementing a new ethics and a new institutional mechanism of operation. Although engaging the institutional space of a museum with the community that surrounds it is not an unprecedented practice, turning institutions into quilombos as a means of unmaking hegemonic structures offers experiences that have not yet been properly tested.^[13]

In recent years, the commons movement has been in evidence in Western capitalist societies and the Global South. The commons movement emerged particularly in the 1990s as a reaction to the financialization of societies and became a central reference for multiple focuses of social struggles and political movements such as alter-globalization, environmentalism, Occupy movement, workers’ cooperatives, and peasant resistances. In the specific context of art, the commons have been proposed as a form of opposition to the neoliberalization of the way art is made, exhibited, preserved, and commercialized.

In their book Common: On the Revolution in the 21st Century, the French sociologists Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval clarify that contemporary commons are a type of collective self-governing social organization that demands a specific mode of coexistence which denies power, property, and competitiveness. According to the authors, commons are defined as a political principle of self-governance organized through collective obligations they classify as a “principle of radical democracy,” in which all citizens participate and decide together on all issues concerning the community as a whole. Although quilombos and commons have different epistemic roots, the definition Dardot and Laval give to the commons movement resembles in many aspects the type of community of the quilombos. For this reason, I propose that, by establishing a critical dialogue between the two types of communal organization, we can expand the mechanisms we have to combat coloniality and neoliberalism.

Independent collective organizations that demand a sense of communal life and social practice are historically recurrent in Western art. Art colonies such as the Village of Arden, founded in the United States in 1900, communities created by artists in the context of the counterculture of the 1960s, like The Blackie in Liverpool, and occupations such as Rote Flora in Hamburg or artists’ houses like KuLe in Berlin, are examples which underline it. However, these experiences are not exactly commons. Contemporary commons, as Dardot and Laval put it, are organizations that have emerged from the notion that the neoliberalization of societies and human relations leads to the degradation of the social fabric. Therefore, we must consider that, although the commons have roots in the past, they are a relatively new sociopolitical phenomenon which is strictly linked to the strengthening of neoliberalism as the rationality that governs the world’s major societies.^[14]

Yet, as Dardot and Laval clarify, the commons are a movement that generates a type of counter-institution that reformulates the functioning of a space according to the needs and demands of a community that surrounds it. An example of this in Europe is the Teatro Valle in Rome, which was instituted as a commons after being occupied by an artists’ collective in 2011. The theater was occupied in response to cutbacks in the cultural sector and rumors regarding the local authorities’ decision to sell the theater to private investors and convert it into a commercial business. The occupation was originally only meant to last for about three days. Nevertheless, as news of the occupation began to echo across Italy, hundreds of people—not only workers in the art sector, but also workers in other sectors, researchers, Italian public figures, and ordinary citizens—got involved in the occupation, which was then prolonged. Following these events, the occupants elaborated the idea that the theater was a commons and began to enact a process of institutionalization of both the occupation and the management of the theater, turning it into a counter-institution formally based on the idea of radical democracy. One of the main goals and activities at the occupation, besides cultural and artistic production, was the promotion and sharing of knowledge that is not present in traditional institutional places. The theater was turned into a public space of relationships, encounters, interactions, and discussions, functioning as an agora where decisions were collectively made. Thus, the occupation achieved international recognition for its attempts to elaborate new social, political, and cultural practices around the idea of “commoning.”

A similar initiative took place in Naples in 2012, when a group of artists, researchers, students, cultural workers, and activists coordinated by the collective La Balena occupied a local building and founded the space l’Asilo. The goal of l’Asilo was to build a different use of a public good and thus generate a form of counter-institutionalization of art based on cooperation, autonomy, and independent practices.

On a European level, the commons provide a practical alternative to neoliberalism. However, it does not offer the tools needed to create cracks in the colonialist pillars existing in the contemporary world. This is where we reach an inflection point at which the conceptual bases and practical tools offered by the West lose their usefulness. Coloniality can only be completely overcome if we evoke the potency of anti-colonial knowledges and practices such as quilombism. Although contemporary commons aim to collectivize property and labor based on horizontal human relations, colonial racial and epistemological classifications remain active. To establish an efficient decolonization of knowledge and dismantle the sociopolitical and intellectual structures of racism, these classifications must be undone so that individuals are de-racialized and non-hegemonic knowledges can be applied. In this sense, the capacity of quilombos to establish cultural and ethno-racial hybridizations is instrumental. In the quilombos, different African peoples—mainly of Bantu and Yoruba origins—established a relationship with Amerindians that configured human relations and cultural intersections not determined by concepts of race created by colonialism. Establishing this kind of relationship is a way to overcome racial and epistemological hierarchies still existent within art and societies.

Since quilombist experiences in art are still scarce, what I propose here is more a speculative exercise than a finished project. Transforming an art museum into a quilombo would demand turning it into a counter-institutional space where decisions are made collectively through public assemblies. The collection of the quilombo/counter-museum should be de-privatized and become a common good that serves the community. It would also require a financial reform based on obtaining new means of collecting funds not dependent on private capitalist foundations, banks, and patrons committed to neoliberal policies. The community should have administrative participation in order to maintain financial transparency and avoid corruption. The existing hierarchies between professions and payment should be abolished in order to avoid competition, as well as the proliferation of elitism, racism, sexism, and the precarization of working conditions. The program of the museum should include non-Western knowledges in a way that Western art would not play a central role. As a quilombo, this counter-museum should be an emancipatory space of encounter, conviviality, mutual help, and care, but also a place of resistance and rupture.

Following the quilombization of art institutions, the penetration of quilombist principles into the artistic practice would inform cultural entanglements that de-universalize Western art. First, it would be necessary to understand that, from the colonization of the Americas onward, art has been used as a Western discipline that regulates the creative labor of populations in order to maintain Western epistemological hegemony. It was through art, for instance, that a racist system of representation stigmatized people of color as inferior beings, contributing to turn the white Western man into a universal model of the human being.^[15] The decolonization of Western art should therefore clarify that art is just one more kind of creative labor among others.^[16] Taking quilombos as an example to apply collective work and counter-hegemonic knowledge in the arts is a good strategy. Second, non-white and non-Western individuals should not have to adapt their practices to artistic norms outlined by the art system and the market in order to have their works legitimated. Not submitting to established concepts, market demands, and labels is fundamental for dissidence not to be institutionalized and commodified.

Although these claims are visibly idealistic, it is essential to bring them into the debate, because a fundamental part of the current dominant power consists in making us disbelieve it is possible to find solutions and modes of life outside of its scheme. But if we cannot find solutions, we must invent them, and for this we need political imagination and a dose of utopia. Acting collectively in the cracks and at the margins, boycotting, sabotaging, and confronting the system is an option. This is what quilombola people did to survive colonial violence.

An initiative that applies quilombist principals and is worth mentioning is the space/art project Lanchonete <> Lanchonete, which is located in Gamboa in Rio de Janeiro (fig. 3). Lanchonete <> Lanchonete was developed by the artist Thelma Vilas Boas to be a “resting, safe and welcoming” space that works as a collaborative space for art, school, and cooking.^[17] It is based on an aesthetic-political praxis that aims to build links with the communities of Gamboa by offering free education and food to local children. Most of the children attending the project are the children of poor, single mothers who need to work and have no day care centers where they can leave their children while absent. Regarding the reason why the space/art project also contains an open kitchen, Thelma Vilas Boas says that “the kitchen is the foundation of the principles of a school. A school of the world. With food we create processes of literacy, of politicization, of recognition of lacks. When I brought the project here, the first thing I heard was ‘I am hungry.’ How can you teach anything to a child who is hungry?”^[18] Besides being a place for education, debate, and research, Lanchonete <> Lanchonete also contributes artists who are eventually invited to develop projects with the children participating in the project. The structural organization of Lanchonete <> Lanchonete is based on the communal life of quilombo and is intrinsically linked to the social reality of Gamboa.

In the context of European institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, quilombization should necessarily transform the museum into a place where creative labor can provide encounters that produce an ethics of life as an aesthetic experience in which the living body acts within the world and rubs itself up against the world, and from this friction opens spaces to recover other ways of (co)existing. The Stedelijk quilombo/counter-museum should be then the place where it is possible to be-in-common and acting-in-common to counter both the Western epistemological hegemony and the neoliberal capitalist commodification of political agendas, cultures, and identities. Its goal should be liberating artworks from colonial roots and permitting Western art to hybridize with other kinds of creative labor in a non-hierarchical way, establishing new forms of subjectivation and coexistence within a space dedicated to art.

Frequently, the desire to establish a relationship with others, maintaining its dimension of reciprocity, is precisely crushed by the capitalist logic of property and competition. If, someday, a quilombist revolution takes place, it will be necessary to realize that this revolution was made and driven by desires corresponding to the relationship we want to establish with others, because we are relational beings. Deep down, the quilombo, and also the commons, is not outside of us. Community life weaves our lives, and experiences like those of the quilombo exist because we are in permanent relation with each other. But the social institutions dominant today, both state and private, prevent us from acting in a democratic way that allows us to express our capacity of existing and acting collectively. For this reason, institutions such as art museums should be turned into non-hierarchical places where collective practices are the foundations of an aesthetic, political, and epistemic change that creates the possibility of making life germinate.

Fig. 3. Pedagogical activity at Lanchonete. Photo: Official <> Lanchonete

Final Considerations: Longing for the Impossible.

Even today, when I enter an art museum, I feel a certain discomfort. But it is no longer the misrepresentation of people of color and the lower classes that disturbs me. The discomfort I feel today comes from the awareness that we are present in the museum as historical ghosts forged by colonialism. It has to be unmade.

The uniqueness of quilombization lies in its capacity to create practices that configure a new horizon of political, cultural, and epistemological possibilities producing actions to destabilize power. It proposes a dissent sensibility and a way of living together, offering political imagination for a world that is waiting to be invented. Quilombism does not belong exclusively to persons of color. It belongs to history and concerns all of those who want to have the right to belong and to inhabit the world.

I want to see Rembrandt dancing the samba at the Rijksmuseum, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing indigenous whistles to attract birds into the Berliner Philharmonie, workers occupying the parliaments, the New York Stock Exchange becoming a forest. I want to see the Stedelijk Museum becoming an open community. I want to see the world becoming a quilombo. Only the impossible matters.

About the Author

Filipe Lippe is a poet, artist, and researcher born in 1986 in Duque de Caxias, Brazil. He is a PhD candidate in art theory at HFBK Hamburg, researching historical trauma, racism, and (de)coloniality in the context of neoliberalism. He is particularly interested in Marxist theory, epistemic disobedience, decolonial thinking, Afrodiasporic music, pop counterculture, and political theory.

[1] The neoliberal instrumentalization of identity politics was problematized by American author Nancy Fraser in her book The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond (2019). Her article “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,” published online by Dissent magazine, also provides a good understanding of this topic.

[2] Duque de Caxias is a city in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. It is located at Baixada Fluminense, a region known for being one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of Rio de Janeiro.

[3] I coined the term “worldless being” to designate the contradictory condition of people of color who, even after colonialism, still do not entirely belong to the world and continue to be seen as illegitimate individuals.

[4] The duo Keyna Eleison and Paulo Lafuente were appointed as artistic directors of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 2020 through an open call. Eleison became the first black person to assume the artistic direction of the museum.

[5] Capitão do mato was the servant of a plantation or feitoria (trading post) in charge of capturing runaway enslaved people.

[6] Although there is a consensus that, in general, Quilombolas and Amerindians mixed harmoniously, eventual conflicts and territorial disputes also existed between them.

[7] Abdias do Nascimento, Quilombismo: Documentos de uma militância Pan-Africanista (Brasília: Fundação Palmares, 2002), 274.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The communities created by runaway enslaved people in the Americas have their origins in African communalism. The name given to the settlements varies according to the country, with “maroon community” and “maroonage” being the most used terms in the United States and Caribbean countries, while “cimarron” is often used in the Spanish Antilles. The word “maroon” comes from the French adjective marron, which means “fugitive” and “savage.” In Latin America, some of these communities can also be called palenques. The term “mocambo” is occasionally applied in Brazil, meaning “improvised hut.”

[10] The etymological origins of the word “quilombo” stem from Kilombo, which means “village” or “fortress” in Bantu.

[11] For a broader understanding of the concept of coloniality of being, I recommend the article “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” by Jamaican author Sylvia Wynter.

[12] Temples where Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda are cultivated.

[13] I recommend the reader to research the work developed by American curator Laura Raicovich when she was director of the Queens Museum in New York City.

[14] Usually, nineteenth-century utopian societies, anarchist communities, and communism are listed as the origin of contemporary commons.

[15] There are many artworks confirming my assertion. However, I mention the paintings created by Albert Eckhout in Brazil in the seventeenth century and also the Casta paintings created by various artists in New Spain (colonial Mexico) in the eighteenth century as two early examples of racist representations of colonized people in art.

[16] I defend the thesis that the term “art” is an abbreviation of “Western art.” In order to decentralize, de-universalize, demonopolize, and de-hierarchize creative practice, I adopted the term “creative labor” to designate the practices of non-Western people.

[17] See https://select.art.br/

[18] Ibid.