A historia inventada e a invençao de historias @ Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo: Roméo Mivekannin

Through his work, Roméo Mivekannin reminds us that there is a History that was invented to justify slavery, the unjustifiable ownership of human beings by other human beings. Yet, he reminds us that there were, and still are, those who, like the artist himself, make an effort to bring to light “the archives of silence,” bestowing on their people, through their art, not only a History but also the hope of redemption and justice.

For the first time, the French-Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin presents his work in southeastern Brazil. At the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo, Mivekannin exhibits 32 works, a set of paintings and textile pieces created using a technique he developed himself, the result of research he carried out in recent years from his studio in Paris.

In these works, Mivekannin revisits the History of Western art through his critical gaze, a reflection that is both aesthetic and ethical, as he questions the multiple meanings of colonial exploitation of our ancestral and contemporary African homeland. In the self-portraits he creates, he denounces the construction of an artistic and symbolic heritage built upon the plunder of assaulted civilizations, the enslavement, and genocide of non-white peoples. Nevertheless, the poetic construction shaped by the artist makes access to these narratives of high political voltage.

In the “Indigo” series of woven pieces, for instance, Mivekannin arranges geometric patterns that connect with an African ancestry expressed through the textile arts of various peoples. At the same time, he links this lineage to the contemporaneity of Afro-Brazilian concretism, represented in the exhibition by works of Emanoel Araujo (1940–2022). The exhibition also brings into dialogue the production of several contemporary poetics, such as Rosana Paulino, Tiago Gualberto, Sidney Amaral (1973–2017), and Otávio Araujo (1926–2015), artists who, like Roméo Mivekannin, construct narratives about the epic of the African diaspora in Brazil.

Claudinei Roberto da Silva

Curator