Por quanto tempo mais terei de nadar? – uma litania pela sobrevivência is a publication derived from the homonymous exhibition by Sara Fonseca da Graça — Petra.Preta, curated by Melissa Rodrigues. The catalogue features essays by Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro, Melissa Rodrigues, Raquel Lima, and Doriedson Nigro, which extend the space of possibility and radical imagination created by the artist. The exhibition was on view at Galeria da Boavista from July 6 to October 20, 2024.
“Amidst a time of social crisis, polarisation, argumentative simplification and also, a lot of violence, Petra.Preta — Sara Fonseca da Graça, created in this exhibition a complex and disarming moment of reflection, where one can imagine new figurations in art and in life, a reconfiguration of identity and the constant movement of survival.”
— Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro
“Contrary to the narratives of dehumanisation, thingification and fetishisation of the black body, as a body marked by a unique story, Sara Fonseca da Graça, in an exercise of countercolonial subversion, — using the concept of Nêgo Bispo — reclaims and resignifies joy, jubilation, and the black experience, conceiving an imaginal realm where the black body, where black women, may relish the right to weightlessness and to pleasure.”
— Melissa Rodrigues
“An awareness that reminds me of Jota Mombaça’s5 warning, about how the way in which dissenting cultures are systematically appropriated by the capitalist nordics that envision guaranteeing the fruition of a mostly white, cisgender and heteronormative public, accommodated in an art system that exploits the dimensions of pain and of wound, not with the intention of healing, but for the reproduction and perpetuation of historical violence.”
— Raquel Lima
“The colonial system not only condemned rest but also seized it. Stopping the system was an act of resistance. It was common sense for stopping, or simply resting, to be seen as softness, fragility and/or laziness. And laziness is seen as a bad example. In Brazil, the colonial rhetoric associated laziness to Bahians and indigenous peoples. In Bahia, the blackest territory in the country, laziness was ideologically constructed by the elite to watch over and to punish blackness.”
— Doriedson Nigro