Suset Sánchez. Black women, cholas, Chinese women, blondes... Fearless tits, resisting bodies and decolonial criticism

What happens when our gaze changes its epistemological perspective and the canonical works of art history are subjected to a decolonial critique? What ancestral, heteropatriarchal violences are revealed in the representations of masterpieces that have reified the female body? 

The emblematic work A Negra (1923) by Tarsila do Amaral, the leading female artist of Brazilian Modernism, serves as a guide and starting point for the art historian Suset Sánchez (born Havana, 1977) to undertake a disruptive exercise on “ways of seeing.” Her lecture will address the historicity and ideology of the interpretations of this well known image, in which a Black female body reveals political power and ethno-racial tensions as a founding image of Brazilian modern art and nation stories based on the discourse of racial democracy in the 20th century. 

Starting with A Negra, Sánchez traces a route towards other images in which contemporary feminist artistic practices resignify women’s rebellious anatomy. The images that accompany her on this exercise traverse the resisting anatomy of non-normative bodies, proud of their differences, which survive racism, xenophobia, pathologisations, media beauty canons, stereotypes, displacements and numerous structural violences established in the control systems of global biopolitics.