Bodies of Water: Hydric Cartography, a Flow into EthnoWEgraphy

• In Event: Afro-Brazilian Waterways and the Black Atlantic I - Diaspora: Ancestrality and Emancipation in Waters

Description for Program

Bodies of Water is an artistic performance, a confrontation based on the work of Cláudia Ferreira da Silva (2020), constructed through poetics, where body and water become theory. Bodies of Water is the memory, oral traditions, and ancestry of Black women from the peripheries. They present environmental racism, which transcends race, class, and territory. It is about the relationship between water and Black women, particularly the exhaustion of the Black body, whose dreams and lives have been drained by the State since colonial Brazil. It is the modus operandi of whiteness, which withdraws water resources and basic sanitation, a practice that leads to the withering of bodies in a continuous process of violence. Here, I intend to reflect from a fieldwork perspective that traverses my own persona—not through an autoethnographic method, but immersed in ethnoWEgraphy, a new method under development to think about the women and waters who came before me. Thus, Bodies of Water will present the tension, unrest, and critiCREATIVE approach that has been developed alongside my research on my grandmother, my mother, my aunt, and the waters—and environmental racism (Costa 2022, Pacheco 2012). Bodies of Water is body-time-space poetry. Above all, it is confrontation. It is a profound discussion between the Black body and water—living elements, yet limited by the violence imposed by temporality. Ancestry and Afropessimism that are present, navigating together in the same boat through the currents of the Black body (Pinho 2021, Smith 2015); between these two concepts, the environmental setting is the lost link that connects them.

Author

• Paulo Ramos, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo