Reel Brazil #5: RACE & DISLOCATION

‘Race & Dislocation’ brings together 4 contemporary videos that explore complex and nuanced realities in Brazil and China since the turn of the millennium, critiquing the unrelenting cultures of marginalisation, erasure and systemic discrimination of people based on their race, gender and class. Three Brazilian artists: Luiz de Abreu, Carlos Nader and Paul Nazareth, provide multi-faceted narratives of racial identities of people of black-Brazilian heritage and their erasure in Brazil. The work by the Chinese artist, Tao Hui points to racial and sexual oppressions in contemporary China, a phenomenon lesser known to UK audiences and adds a new visual sensibility to the set. Satire, performance and rituals bring these works together, as strategies of resistance and healing, as well as an armour against forgetfulness, dislocation and uprooting.

O Samba do Crioulo Doido (Samba of the Crazy Creole) | Luiz de Abreu | 19min 44sec | 2004 | Brazil | Documented Performance

O Samba do Crioulo Doido explores the eroticised black body and racial identities in Brazil, through the performance by Luiz de Abreu at the 18th Videobrasil Festival in 2013.

The title of the performance references a satirical song composed by the writer and journalist Ségio Porto, under the pseudonym Stanislaw Ponte Preta in 1966, for the Teatro de Revista, in which he seeks to ironise and obligation imposed on Samba schools to portray only historical facts in their sambas. The expression is used in Brazil to refer to meaningless things, to far-fetched and incoherent texts.

Borrowing from the satirical nature of the song, and with references to Samba, the carnival, and exoticised and eroticised black body – the dance deconstructs cliches of Brazilian cultures and the identity of black Brazilians that have been erased of feelings and spirituality, and being reducing the black bodies as spectacles and to be othered and objectified.

The dance uses transgressive humour and satire as a form of resistance, and hints to Brazil’s structural racism engrained within its historical narratives.

Luiz de Abreu is a choreographer-performer who lives and works in Brazil. His works explore stereotypes connected to the black body. Born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, he first discovered dance in the 1960s through the rituals of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion. He graduated in dance from Faculdade Angel Vianna in Rio de Janeiro and received a master’s degree from the Federal University of Uberlândia. He worked with various companies in Belo Horizonte and, in the mid-1990s, began his solo career in São Paulo.

Courtesy: Videobrasil Historic Archive

Preto e Branco (Black and White) | Carlos Nader | 1hr 13min | 2004 | Brazil | Documentary

The documentary seeks to shed light on issues related to racial prejudice in Brazil through four stories of citizens and families from different strata of society who, in one way or another, are related to the subject. Is the country a racial democracy? Or is it a country that is racist only in the economic sector?

The questions of race and its taboos remain urgent in Brazil today, like issues of origin, gender and class. The documentary, shot in black and white, allows the speech and gestures of its characters to reveal the discomfort that the subject matter embodies. With the city of São Paulo being at its epicentre, the film attempts at a comprehensive survey of the nuances and complexities of racial inequalities that exist in Brazil in the early 2000s as a perverse socially introjected problem.

Carlos Nader is a Brazilian Filmmaker and essayist born in Sao Paulo, 1964. His works experiment and mix languages ranging from video art to documentary film, that explore the complexity of contemporary Brazilian culture and its media-driven dimension. His work explores certain characters – anonymous people, personalities and artists – looking for widely varied traces of urban identities. Apart from creating authorial work, Carlos Nader is a screenwriter, film producer, events curator and journalist.

Courtesy: Videobrasil Historic Archive

Ipê Amarelo (Yellow Ipê Tree) | Paulo Nazareth | 15mins 44secs | 2013 | Brazil

Ipê Amarelo (Yellow Ipê Tree) is one of four performance videos by Nazareth, called L’Arbre d’Oublier, the Tree of Oblivion. In these videos, Naza Nazareth’s long journeys on foot explore borders and the global slave trade. During the slave trade from the African continent to America the men and women who were taken from their lands and arrived at the port of departure to an unknowing future – before crossing the Atlantic – they had as their last alternative a ritual that had been taught by their ancestors: to revolve around the Tree of Oblivion.

In a similar video filmed in Ouidah, which was once home to one of Africa’s biggest slave trafficking ports, the artist walks 437 times around the Tree of Oblivion, which men were made to encircle seven times in a rite meant to erase their memories of the past.

The Yellow Ipê (golden trumpet tree) is a tree native to Brazil, a national symbol, recognised for its exuberant yellow blossoms. In Ipê Amarelo, the artist repeats the act of circling the Tree of Oblivion several times. The performative gesture, a poetic attempt at rewinding history.

Paul Nazareth (b.1977) is a Brazilian contemporary artist based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Nazareth builds relationships with the diverse individuals he meets while travelling for his art – often long distances by foot – become inspirations for his works of art.

Paulo Nazareth works in performance art, video, painting and installations. His ethnic heritage and cultural background are major aspects of his works, which addresses the complex histories of immigration, globalisation, racialisation and the effects of capitalism in his home country of Brazil and in Latin America as whole. In Brazil, many people still face not only racial, gender and social discrimination, but also experiencing, through migration, an unremitting condition of uprooting and loss.

Courtesy: Videobrasil Historic Archive

Talk About Body | Tao Hui | 3min 48sec | 2013 | China | Artist Moving Image, Performance

The video creates a strange scenario in which the artist, dressed in a hijab as a Muslim woman. Facing a group of adults, she delivers a dead pan monologue which analyses her own body in detail and objectively as if a piece of specimen – such as her body structure, physiognomy characteristics and blood lineage, racial and regional typology.

The artist is Han Chinese and biologically male. In this subversive cross-ethnic drag performance, the video alludes to the Islamophobia and heteronormative attitudes in Communist China, where discrimination on the basis of gender and sexuality is still commonplace.

Born in 1987 in Yunyang, Chongqing, Tao Hui graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2010 and now lives and works in Beijing. For over a decade, Tao Hui has created a series of highly affecting artworks, drawing extensively on personal memory, visual experience, and popular cultural imagery, and is recognised internationally for films and video installations that combine touching narratives with poetic images. Closely studying and representing movements that transcend geographical, cultural and identity boundaries, Tao Hui in recent years began tackling subjects such as the confrontational relationship between society and the individual, as well as the disavowed reality of marginalized communities.

Courtesy: Videobrasil Historic Archive

Brazil has long stood at the crossroads of authoritarianism and democracy, a nation marked by deep post-colonial struggles, social inequality, and vibrant cultural resistance. Emerging in the wake of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985), a generation of artists and filmmakers embraced accessible video technologies to document authentic Brazilian realities, challenge mainstream propaganda, and give voice to the marginalized. This body of work forms the powerful core of Reel Brazil, connecting past creative mutinies to urgent contemporary struggles.

Creatively directed and co-curated by Nina Shen and presented by CT20 in Folkestone, a coastal town at the intersection of art-led regeneration and class conflict, Reel Brazil also confronts the tensions of gentrification, cultural erasure, and experiences of displacement for local residents. It reclaims space for radical creativity through the power of storytelling.