Luiz Marcelo

My foundation is strong, I have deep roots and even when I wear it, I soon restore myself.

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Mo dúpẹ́ to the Guidance of those who came before me. To black women for the technology of care and perseverance in understanding that matriarchy is put, gender divisions are Western Euro-American creations. Our understanding of gender permeates the place of subservience. Care is not about submission, it's about teaching, affection and resistance.

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Mo dupẹ́  to black men for the hope of liberation from the burden of being compared; I would like to take this opportunity to thank my father (in memory), Seu Luizinho, for all the example of humanity he had carried. Mo dúpẹ́ , bàbá mi.

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​ Mo dupẹ́  to Mainha, Marinalva, for being sweet, even with all the bitterness that coloniality reserved for it. For being the greatest reference of love and overcoming. For making me have the courage to try different paths to which they kept us. Mo dúpẹ́, ìyá mi! To Mainha I also dedicate this Ebó and I reserve it, I wish her life to be long and that all her wounds are staunched. Dárijì mi , for the naughty boy I was, for the screams and demands of yore, Dárijì mi for the disobedience and worries I caused you. I love you.

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​ Mo dupẹ́  to my partner Juliano for supporting me in this process with all my abuse and impatience. Mo dúpẹ́ for dedicating himself so well to teaching, for being committed to his craft, engaged and courageous. If today education is a path, Ẹ ṣe pupọ̀ for introducing it to me. Mo dúpẹ́ for the partnership, for believing in our love; and thus to counteract the statistics of loneliness that an intersectional black fag carries with all these layers. Ps. I need to finish soon so we can get back to fucking more (lol).

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Mo dupẹ́  Tonha Preta for being avant-garde, a black woman who has not lost her joy even as I try to raise her children, grandchildren and now her great-grandchildren. Tonha is a mark of blackness and resilience in my path. Ẹ ṣe is the coffee with flour that fed me when I needed to eat.

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​ Mo dúpẹ́ my grandmother Oldina, whom I learned to like as a teenager. I am a boy who suckled until he was four years old and whenever my grandmother crossed the Velho Chico to visit us, she would float left and right: “I would like to see a grown man like that hanging on his mother’s breast” — I swore to pass chicken shit so I could stop breastfeeding, without her knowing that I've been stubborn since I was very young, and just to contradict I've been breastfeeding until here (lol). My grandmother is the angry type, a cabocla who was decimated by the course of environmental racism, a supposed ideal of progress that made us distant references, without cousins and family members present.

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​ Mo dupẹ́  to all the black people in the Sertão territory, to the black movements, to the people of terreiros and quilombodos, and to traditional peoples. Ẹ ṣe pupọ̀ for centralizing discussions thinking about the mechanisms that racialize and cover up plural bodies — we are black and we are multiple. We, who are far from the cities where the slave ships docked, are racialized in other ways, and yet it is worth reaffirming that “We are not all BLACK” — watch out!

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​ Mo dupẹ́  to all my Asè family, for their company and care. Mo dúpẹ́ bàbá mi Dennis Ty'Òssòssì for his expertise and hospitality, for teaching me so much and for being so committed to ours. Ẹ ṣe o , for receiving my research with an open heart, even though I don't understand anything about art. The living and experience that it provides us is the greatest materiality that can be exposed. Art for me is decoloniality, experience and construction of knowledge.

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​ Mo dupẹ́  to my girls, João Pedro Rodrigues, Yanne Andrade and Déba Tacana, for the meetings and knowledge exchanged, for the modeled clay, for being such partners, for the laughter and fights. Ẹ ṣe o! I am very happy to be part of this boat, as we call it in Candomblé when more than one person starts; in art, I am from your boat.

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​ I thank all the rolezeiras for the meeting, for the madness and cachaças, for the disagreement when the ass is full of drips...lol... for making any experience together a historic landmark, with condensed milk and apparent nipples, lol. I will dare to name a few names, forgive me if I forget someone: Juliane Lima, who was so important for the making of my wedding and also of this site, guided me in the layout and when I lacked patience, she slowed down. Anna Paula Vidal,  Maria Julia, Arilson Rodrigues, Morgana Caroline, Candice Machado, Laís Bione and all malocada by so much madness in such conservative times. A bunch of screwed up faces! The feet.

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Mo dúpẹ́ to my classmates, to those who stayed until now, first blacks followed by non-blacks. Mark Allen, Marrison, Giovane Peixoto, Thais Marczuk, Marina Diniz, José Lírio Costa, Fernando Pereira, Bibia Aguiar...

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​ Mo dupẹ́  to Sarah Allelujah, for teaching me to love the earth and making me realize the power of my work, for being the curator of LUGAR DE TERRA, an exhibition that marks me for sharing the space of the galleries we passed through with people so dear, so poetic and necessary .

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Mo dupẹ́  Clarissa Campello, for agreeing to guide me at the last minute and for believing in my work, helping me to build such beautiful and important material for me/us. For being this crazy, funny and helpful person who I learned to respect and want close and very well. Ẹ ṣe o , for making his production a place that walks on the streets and in the peripheries. Sometimes we hate, but the deconstruction process is very long and you are always able to listen without questioning and change. If it weren't for you, oh, oh... lol...

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​ Mo dupẹ́  to some other teachers who contributed to my training, especially to Elson Rabelo. And ṣe o , for thinking about black culture and identity in a whitened curriculum course. And ṣe o , for encouraging and guiding me, even in different production lines. Mo dúpẹ́ the only other black teacher, Inês Regina, for the dedication and care with which she develops her profession.

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​ I pay tribute to dear Zé de Rocha, for escaping the Cartesian logic of teaching and using music as the central point of his poetics. Mo dúpẹ́ Edson Macalini, even without being my teacher in the classroom, taught us a lot about expanded drawing and its possibilities.

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​ Thanks to Jane Gondim, for welcoming me to her project “Alegrarte”, from which I guaranteed permanence in the course, because public quota policies are not enough when there is no assistance for the permanence of dissident students. Thanks to Euriclésio Sodré, for PIBID, even making me angry with so many unnecessary meetings and for making me teach in the place of a teacher in this action.

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​ Thanks to Joana Rabelo, for showing us so many possibilities of being a teacher, for giving us autonomy and freedom to exercise our student status.

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​ Mo dúpẹ́ the passage of Violeta Pavão in the collegiate, for having the opportunity to live with her, for listening to me and guiding me too. For being a shoemaker and a teacher who thinks of the body as a possibility of language and potential. Longing.

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​ Mo dúpẹ́ a Nereide (the process of racism makes us not know the surname of black people), for taking care of our spaces. I thank all the employees who make the university move, especially Willames Franklin (Ai Wil, kkk), for putting up with so much boring professor and still managing to be wonderful.

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​ On the cue, I would also like to add an addendum: we are a university in the northeastern backlands of a Brazil that believes in the myth of the three races. Our collegiate is composed of 15 professors, of which only 2 are black. Many curricula are still whitened and repressive and the university still passes cloth to racist and abusive professors.

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Mo dúpẹ́ to the Orísàs, for my physical and mental health, after being a victim of institutional racism by a newly hired teacher. I got sick and I almost didn't get here. This Ebó is also individual healing, even before being collective and without ceasing to be.

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Mo dúpẹ́ to all students committed to the development of the course and to the social guidelines of black people, especially in denouncing racism. Will not pass!

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​ Mo dúpẹ́ to DARVIS – student movement, for allowing me to enter this madness and understand all the dirt under the rug of an institution, I was a representative for four years, I learned the delight and pain of doing it. And ṣe o , to all the tension and contribution that we leave as a legacy. Black, indigenous and gender agendas have always been paramount in this journey; ensuring the blackening of the academic curriculum, making it serious and denouncing when necessary. To those who come after us, keep going.

Here I was able to be a curator, set up an exhibition, fight, cry, have collective responsibility, get sick and heal.  

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And ṣe o, for the opportunity to meet  Dona Cadu the centenary (Ricardina Pereira da Silva), samba dancer from Caboclo. And ṣe o , for honoring us with his teachings in the work of making ceramics.  

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Mo dúpẹ́ a  produced by Dona Ana Das Carrancas, a black woman potter in the sertão.  And ṣe o, for the legacy and inspiration. Mo dúpẹ́ to their daughters and granddaughters for continuing their work with such care and quality.

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Mo dúpẹ́ to potters and potters  de Coqueiros and Maragogipinho Bahia for the exchange and for the objects they produce for Candombé.  And ṣe o, for the clay provided for my production.  

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Mo dúpẹ́ to all black people who committed to paving the way for people like me to be here.  

I am the first person in my blood family and saint to attend a public university.  

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And ṣe o , to black authors, to black artists committed to this path. And it is the one to all the movements that tension the structures.

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Mo dúpẹ́ for listening that made me compile so much knowledge and so many secrets from the past.  And ṣe o , for the wisdom and orality of my elders.  

Ẹ ṣe gbogbo!