Black Women and the Five Natural Elements

Apresentação

This double event is part of the second edition of the CES Summer School Endangered Theories: Standing by Critical Race Theory in the Age of Ultra-Violence. It includes the projection of the film ‘Rasura’ and talk ‘IntRAsectionality: Black Women and the Five Natural Elements’ by the artist/speaker  Raquel Lima.

‘Rasura’

How to think about the relation between my poetry and the dimensions of deletion and erasure? The videoart Rasura tries to answer this question by reflecting around three axes: the erasure that comes with a ‘poetics of the present body’ considering my path through stages of oral and performative poetry and its ephemeral character; the erasure in an ontological sense, by introducing orature as a tool for historical reconfiguration, alerting to epistemic tensions between conventional literary practices and other forms to narrate and produce knowledge; and finally, the relation between identity and erasure considering the manifestation of literary borders towards forms of repression from the very act of writing. It is, therefore, a video focused on materializing the impossible, whether through the search for my literary aesthetics and ethics, or the pursuit for other ways of telling, feeling, embodying, meaning, and describing the world, beyond structural and dominant forms of deletion and erasure.

‘IntRAsectionality: Black Women and the Five Natural Elements’.

This talk is shaped by my experience on Black movements in Portugal and introduces intrasectionality as a concept under construction and a self-analysis tool for a political therapy that envisions autonomous organization and the rights for life, justice and peace against a system that oppresses racially and transnationally, with the objective to seek ancestral views of social and political organizations that embrace ethics of care and selfcare.

This talk is focused on the complementarity between intersectionality and intrasectionality, and the application of intrasectionality to several actions of Black women in the scope of the anti-racist struggles in Portugal, by organizing it as a timeless collective body manifested through the five natural elements – water, fire, earth, air and ether – that can be applied to other geographic contexts and subject to more comprehensive, transversal and congregating transnational agendas.

Bio note

Raquel Lima (1983, Lisbon) is a poet, performer, art-educator and a PhD Candidate in Post-colonialisms and Global Citizenship from the Centre for Social Studies at Coimbra University. Her research interest focuses on Orature, Slavery and Afrodiasporic movements. She holds a BA in Artistic Studies – Performative Arts from the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. In 2019 she co-coordinated the 7th Afroeuropeans Conference: “Black In/Visibilities Contested” and published her poetry book Ingenuidade Inocência Ignorância (BOCA and Animal Sentimental). As a spoken word artist, she travelled to over a dozen countries in Europe, South America and Africa. She published her poetry in several languages and has been organizing poetry workshops, highlighting the ‘Workshop Poetry, Race and Gender: for an intersectional poetic writing’. In 2022 she participated as a speaker in the event Loophole of Retreat at the Venice Biennale 2022 and was keynote speaker at the World Congress of Women in Maputo.

About the film

Rasura’ (São Tomé e Príncipe, 2021, 14′) | Concept: Raquel Lima. Direction: Lubanzadyo Mpemba and Raquel Lima. Video Editing: Lubanzadyo Mpemba and Raquel Lima. Sound Editing: Sara Morais. Participants: Daniel, Pedro, Jorge, Delson Santos and Tchiloli Mini Riboquino. Poem (excerpt): “sucubu” in Ingenuidade Inocência Ignorância de Raquel Lima (2019 – BOCA, Animal Sentimental).