Das avós: The Photographic Archive of Imperial Brazil in the Imagetic Practice of Rosana Paulino

Abstract

From the photographic archive of Imperial Brazil, the artist Rosana Paulino recovers images taken of black women which are marked by racist exploitation. Focusing on representations of wet nurses, this article analyses Paulino’s imagetic practices with which she transforms visual regimes based on slavocrat violence into affective conviviality, particularly in the photographic ritual of the video work Das avós. Tracing the contexts and characteristics of the reconfigured photographs, including the discourse on certain images, the article shows how Rosana Paulino reveals the wounds of transgenerational trauma and, at the same time, symbolically recreates a genealogy interrupted by the necropolitics existing in Brazil since the time of slavery.