Suset Sánchez. Black women, cholas, Chinese women, blondes... Fearless tits, resisting bodies and decolonial criticism

Whathappenswhenourgazechangesitsepistemologicalperspective and the canonical worksof art history are subjectedto a decolonial critique? What ancestral, heteropatriarchalviolences are revealed in therepresentationsofmasterpiecesthathavereifiedthefemalebody? 

TheemblematicworkA Negra (1923) byTarsila do Amaral, theleadingfemaleartistofBrazilianModernism, serves as a guide and startingpointforthe art historian Suset Sánchez (bornHavana, 1977) toundertake a disruptive exerciseon “waysofseeing.” Herlecturewilladdressthehistoricity and ideologyoftheinterpretationsofthiswellknownimage, in which a Black femalebodyrevealspoliticalpower and ethno-racial tensions as a foundingimageofBrazilianmodern art and nationstoriesbasedonthediscourseof racial democracy in the 20th century. 

Starting with A Negra, Sánchez traces a route towards other images in which contemporary feminist artistic practices resignify women’s rebellious anatomy. The images that accompany her on this exercise traverse the resisting anatomy of non-normative bodies, proud of their differences, which survive racism, xenophobia, pathologisations, media beauty canons, stereotypes, displacements and numerous structural violences established in the control systems of global biopolitics.