Art-Axé: The Decolonial Poetry of the Visual Orikis

Abstract

This article aims to highlight contemporary Afrocentric visualities from the Global South as decolonial forms of resistance. To achieve this, it will be essential to analyze a portion of the poetic repertoire of the Bahian teacher, curator, and artist Ayrson Heráclito. The artist’s becoming-ritual is relevant in combating the stigmas left on transatlantic diasporic black populations. Simultaneously, it is necessary to understand the violence practiced during the period in which enslaved bodies were racialized, culturally superimposed, socially subordinated, and demonized for belonging to religions of African origins, by mechanisms arising from colonial domination. The main objective is to demonstrate at what point his aesthetic-political poetics breaks away from the Western hegemonic thought, maintained by Eurocentric colonialism, through the aesthetic-performative experiences he proposes. The qualitative methodology is carried out through the observation and analysis of the visual and poetic elements of his work. The result problematizes the consequences left by the colonial domination processes, and how these can be addressed by decolonial poetic expressions. Therefore, his artistic production made it possible to articulate thoughts that promote the rupture of structures attempting to confine black bodies in conditions that limit their ways of living and being in the world. Thus, Afrocentric visualities become essential in the process of healing and reversing the epistemic, cultural, and symbolic violence to which we were and continue to be subjected since the colonial period.