FOUNDEr’s Note

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Born and raised in the South Zone of São Paulo, Aquiles Coelho Silva is a researcher, writer, and emerging artist. He is the author of Vila Missionária: constituição e desenvolvimento da periferia em São Paulo (2019), awarded by the São Paulo Municipal Historical Archive, and of the poetry book Notas sobre o cultivo (2023). His current practice explores themes such as poetry, memory, music, and the relationship between land, space, and race. Aquiles has collaborated with research and art institutions such as the 35th São Paulo Biennial, Instituto Pólis, SESC/SP, Centro Cultural São Paulo, ANPUR, and USINA Technical Advisory, often as a member of the collective GIRA and the project História da Disputa. He holds a degree in Economics from Unicamp (2017), a master’s in Urban Planning from IPPUR/UFRJ (2024), and since 2022 has worked as a research assistant to Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva.

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The Cartografia Negra Collective was created to reflect on, revisit, and re-signify historic Black territories in São Paulo—places of resistance or, conversely, sites once used for the sale, torture, or execution of enslaved people. Today, many of these places carry names and meanings that erase—or even contradict—those histories. We are a collective of young researchers seeking to raise awareness among the people of São Paulo about the memory of the city we live in. At present, 63 young Black people are killed every day in Brazil, according to data from the Senate’s CPI on the Assassination of Youth (2016). The genocide of the Black population happens both through physical extermination and through the erasure of its history. It is this dual process we want to expose, following the example of figures such as Casé Angatu and Abdias Nascimento.

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Cecílio Henrique Costa and Tiago Almeida, both born in Salvador, follow complementary paths that meet in the valorization of Afro-Brazilian ancestry and culture. Cecílio moved to São Paulo as a young man, where he is now producer and curator of the Humanities, Rights and Diversities Program at IEA-USP/Quilombo Inteligente, in partnership with Professor Gilson Schwartz. He also works as local producer for Coletivo Amazonizando-SP and for Master Ivamar dos Santos, and he wrote the script for the film Dia de Iemanjá. His artistic and academic research focuses on the quilombos of Jongo de Pinheiral and the Vale do Café, documenting oral traditions and jongueiro aesthetics in Rio de Janeiro’s Paraíba Valley. Tiago, in turn, built his career between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo as a visual artist, with solid experience in film and TV post-production that now feeds his own creative practice. In his documentaries and audiovisual works, he celebrates Brazilian culture and ancestry, exploring social, environmental, and spiritual themes, with particular attention to African-based religions and the tradition of Jongo—producing an audiovisual language that connects people, territories, and memories.

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História da Disputa: Disputa da História is a project led by women historians dedicated to research, production, and dissemination of historiographical content rooted in the “History of the defeated”—that is, in documents, testimonies, memories, and dynamics produced by social actors usually ignored by traditional history. Its methodology involves occupying public spaces to create debates that incorporate people’s knowledge and lived experiences, seeking, through such exchanges, to intervene in how those spaces are used and narrated, and to challenge the hegemonic narratives that define them.

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Natasha Felix, a poet and performer born in Santos (São Paulo, Brazil), and Joss Dee, a DJ and music producer from Luanda (Angola), collaborate in the performance APUPÚ – onde os corpos vibram, a sound and literary experiment that stages a dialogue between Brazil and Angola.

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Mônica Garabito is a researcher and artist based in São Paulo. Born in Cuba and raised in Germany, she studied Anthropology and Documentary Film across institutions in Cuba, Mexico, and Germany. Her work proposes new ways of listening and being present, engaging with Afro-diasporic communities, collective memories, and non-hegemonic epistemologies, while questioning colonial ways of seeing, hearing, and narrating the world.n goes here

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Nduduzo Siba is a multidisciplinary artist, born in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and living in Brazil for the past 12 years. Her trajectory brings together photography, documentary film, theater, dance, music, fashion, and acting, always guided by a vision that links art and social transformation. As a photographer and filmmaker, she seeks to tell stories that reveal identities, memories, and collective struggles, highlighting the cultural strength of diverse communities. In theater and dance, she finds ways to express the body as a site of resistance and poetry. In music and performance, she uses her voice as an instrument of connection and healing. Her work is imbued with activism, the desire to give visibility to silenced experiences, and the drive to weave dialogues between her African roots and her Latin American life. Between borders, she moves freely, turning her trajectory into a collage of images, sounds, and gestures that celebrate diversity, ancestry, and the future.

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Allen Kwabena Frimpong is a conceptual artist and urbanist dedicated to cultural design as a means of building community wealth on a global scale. He is the founder of ZEAL, a cooperative alliance of creative studios formed by Black diaspora artists, featured in the New York Times, ABC Nightline, and Hyperallergic. As a conceptual artist, he creates multimedia anthologies through sound installations and public art exhibitions. A 2024 Open Society Foundations Equality Fellow, he is currently producing The Remedy is Solidarity, a global multimedia anthology on reparations. Previously, he led Old Money, New System, a community of practice funded by the Andrus Family Fund that supports resource mobilization for social movements focused on redistributing wealth through the solidarity economy. He has also worked as a senior researcher at PolicyLink and co-founded Liberation Ventures, an organization building networks and practices to advance a culture of reparations in the U.S. His work has been featured in books such as Decolonizing Wealth. He currently chairs the board of Resist, one of the oldest public foundations tied to social movements in the U.S.

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Sarah Brito is an artist by vocation and a researcher by training. Since 2010, she has dedicated herself to the study of intangible heritage, focusing on practices, rituals, and territorial expressions. She has joined and co-founded cultural and art collectives, participated in the National Council of Memory Points, and founded Observatório Brasil Profundo, an initiative dedicated to Brazilian ancestral practices. A native of Belém in the Amazon region, she is a CNPq fellow at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, working on the Museu Terra Indígena project. Her artistic production spans photo-performance, collage, audiovisual, and interventions, exploring body, territory, and time. She signs her work as Sarah Maria, honoring her late mother, also named Maria and also an artist, from whom she learned that human experience is shaped by memory and the re-signification of diasporic lives.

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Shambuyi Wetu is a visual artist, muralist, art educator, actor, sculptor, and performer. A Congolese artist trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, he has lived in Brazil since 2014, working actively in the art scenes of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. His practice spans painting, sculpture, and performance, addressing urgent issues of contemporary African and Afro-Brazilian life. Through visual arts and performance, he investigates the experience of the African diaspora, the Black body, ancestry, and cultural resistance. From his early years in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with exhibitions in museums and cultural centers in Kinshasa, to his artistic career in Brazil, his trajectory has been marked by displacement, memory, and cultural exchange. His diverse and dynamic work connects territories and artistic languages, inviting audiences to reflect on identity, migration, and belonging.