Arquivo Atlântico

Arquivo Atlântico is an artistic research project by Beatriz Cantinho and Túlio Rosa that proposes to think about coloniality through the creation of an archive: a set of texts, images and gestures that have the potential to inform and problematize the present. The project emerged from a desire to look at the history of the various territories bathed by the Atlantic Ocean in order to understand the forms of occupation, extraction, hierarchization, exclusion and extermination that still mark the relationship between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’. Working with a wide range of sources – films, official documents, literature, sound recordings, oral narratives – we have been exploring how creative and compositional practices can rescue the affective capacity of these materials and allow us to deconstruct narratives and visualities that characterize an imaginary of colonial matrix. More than about history, Arquivo Atlântico is an investigation on the notion of memory, on the possibility of re-membering places, peoples and knowledges in different ways. It is an attempt to weave personal stories with historical accounts and understand how, by positioning ourselves in relation to these narratives, we can draw connections, inaugurate dialogues, foster imaginaries and open space for other readings of the present.