Listening to the Echoes of the South Atlantic Listening to the Echoes of the South Atlantic | Page 9

to these ideas in a subsequent passage, which emphasizes the multiple, meaningful
connections between music, art, literature, and architecture. Here he describes échos
monde as an interactive, interdependent totality and the idea that thought creates
music.
William Faulkner’s work, Bob Marley’s song, the theories of Benoit
Mandelbrot, are all échos-monde. Wilfredo Lam’s painting (flowing
together) or that of Roberto Matta (tearing apart); the architecture
of Chicago and just as easily the shantytowns of Rio or Caracas; Ezra
Pound’s Cantos and also the marching of schoolchildren in Soweto are
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échos-monde.
Interestingly, Glissant’s observations about poetry also apply to music. He states,
“The world’s poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting,
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delicate shivers, onto the rambling prescience of poetry in the depths of our being”.
The participating artists in Listening to the Echoes of the South Atlantic guide us on
what Satch Hoyt refers to as a journey from slave ship to spaceship. Highlights along
the way include the Tupi-Valongo Cemetery, where Pankararu indigenous chants
are interspersed with the sounds of gunshots from a favela; the Danish Marienborg
residence, with its strong connection to the triangular trade, where Jeannette Ehlers
performs a Vodou dance, and a haptic sound installation by Camille Norment that
explores sonic interconnectivity conveyed through a soundscape that ranges from
subdued humming to deep, rhythmic moaning.
African-American musical traditions are at the center of most discourses about
musical migrations within the Black Atlantic, and rightfully so. Shifting the focus
ever so slightly, this exhibition places particular emphasis on the social, political, and
cultural links between African, Latin American, and Caribbean musical traditions.
As such, the exhibition is shaped into a comprehensive narrative that spans hundreds
of years, transcending history, belief systems, and cultures.
The female voice of Sandra Benites speaking in Guaraní captures our full and
undivided attention at the beginning of Anita Ekman’s performance Tupi-Valongo
Cemitério dos Pretos Novos e Velhos índios (Tupi-Valongo Cemetery of the New Blacks
an Old Indians). She declares, “When we walk on earth, we are stepping on the body
of a woman”. These words, coupled with Brazilian indigenous chanting, maracas, and
sounds from nature, are part of the video that sets the tone for her performance,
conceived in collaboration with Hugo Germano, Sandra Benites, Nzo Oula, Dani
Ornellas, and Marcello de Macedo Norohna.
Emerging from a large straw basket, Anita walks around slowly as she stamps her face,
breasts, legs, and arms with red urucum pigment, a natural paint extracted from the
seeds of the achiote plant, typically used by indigenous people in Brazil. Drawings
appear on the bare skin of her body, which, through the process of stamping,
becomes enveloped in meanings. Ekman recovered the indigenous technique of
body painting, which has existed for over 6,500 years, to create her own symbols and
designs. Through this process she embodies an indigenous tradition that colonists
attempted to erase. Adding a very personal element, the visual language imprinted
on her skin speaks of the connection between Ekman and her ancestors. She explains
that although she will never know who they were, she still feels the presence of these
indigenous women in her body, physically and spiritually.
The voice from the video spellbinds the audience with a brief yet powerful history
lesson:
When the Europeans arrived to colonize our lands, they said that we
indigenous women were naked. But we were not. Our bodies were dressed in
paintings. They enslaved us to serve men, European and Black. Today those
who say that their skin is black have forgotten that on those ships from Africa
there were few women. 70% of those transported were men. We were slaves
like them. We were their women, we fed them, we helped the blacks to take
refuge in our forests, to find their Quilombos, but we have been erased from
history, women cannot star in any story. The ancestry of Afro-Brazilians is
not only in Africa, their bodies also come from us, just as most Brazilians,
regardless of the color of their skin, come from us. In their veins runs the
blood of indigenous women, raped and forgotten, remembered only as
lassoed, domesticated, dressed, put in shoes. We are united not only by the
blood of our ancestors, but also by our dead who are buried together in this
land. We are united in the spiritual sites where Black and indigenous souls
mix.