Walla Capelobo is dark forest and fresh mud.
Born in Congonhas (state of Minas Gerais, Brazil), lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Artist, researcher and independent curator. Graduated from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Art History, currently a master's student at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in the Program of Contemporary Studies of the Arts.
Walla acknowledges the inheritances of good living, received by the thin layer of her skin, in dialogue with the exchanges and encounters of life. Her creations take form in different languages that recreate the world, her body, her pain and her cure.
Participates in two study groups: GeruMaa - African and Amerindian philosophy and aesthetics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; and CIPEI (Permanent Cycle of Independent Studies - Contra Pedagogías / Contra-visualidades) Mexico / Brazil. In addition to serving as an assistant to Camilla Rocha Campos, artist and director of the international residency program Capacete.
Contact: teiwalla@gmail.com / @wallacapelobo
The following interview is filled with hyperlinks to assist readers to better comprehend some of the context in which the artist finds herself. If anything was left unclear, please get in touch.
I once read a text by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni on decolonization and decoloniality, in which he says that there are no African universities, there are universities in Africa. You are currently in graduate school, and I wanted to know how you see this idea by Ndlovu-Gatsheni in relation to universities in Brazil.
To exist in university has never been and is not yet a smooth process for me. It is a space that has historically been denied to me. There is an author, Gloria Anzaldua, who speaks about wild languages. That is, when we enter that space, we end up learning to speak two languages. I speak one language within the university and another language within my community, to my family.
I am the first person in my family to graduate. The beginning of my life at the university was not an easy one. I dropped out of two different degrees before I managed to graduate on the third try. Universities in Brazil only started to open up to people of color with the President Lula’s first mandate in the early 2000s. However, the internal teaching structure did not follow this opening. Although the university allowed more places for students who were excluded, there was no support offered to keep those students in that space, so several students of color who managed to access those spaces were unable to graduate.
So, on my third attempt to achieve a degree, I finally managed to finish, and I graduated in art history. It was also when I finally had access to a type of theory that I engaged and continue to engage, which is the decolonial theory. That was when I had my first black teacher at the university, called Cintia Guedes — a name that deserves to be praised, because she was essential in my trajectory, and eventually became my friend.
In addition to the theoretical introductions, Cintia helped me to understand that my body, just like our experiences, was a form of knowledge, ways of learning the world, something denied by the university, and the colonial language, which the university reproduces and idealizes.
Anthropology has been secularly doing this: taking our knowledge and coding into another language to keep us apart, creating a language that is not ours. In fact, the universities are not ours, they are not African, they are not Latin American, they are not from these lands, but they are fed by our knowledge, encoded in another way.
Today, I am at the university in an epistemic struggle to retake it, and therefore I face several challenges. There are days when I don't want to go, but I believe in destiny. In the destiny of resumption, that our lives need to be humanized. The university has dehumanized us for centuries. Thus I think that occupying spaces of knowledge production, accompanied by several others that have been doing this for longer, is a way of resuming our autonomies that were once stolen and continue to be subjugated.
As I said, it's challenging. It's a double game, a double tongue, and the capoeira swing, right? You have to go understanding that it is not going to be a bed of roses, but that it is necessary. And each one of us has to do what is needed at the moment, with the tools we have. By saying that, I also mean that I believe in our ability to transform the university.
European thought created this abstraction between body and mind. The "intellectual" capacity as something separate from its community, is something alone, almost religious, as if studying and researching was divine enlightenment. While, in reality, our most valuable wisdom comes from life, it comes from everyday organic knowledge.
And it is an abstraction (in the philosophical sense), because, for example, in the biological sciences, a scientist spends hours experimenting in a laboratory. Why in the arts and humanities are these experiences ignored?
As if it didn't exist and was needed. It is a matter of abstraction that Europeans have managed to create for themselves and try to insert in us, but it does not make sense in the end. And even the European who believes to be doing universal theory over there, his body is colonized and suffering from the mechanism that they invented. It has a construction in the way of seeing the world. That’s why, even though I am in a postgraduate program, I also believe that the university should not be the only source of training, and production of knowledge. I learn and embody knowledge through constant exchange, and through affections experienced. My thinking is derived from love and encounter. Some people that have crossed my path should be remembered in this regard: Elton Panamby, Nala Corsa, Bruna Kury, Ventura Profana, Jota Mombaça, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Jo Assumpção, Millena Lízia, Gatynha, Camila Rocha Campos, Mãe Celina de Xangô, and many others that fate had already brought us together.
In the work entitled Kill the White Man Inside You (2020) that you produced together with Bruna Kury, you mention that the "white man" prevented you from having the spiritual connections that you should’ve always had. And in your most recent work, Home Recipes for Lung Infections (2020), you bring alternatives to Western medicine. I believe that both artworks are a call for resistance. Could you talk about resisting colonial structures within the art system?
This phrase 'kill the white man inside you' is a phrase that I really like, by the former Black Panther and anarchist Lorenzo Kom'Boa. I saw this phrase for the first time in Salvador, Bahia, in 2013, during the event Undoing Gender, which was very important for my life, where I met many people who are essential in my trajectory, such as Jota Mombaça, Michele Matiuzzi, Elton Panamby. So that phrase was present and has been marked since that meeting. And this processes of whitewashing and constant erasure of our lives and knowledge is an experience that the Diaspora has, and it takes a lot for us to recover.
My great-grandmother was practicing Candomblé, then my grandmother was already Christian, and the practices of African origin disappeared… they were erased because Catholicism in Minas Gerais, the state where I was born, is dominant. So, when I started to have more autonomy over my spirituality and contacts, to finally find who has always been by my side was my greatest joy. At the same time, I felt outraged, because I spent so much time of my life without even knowing these names, due to the Catholic and racist social structures that prevented me from having access to my spirituality earlier. And still tries to stop daily, but they can't do it anymore.
I think that in order to kill the white man inside me, it goes through a spiritual matrix. Christianity is a weapon. For the enslaved people, who were leaving Africa, passing through the tree of oblivion, forgetting their ancestors, and becoming Christians. So taking that out of the body is the first resumption. Christianity is the moral basis of our relations. Therefore, unlearning to be white has a lot to do with unlearning to be Christian; it is entirely simultaneous.
Meanwhile, when the art system minimally opens up to our knowledge, it is once again wanting our capture. Because, as in the colonial order, it is the capital that needs the colony, not the colony that needs the capital. And I am very sure that it is my knowledge and the knowledge of my ancestors that have the ability to change this world. And only through that knowledge, from those sources.
However, at the same time, we see it as a chain. The same situation has been repeated for 500 years, from theft and expropriation. That's also why I need to speak two languages. Part of my work has to do with talking in code. Some things will make sense in one way for some people, and in another for others. There is no better or worse, but it has to do with the ground you walk on and your background. I try to talk to as many different people as possible so that each person can access the codes differently from their life trajectory.
I find it a way to escape. And I think our lives, of people of color, are to live on the run. But we also have to keep updating these codes because the system finds out how we do it, and then we have to do another one.
Art, even that word, with its meanings and terms, is a creation of the Global North. And I think that contemporary art is able to update their way of capturing other cultures. For instance, in native cultures, there are traditional practices that can now be recognized as art, because the Western understanding of art has expanded. Even in my family, although I was the first person seen as an artist, I created a work inspired by my mother's and grandmother's recipes. They have been making this recipe book for years, and now it’s recognized as art. So it’s fair to say that the art institutions are very narrow-minded to the plurality of knowledge and practices in the world, that also have an incredible aesthetic sense. But they will be ready to capitalize over it when it’s a good timing for them.
Could you explain the choice of that specific site for your performance Pele Diamante (2018)?
I performed this work at Chapada Diamantina. The locations where I choose for my works are about reactivating places that were marked by colonization. It is about going to sites explored by colonization and mining extraction, mainly in Minas Gerais and Bahia, the two states where my family is from. Chapada Diamantina, in Bahia, was a diamond trail. And, in the eighteenth century, it was mineral extraction site. The reason for revisiting these places where colonization had been established, is to honor my ancestors who had not given up on life in those places, allowing me to be alive now.
I had two friends helping me with the work. My friend Nala Corsa, who was filming, and Vinicius Davi, who appears in the film. We traveled together for a month and decided to do this work after better understanding the site's history.
So, in this performance, ten diamond-like beads are placed on my back. However, the fact that they are inserted in the body reminds us that the colonizers were capitalizing not only on precious stones, but especially on our skins. The accumulation of capital from all over the world benefited from slavery. That is, capitalism was born with the slave trade. There is no way to disassociate the accumulation of wealth from slavery. So, I wanted people to understand that, in that game, what matters is our skin more than the crude mineral extracted from the land. And the pain of perforation has to do with accessing this strength in the flesh, which allows me to be here.
Also, I think it's fundamental to say that, for myself, it was incredibly important to do that work. And that I feel great about creating that type of work, as it helps me to access my body in a different way, which makes me stronger and more prepared, as a kind of cure.
I understand that your performance Ex-Voto para Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos (2019), which is paired with an essay, is a multilayered work. Could you unpack its process of creation?
This work also follows the dynamics of going to places where colonization left a significant impact, and where has traces of enslaved lives.
This specific piece was done where I was born, in Congonhas, Minas Gerais, which is a former colonial city. Congonhas keeps a very precious memory of colonization as if the colonial period was excellent. It has a sort of nostalgia about that time — just like most colonial cities in Minas Gerais. The narrative about the Royal Road and other places that have become tourist spots, makes it sound as if it was a peaceful and pleasant period to have lived.
Therefore, this work is born from thinking of how Congonhas is a city that was very important during the Gold Rush, and today it is one of the most important cities in the extraction of iron ore. Fundamentally, both cycles have existed to benefit the colonizers: the former is from the period before independence; the later is from nowadays. But the foundations are the same.
Congonhas has a large ore dam, with the same structures as those of Bento Rodrigues and Brumadinho. I created this work right after that last criminal disaster in Brumadinho. Besides the environmental impact, I find it crucial to notice that the areas affected by the destruction caused by the mining companies' disasters are also areas occupied mainly by people of color. Bento Rodrigues is a district of Mariana in which 85% of the houses affected belonged to black people. While in Corrego do Feijao, in Brumadinho, where the last disaster happened, it was a former quilombola area. So, there is a layer of systemic racism in those stories as well.
My parents' house is very close to this dam in Congonhas, but we didn't know until we were notified by the government when they had to assess other dams in MG that were a potential risk. And one of the cruelest things about this system is to live your whole life looking at a mountain and not knowing that it is a dam. We didn't imagine. I was very reflective of how our lives worth nothing in this colonial world, and the little they are worth is at the mercy of large corporations. I was sad about the danger, and I decided to spend some time dedicating myself to my family in Congonhas.
That’s when my grandfather, took me to a seventeenth-century church, Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, which is located in Congonhas. I started crying a lot inside the church, seeing a picture that tells the story of the congadas, as my grandfather was from the congada of the reigns. So learn more about how that story happened. And I will explain it here because it is important.
Congada was born in Minas Gerais in the seventeenth century. There was a royal family from Congo that was trafficked to be enslaved. On that journey, between Africa and Rio de Janeiro there was a storm, and the women did not arrive in Brazil. They preferred to keep the men due to the labor force they could offer and threw the shipload of women into the sea. Upon arriving in Rio de Janeiro, the men were sold to Minas Gerais, where one of these enslaved men became known as Chico Rei.
Within the colonial law of that specific period, if the enslaved person managed to find a new mine, he was entitled to freedom. Chico Rei then managed to find a mine, and had his freedom. However, in the colonial period, there were some types of rules that made it difficult for black people to have an income. So black people could be free, but they would be forced to work informally. These were strategies for not assimilating these people into the system and keep them in positions of subalternization.
The Catholic church in the colonial system is divided into saints. And each saint is worshiped by a type of person. For example, if you are a blacksmith, you are a devotee of São Jorge. That is why colonial cities had many churches as each type of person went to a different kind of church.
The black fraternities already existed in Salvador, and Chico Rei invests in building a church that is Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos in Minas Gerais. From then on, money started to be laundered inside the church, because it was the way that these enslaved people had to manage to have some kind of income. Moreover, African people have a powerful connection with death, so one of the main concerns was to have a proper funeral. The churches of Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos started to guarantee a suitable funeral for their faithful. There are several songs from the congadas that tell that death is when the person returns to Aruanda, which is this place in Africa, Brazil, or the middle of this path. And there is a way to continue.
So, I wanted to pay tribute to this story of persistence, of getting into the system in some way and sustaining it. I walk through two points in Congonhas and finish at the Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos Church, doing the ex-voto.
Finally, the most famous church in the city of Congonhas is the Bom Jesus do Matosinhos Church, and has a place called the room of miracles, which is a place of ex-votos, where people leave offerings, and their tributes for graces achieved. So I left these three pictures there; they are inside this church. I left them there as a sign of gratitude for a miracle.
(Images from the performance Ex-Voto Para Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos by Walla Capelobo. Courtesy of the artist)
Could you talk us through the importance of the body within your artistic practice?
I think it has a lot to do with a fictitious idea that the Global North has created: the separation between body and mind. For me, it is necessary to understand my body as my primary source of knowledge, as it is from it that I experience the world. So my performances are a way for me to ritualize learning. If I don't try it, I didn't learn it, and it didn't leave a mark on me. We must accept that our body is our most extensive library.
For example, Ailton Krenak, when referring to the terrible number of deaths of the Yanomami people (due to COVID-19) that are happening in Amazonas, he says that when a shaman dies, an entire library died, a source of knowledge that the world lost. And it is the people who are holding the sky not to fall.
I believe that this resumption is crucial. Even more so that colonization acted precisely on our body, removed this autonomy from us. Therefore, understanding our body as a source of knowledge is essential in the process of decolonization and liberation. I appreciate that decolonizing is to free yourself, seek autonomy, seek to settle with your ancestors' strengths that came before us, and be sure of a good place. And, fundamentally, that this body is not about guilt, it is about joy, it is about pleasure, it is a cycle. And always be attentive, because what we keep inside us are destruction and construction, and it is precious. So we have to take care of and love ourselves, no matter how much the system says the opposite, this resumption is certainly an ancestral escape route.
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