NOTES ON A POETICS OF VIOLENCE WITHOUT REFUGE

Ayrson Heráclito (curator and artist)
Beto Heráclito (writer)

Carlos Martiel’s artistic journey can be understood as an experience of erratic self-theory within the framework of Western society. In this approach, the artist transforms his existence into a radical experience of art.
Martiel is Cuban (1989) of Haitian and Jamaican descent and has made statelessness the territory of his poetics.

We can think of his artistic discourse as the dissonant voice of a black, queer, dispossessed and immigrant subject in constant conflict with the politics of subjection of his time. Presenting an archive of situations where racism, sexism, colonialism and utopianism intersect in the most vile and sadistic violence, the artist produces an anti-racist and libertarian manifesto. The poetics of his work trigger an uncomfortable ethical and political shock in the audience.

It is from the place of the subject, crossed by many instances of domination, who only has his own body, that Martiel spectacularises, performs, figures and sculpts the pain and inhumanity suffered by the subjugated. His body in a state of performance presents the violence of patriarchal slave colonialism in a naked and raw way. At the same time, this same body is an insubmissive cry that transforms his actions into trenches of struggle against all forms of oppression, tyranny and inequality.

The conceptual field of Carlos Martiel’s work makes us think of the founding matrices of critical thinking on coloniality, coming from the same African diaspora in the Caribbean, such as Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. The radical nature of his work can also be associated with the Afro-pessimistic thinking of the North American Frank B. Wilderson III. Wilderson III.

Carlos’ actions seem to paraphrase Fanon: violence without refuge is the sine qua non of blackness within the framework of colonial society. In many of his performances, the black body is often shown being violated by the annihilation processes of racism. His work shows us that blackness is necessary within the framework of Western society in order to demarcate the boundaries of ‘human subjectivity’. His performances, in this context, constitute a critical and forceful erasure against white supremacy. The artist denaturalises the racist principle that ‘Western man’ only exists because his opposite, the black man, exists. The black man is the embodiment of the entire antithesis of the human in this society. He doesn’t exist as humanity. He only exists as materiality, as a thing. Carlos Martiel’s work affirms that black lives matter.

There are many inequalities, beyond racism, that articulate the colonial world, and Martiel also decides to open/expose these wounds; carving his pain and trauma into his own flesh. It’s no wonder that performance is the legitimate expression of his art, because it fulfils his fundamental political condition, which is the inseparable relationship between art and life. His black body performs, expanding and claiming all confiscated humanities.

In his first solo exhibition in Brazil, entitled Posesión at the Verve gallery, the artist shows how he has been thinking about issues relating to the inequalities that affect black people and indigenous peoples in our country.

In the case of black people, Martiel chooses to emphasise a unique fact: the African populations brutalised by the diaspora of slavery will be the ones to bequeath the technologies of care and healing that are fundamental to the processes of overcoming and rebuilding their metamorphosed black identity. This elaboration is clear in the work ‘Gran poder’ (2023), where two candomblé priestesses are responsible for keeping alive the artist’s chained body, which is submerged in a river of deep, flowing water. In this action, the artist entrusts his life into the hands of two Yalorixás, who prevent him from drowning. In the work, the artist recognises the great power of healing, survival and insurgency of black spaces such as candomblés and quilombos.

In Posesión (2024), the artist transforms a dining table from its usual use into an instrument of slave torture. An exceptional banquet of Afro-Bahian cuisine is served on the table. However, the artist traps his head and hands in the object, demonstrating that it is his body that supports the structure. The black man here is the one who serves, the one who supports. The work is an explicit allusion to the ‘exclusions and reductions’ of Brazilian racism. The artist seems to be asking: how is it that in a country where the black population prepares and serves an opulent Afro-Brazilian banquet, they are still excluded from sharing it?

The title of this exhibition contains a perverse ambiguity present in Brazilian racialisation. If, on the one hand, it refers to the state of transcendence and mythical evasion – which are states of freedom and ancestral connection – on the other hand, it concerns the dominated and subjected black body. In this way, we understand that the artist is working with the major keys of Brazilian racism, which includes/excludes, brings together/distances, plays/dissimulates.

In his works on indigenous peoples’ issues, Martiel seems to want to nationalise the American genocide. By painting emblems, bodies and flags in blood, he seeks to localise the geopolitics of violence promoted by the structures of domination that act on massacred indigenous bodies.

The construction of the image in Carlos Martiel’s work is precise and essential. The artist demonstrates a sensitive understanding of the elements that make up the scene – both in the live performance and in his photographic recordings – revealing a profound mastery of the placement of his body in action in the compositional space.

The artist undertakes an archaeology of colonial violence in its most necessary and brutal aspects. With astonishing and explicit corporeal honesty, he exposes the deep wounds that inhabit the body and soul of those subjected to racism, patriarchy, coloniality and sexism.