África, Artistic Expressions of a Continent

The exhibition “Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent” is renewed in the Brazil-France year, which celebrates two centuries of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In a partnership between the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection (CIJY), and the Tomie Ohtake Institute, both in São Paulo, this new edition of the exhibition proposes a cultural and artistic exchange.

We are presenting two distinct projects to the public simultaneously, with general curatorship by Renato Araújo. The first consists of an installation of two videos by the artists Josèfa Ntjam and Tuli Mekondjo. The curator is Nadine Hounkpatin, born in Benin and based in France for many years.

The second project, curated by Paulo Miyada and Ana Roman, addresses the theme "Wanderings: Between Brazil, France, Africa and the Caribbean," based on residencies offered by the Édouard Glissant Institute in Martinique to artists from around the world. The participation of Brazilian artists Rayana Rayo and José Eduardo Ferreira Santos resulted in the creation of works exhibited here. 

With this activation, the MON, as a living instrument for the appreciation and democratization of culture, brings to its visitors an important dialogue between traditional African art and its transversality, which is gaining increasing space in the contemporary world.

In its third edition, the exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent" consolidates a long and meticulous process that culminated in the arrival of one of the most important and significant collections of African art at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum.

We understand that a museum exists because of its collection, but it is through the interaction between the public and its works that culture and knowledge are disseminated. 

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika 
CEO of Oscar Niemeyer Museum

Turn a tree into firewood and it will burn; but it will never again bear flowers and fruit.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)

Strengthening institutional ties, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum received an important donation of African works from the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection, comprising approximately 2,000 objects – including masks, statuettes, musical instruments, and a wide variety of other works, of which these are just a selection.

As part of the celebrations of the France-Brazil cultural season, the Museum is currently presenting interventions linked to France and its overseas region, Martinique. In dialogue with the collection, each intervention has its own forms, gestures, and narratives.

On one side, the video art installation “Presences: Bodies, Objects and Memories,” curated by the Franco-Beninese specialist Nadine Hounkpatin, brings together videos by the Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo and the Franco-Cameroonian artist Josèfa Ntjam. The works fuse African philosophy, technology, and spirituality, reimagining Black heritage as a living agent of memory and resistance. With support from the Ivaniand Jorge Yunes Collection, artist Rayana Rayo and curator José Eduardo, from Acervo da Laje (Bahia), undertook an artistic residency in Martinique, also in partnership with the Tomie Ohtake Institute (São Paulo) and the Glissant Art Fund. The experience stemmed from the concepts of wandering, creolization, and relation, formulated by the philosopher Édouard Glissant. The Afro-Brazilian works of César Bahia (Salvador), which reverberate the formal and symbolic heritage of African cultures, and the paintings of Rayana Rayo (Recife), which investigate containers as metaphors for the body and shelter, create zones of intersection between territorialities and temporalities. These “Wanderings between Brazil, France, Africa, and the Caribbean” articulate memory, origin, and displacement, proposing a broader listening to the African legacy and its unfolding in the Brazilian context.

Renato Araújo da Silva
Curator

The intervention “Presences: Bodies, Objects and Memories”, curated by Nadine Hounkpatin and Renato Araújo, brings into dialogue ancestral African artifacts donated by the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection to the Oscar Niemeyer Museum with video works by Josèfa Ntjam and Tuli Mekondjo. The project explores the relationships between metamorphosis, memory and identity, reactivating visible and invisible traces of African heritage. The contemporary works breathe new vitality into the ancient objects, which then act as mediators of narratives and possible futures.

More than an aesthetic encounter, Hounkpatin reflects on the status of African art in museums, questioning ownership, transmission, and the notion of shared heritage. By giving voice to contemporary artists, a bridge is built between past and present, collective memory and living creation.

“Mélas de Saturne,” by Josèfa Ntjam (France/Cameroon), is a speculative video that explores the stories of the Black diaspora through a post-human lens. A digital avatar merges with an algorithm that anticipates the integration between organic and technological life, suggesting new forms of memory and identity. Drawing inspiration from the spiritual iconography of West Africa, especially Mami Wata, Ntjam combines mythological, archaeological, and biological imagery – masks, corals, hybrid and serpentine marine forms – creating a fluid cosmology. “Mélas,” from the Greek “melas” (“black” or “dark”), evokes a transformative energy that challenges linear time and fixed identities. Fragmentation becomes a force of resistance and renewal, reimagining African heritage not as a relic, but as a living agent.  

“Afrotekismo: The Living Museum of Afrotekismo,” by Tuli Mekondjo(Namibia), is a performance that connects African heritage, bodily memory, and speculative futures. In resonance with the ancestral artifacts of the Yunes Collection, Mekondjo positions the body as a living museum, where memory, ritual, and technology intertwine. By moving through public space, she activates objects and gestures as bearers of history and imagination, challenging Western museological models that disconnect artifacts from cultural life. The work imagines a future in which African knowledge systems remain dynamic, mobile, and self-defined – a living archive of resistance and renewal.

Nadine Hounkpatin (Benin/France)

Wandering, in the thought of the Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant, is a way of being in the world. More than displacement, it is an exercise in attention to difference and opacity, which transforms the experience of exile into shared consciousness: each person carries with them fragments of other places and knowledge, and it is in this transit that new languages ​​and senses of belonging are formed. By questioning fixed roots, Glissant proposes a dynamic vision of memory, origin, and ancestry.

Based on the concept of wandering, the exhibition “Earth, Fire, Water and Winds – Towards a Museum of Wandering with Édouard Glissant” was organized, currently on display at the Tomie Ohtake Institute, presenting Glissant's private art collection in dialogue with contemporary artists. In the context of the exhibition, Rayana Rayo and Zé di Cabeça undertook an artistic residency at the Maison du Diamant in Martinique – the house where Édouard Glissant lived and wrote part of his work – in collaboration with the Édouard Glissant Art Fund and the Institut du Tout-Monde. From this experience, the artists proposed interventions in the African Art Collection.

The works presented arise from the interplay between objects and landscapes. In Rayana, the investigation of containers unfolds: the vase appears as a body-shelter and as a device of language. In Zé di Cabeça, observation and writing procedures connect territory, song, and shared memory; faced with pieces without a defined individual authorship, the artist proposes a dialogue between the collection and the sculptures of César Bahia. His masks and figures of orixás reactivate links between ancestry, craft, and the living presence of Afro-Brazilian deities.

Together, the interventions propose a field of passages between Brazil, Africa, and the Caribbean, in which the collection is both interlocutor and subject of listening. The works make wandering a form of correspondence between times, voices, and gestures, expanding the territory of the collection towards a living geography of relationships.

Ana Roman and Paulo Miyada

José Eduardo Ferreira Santos
Salvador, Brazil, 1974 – lives and works in Salvador, Brazil.

José Eduardo Ferreira Santos is an educator, holds a master's degree in Psychology, a doctorate in Public Health, and a post-doctorate in Contemporary Culture. Born and raised in the Salvador Railway Suburb, he founded, alongside his wife Vilma Santos, the Acervo da Laje: an independent cultural space that functions as a home, museum, and school, dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of the artistic and cultural expressions of Salvador's peripheries. During his artistic residency in Martinique, José Eduardo wrote 27 letters to Édouard Glissant, addressed to the Maison du Diamant, the house where the philosopher lived and worked.  In them, he draws parallels between Salvador and the Caribbean, between the Railway Suburb and the archipelago, between the rivers of the Bay of All Saints and the waters of the island, weaving fables about territory, wandering, and belonging. As an intervention in the collection, José Eduardo establishes a correspondence with César Bahia, a sculptor from the Laje Collection and heir of Otávio Bahia, an artist who produced African deities in wood in the Railway Suburb. César follows the family tradition, carving jackfruit trunks and painting them by hand in intense colors, preserving the memory of the craft and the ancestral strength of his figures. In the encounter between the letters and the sculptures, between Salvador and Martinique, the intervention makes the collection an active interlocutor. The works listen, respond, and invent continuities between Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil.

Rayana Rayo
Pernambuco, Brazil, 1989, lives in Pernambuco, Brazil

Rayana Rayo's work is permeated by her experience of the climate and tides, the mangroves, coastal vegetation, and islands of the landscape of Recife, her hometown. Her paintings, with their thick brushstrokes and colors refined in their tonal relationships, evoke humid atmospheres and rounded topographies, inhabited by hybrid elements – between vegetal, animal, and dreamlike beings. These scenes do not communicate linear narratives, preferring to create fictional relationships between bodies, fragments, and affective ambiences. Similarly, she does not deal with the landscape through perspective or description, but rather by making all the elements of the composition emerge from the same material as the painting, taking advantage of its synesthetic properties (its capacity to evoke heat and odor, silence and desire, wind and solitude).  For this exhibition, Rayopresents a series of commissioned paintings that are articulated with a selection of containers – objects used to contain, store, and retain water, present in the Africa Collection. This juxtaposition proposes a dialogue between liquid surfaces and contained volumes, between the pictorial gesture and the materiality of the forms that, like his paintings, deal with flows, retentions, and permeabilities.

The Yellow Flamboyant Tree

August 14, 2025

Glissant, good evening.

In the middle of my trip I found some yellow flamboyant trees.

The yellow flamboyant tree was my first wonder at beauty in childhood, on my way to and from primary school in the 1980s.

The path from Rua Nova Esperança to the Machado de Assis School, on Rua dos Ferroviários, the end of the line in São João do Cabrito, was a spectacle for the eyes because of the gardens and beautiful trees that adorned the path.

Flamboyant trees and other trees bloomed abundantly, making the whole place look like a garden, and that enchanted me greatly, but no one can explain the enchantment: it simply happens. Even describing it is difficult, because it is in the realm of personal magic, of the delicacy of what our soul keeps as a treasure.

And even more so knowing that those trees, plants, and gardens were cultivated by hands and hearts that loved trees, plants, and gardens, by women from all over the neighborhood.

We don't realize the importance of the landscape, of the trees, the plants, and the gardens in a child's imagination and imagination: it's the beginning of everything, where questions are asked, happiness is experienced, intelligence and sensitivities are sharpened, in short. Life is reborn in the encounter with the outside world, external to us.

The landscape educates. The tree, with its imposing presence and beauty, educates and enchants.  

Plants, needless to say, carry the mystery of constantly dialoguing with life and also of educating us about care and affection.

Trees, plants, and gardens educate for sociability. To live in society, it is necessary to cultivate and care for plants, trees, and gardens.

Culture, curation, care, elaboration, civilization—all this and an infinite amount more fits within a garden.

In addition to the remarkable presence of the yellow and red flamboyant trees, I cannot fail to mention, Glissant, the abundance of crotons, which, being so old, are beginning to lose their color.

Encountering this botanical diversity teaches us that nature is brutally relational. Subtly relational. Between the cracks, it is relational. Nature dances in the gaps of light and fills them with life reaching upwards.

Nature fills the gaps of oblivion with life.

Nature is full because it drinks from sources that our eyes cannot see.

And we, to live, from which source do we drink?

Whoever says, loses the enchantment…

Nature is silently, silently relational.

Scandalously relational, but always silent and precise; dynamic and rhizomatic; aware of the paths that the root must take to have health and a full life.

Nature is the metaphor of life.

And the metaphor of life is relationship.

“Ancestry” is not an empty word

August 17, 2025

Glissant, good morning.

As I say goodbye here and thank Sylvie and you for everything, it occurred to me that we need to take better care of the word “ancestry,” because it is becoming an empty word, an adjective, used as a gerund – a linguistic vice, an emptied expression.

I know everyone wants to have ancestry, but care is needed: not everything one has should be said.                                

Parsimony, please. Mystery has its taboos, its nuances, and does not ask for ostentation. 

The final presentation is not always the synthesis of life. It is necessary to guard oneself. The logic of emptiness presupposes grand speeches and self-definitions.

Grandma knew this and taught me everything in silence, secretly, and with affection.

To evoke ancestry haphazardly, banally, is dangerous, because it is to throw this concept, this presence, into a void of meaning that does not even allow it, ancestry, to manifest itself.

I don't know if you don't know, but ancestry is not emptiness, echo, imagination: ancestry is presence. And strong. And companion. And friend. And caretaker of our steps here in Martinique.

Those who evoke ancestry so much forget to evoke presence. And ancestry is presence, and presence cares.

Let's rethink the way we present ourselves to the world.

I call ancestry those ancestries that have names and gave me comfort, affection, food, and love…

Anonymous ancestry is a dead end…

Generic ancestry is a tormented soul…

Respect the words…

Ancestry is presence and not a transitional vernacular fad.

Ancestry is presence, so if you don't understand, respect it.

Here, at the Glissant residence, it was present the entire time, without needing to say that word.

Both presence and ancestry should educate by what they are and how they manifest themselves. If this is lost through empty use, it is a symptom of this generation that tries to grasp everything in one concept and fails. When that is not possible, silence also screams and evokes. It is necessary to reteach the liturgy of evoking the sacred, so that it does not become banal.

José Eduardo Ferreira Santos