Contemporary Art and Candomblé

a semiotic, a diagram of Afro-Brazilian culture

Authors

Abstract

Diversity is a key characteristic of Brazilian culture, greatly influenced by the heritage of African diaspora peoples in the fields of aesthetics and religion. Both contemporary Art and Candomblé reflect a vibrant Africa that asserts its unique identity and reclaims ancestral roots through chants, crossroads, and artworks. This study aims to create a diagram, a semiotics of “terreiro”, with art and Candomblé as privileged expressions of the symbolic crossroad that signifies the black heritage in Brazilian culture—a resilient force. Barthesian semiotics guide us to question signification and image, and Deleuzian philosophy provides theoretical support of a diagram to explore our constitutive ancestry, where Candomblé and Art serve as starting points on an open path, transcending texts and their meanings, encompassing the aesthetic experience of this works and reflecting it to the texts. This article is the outcome of a broader study investigating the concept of ancestrality in audiovisual media and aimed to define a cartography that could potentially diagram artworks created by Black individuals in Brazil. Within this framework, we present an analysis of Clébson Francisco's multimedia works, an artist from Ceará. 

Author Biography

George Ulysses, Universidade Federal do Ceará

PhD student and Master in Communication by the Graduate Program in Communication PPPGCOM - UFC, at the Federal University of Ceará, researches Communication, Ancestry, Quilombismo and its implications in the artistic production of the Black Person in Brazil. Bachelor in Cinema and Audiovisual from the Federal University of Ceará (2017), researcher in art and technology, audiovisual devices, phenomenological and communicational processes in art. He is a yawo from Obaluayê at Ilè Iba Asè Possun Aziri, where he experiences / researches a semiotics of the terreiros. He is also a percussionist, writer (Tratado da Pele, 2021) and performance artist.

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Published

2023-06-30

How to Cite

PARODE, F.; RODRIGUES SOUSA, G. U. Contemporary Art and Candomblé : a semiotic, a diagram of Afro-Brazilian culture . Revista Internacional de Folkcomunicação, [S. l.], v. 21, n. 46, p. 14–33, 2023. Disponível em: https://revistas.uepg.br/index.php/folkcom/article/view/21815. Acesso em: 20 may. 2024.