The Atlantic Ocean is the large territory that unites and separates Brazil and Portugal. It was through this great liquid body that the first navigators and Portuguese expatriates arrived to the indigenous land that today is called Brazil. It was also through this major sea that the two countries have been exchanging migratory flows since the 16th century.

The Atlantic lived the intense and radical social, political, and economical transformations of the world between the 16th and 21st centuries. An ocean that witnessed stories of pain, hope, extreme violence, and extreme resilience. It hosted domination schemes, escape plans, of fluxes and refluxes, encounters and reencounters. It was a path crossed by countless diasporas, the biggest one being the consequence of slavery and forced migration: 12 million African people kidnapped to the Americas and the Caribbean. The Atlantic holds the physical memory of 2 million enslaved people that never got to complete the crossing, as they had their bodies thrown to the sea, dead or alive.

Bove, Carol | Process Yellow | 2012

For some, the Atlantic Ocean meant the horizon of colonial and imperial expansion. For others, the major abyss of separation from their homeland. For many others, it is the familiar abode of their ancestors since time immemorial. The second largest and the saltiest of the world’s oceans, it is also for some the most sacred of the seas, home of deities, such as orixás, nkisis, and vodun.

For all this complexity, the imaginary that surrounds the Atlantic is immensely disputed. If the previous section of the exhibition dealt with the intertwining of multiple memories in the elastic temporal dimension, this second part invites a look at the questions of weaves, distances and abysses, as a way of nurturing reflections on the Atlantic. Even if a great part of these artworks doesn’t deal with this ocean directly, here, we gather various formal and conceptual strategies, as well as narratives, that can help us to imagine the meanings of this body of water. The question that lingers with us: What can the memories of the Atlantic Ocean teach us?

We are on the high sea….
Castro Alves. The Black Ship, 1880.