Poetry and the Visual Slavery Archive in Brazil with Luciany Aparecida

A part of Denise Carrascosa’s October residency with Visualizing Abolition, Aparecida will read from and discuss her poetry chapbooks Macala (2022) and Aziri (2026). The works are inspired by nineteenth-century photographs of Black women taken in Brazil, shaped by the historical contexts of slavery and scientific racism. The research explores how poetry and fiction can reinscribe these images beyond the colonial gaze that originally produced them. Once confined within systems of economic exploitation and the aesthetic contemplation of whiteness, these women are now reimagined through a poetic practice in which poetry and photography converge as a feminist and abolitionist mode of critically engaging the archive. Following the wake, the work seeks to transform documents of violence into new aesthetic forms of freedom.