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Echoes of the South Atlantic will reverberate, at least, until 2020, according to Julian Fuchs, responsible for the cultural programming at the Goethe-Institut of São Paulo and South America. 

The thematics that are born out of peoples classified as “minorities” for an edited and Eurocentric history, such as those that speak about African and indigenous matrices, evidence social and racial tenses, with layers of prejudice. 

​Slippages and frictions mark the meetings and pathways of artists, performers, curators, and researchers around the hallways of the Goethe-Institut, but they also go beyond their walls. 

The last night of the event is marked by the launching of the collective exhibition and magazine, artistic performances, and musical presentations.
 

​An interesting thing happened at one of the late afternoon sessions when the talk veered from the theoretical and more towards the practical reality.

​The idea of constituting a network of education, responsible for the exchange of didactic materials produced by centers in the South Atlantic axis, motivated articulations in the laboratory of educational interventions.

"Bahia is an excellent space to exercise decolonization and to discuss the place and concept of art, due to its non-European influences - indigenous and African ones. The concept of what is culture in there distinct influences is not Western.”

To the sociologist Crisanto Barros, world democracy must be rethought from an African perspective.

Themes such as Hierarchy vs. symmetry in academic thinking and the problematic of appropriation of objects/subjects by museums are discussed in the lab that intends to unfold into the creation of a working group. 

The most profound part of the closing statements during the Echoes of the South Atlantic Conference was a candid conversation on authorship, authority and ownership. 

​Elisa Larkin Nascimento defends the mobilization as an alert to society regarding the serious situation of the Rio dos Macacos Quilombo. 

The participants of the last large panel of the conference, debated in Portuguese, at the rectory of the Federal University of Bahia, point to paths towards the tearing down of borders in the Southern axis, and share common problematics.

You want to decolonize your mind? Here’s 15 ways you can start the decolonizing process as shared by professors, anthropologists, artists and social activists.

​​The anthropologist and professor Moises Lino e Silva, mediator of the barcamp who dwelled on concepts of the south of the theory and of disobjectification, made a critique of anthropography and of the insufficiency of symbolic and semantic language.
 

Decolonization, connection, and preservation are the key words of the debate that united 16 specialists from various parts of the world, around the theme “Art as a way of union,” during the Conference Echoes of the South Atlantic, at the Goethe-Institut Salvador. 

The group reflects about time and suggests the invention of a restaurant that visits many locations around the world.

Dealing with collections characterized by invisibility and marked by violence is one of the main worries in the work of the Dutch curator Nanette Snoep, who runs three ethnographic museums in Saxonia (Germany) 

Monday the 23rd of April marked the beginning of Echoes of the South Atlantic, a Goethe-Institute international conference.

In “Images of Afro-Atlantic Slavery: The Other of the Other,” Lilia Schwarcz deconstructs stereotypes created by representations permeated by European goals and standards.

With the theme "It is Dark and Damp on the Front - Treading the Sonic Path of Halim El-Dabh,” the Cameroonian curator Bonaventure Ndikung shed lights - and sounds - on the legacy of El-Dabh. 

​Practicing the South - How to deal with differences for a better world.” This is a phrase that resulted from a discussion that united Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Selee Wendt, Nana Oforriatta Ayim, Manuel Monster and Feliz Kaputu, around a common objective.

The panel featuring Felipe Arocena, Koyo Kouoh, Diedrich Diedrichsen and Ute Fendler was one of four where conversations happened in an organic format with a vary malleable structure.

​Five invitees from different fields accepted the challenge of discussing their works without thematic axes previously established. In the end, they arrived at the theme of the panel: “Excavations and Reparation Stories in the South Atlantic.”

The South Atlantic suggests multiple approaches, that range from the poetics between death and the maternal strength all the way to humanism, passing through the transformative power of the arts and the genocide of black populations in Brazil.