Here in Horto, we got used to these types of events in childhood because our ancestors were very involved in the cultural community movement. So this has always been very important to us. I remember carnival with everyone in the streets. However, over a certain period, during our adult years, this cultural movement totally disappeared. It was practically extinguished.
Where is our cultural heritage , all that we lived through? This was also a period when Rio de Janeiro began to bring back the street bloco movement. In Rio it was quite widespread, especially here in the South Zone. Nature has a significant presence here and we could be at the forefront of joining the carnival movement with the environment , to preserve it and to understand it in light of the totally different context of carnival.
And the idea worked. We started to define our identity, in the simplest of ways, for example, by using recycled materials to construct a mobile installation, a prop, or a costume. We immersed ourselves in the implementation of ISO Standard , an international standard for sustainable event management. This was great because we started already making an impact.
The city government was desperate when it saw the growing numbers. The bloco was already a [fundamental] part of the cultural calendar of the city of Rio de Janeiro. It was then that we were invited to hold it at the Botanical Gardens. And today here we are. In , we paraded with 50, people in the streets.
And we bet on this characteristic of the bloco —giving a voice to this community so that, through carnival, the community can speak of its desires, its aspirations, its victories, and its defeats. On top of this, there is a new characteristic which provides a different type of education, the elements of environmental education.
This is nothing more than what the people here already knew how to do. How do we speak to children about environmental education? How did they speak to us? How did Uncle Pedro talk to us about the environment and environmental education? We also wanted to show people that we are here to embrace this city. This luxury turned into necessity changed the course of human history, driving colonization of tropical zones, chattel slavery, indentured labor, and glucose illnesses.
I now need to go slow. I cannot rush to the enormous woman sphinx. I have to take my time in fear of what I will find. Meandering wingless African cherubs pave the way to the monstrous and marvelous Sugar Baby. These five-feet tall black children, enlargements of collectibles, which could be found at the front door of a white southern home or sugar plantation, signifying "Southern hospitality," carry bananas or food in baskets.
The cherubs' sweet smiles, apple cheeks, and potbellies merge into the most terrifying part of the installation. Two months into the exhibit, the statues have changed, deteriorated, or disintegrated.
A majority of the figurines are made of resin covered with molasses. The molasses cherubs, made of a viscous and dark by-product of cane refining, stand in sharp contrast with the white and powdery confectionary sugar of the sphinx. The crumbling molasses sculptures each weigh four hundred pounds: surprising for their true-to-life size. Kara Walker threw broken body parts and remains into the fruit-bearing baskets of their surviving brothers. The offering of food turns into an offering of human flesh, gesturing that sugar production and consumption are acts of cannibalism.
My book The Tropics Bite Back was an effort to demonstrate that the image of the cannibal was projected onto Amerindians or Africans to dehumanize them. Walker's installation makes clear that the true cannibalism was the machinery of colonization and enslavement. The molasses children who have suffered the most have stumps for limbs, tumorous skulls, gnawed mouths, empty eye sockets, and metal bars sticking out of their trunks.
Blood- and pus-resembling liquid oozes from their groins as if they have been maimed by rape or castration. However, while Taylor's sculptures' evolution with their coral environment conveys rejuvenation, Walker's art's alliance with the industrial site evokes degeneration.
The critic reads the marking of the flesh of the New World African woman, of the "seared, divided, ripped-[apart], riveted to the ship's hole, fallen, or 'escaped' overboard," as a cultural text whose marking and branding "transfers from one generation of the other.
In Vibrant Matter , Jane Bennett interprets American culture as marked by "hyperconsumptive necessity," by "thing-power" or "vitality": "the capacity of things—edible, commodities, storms, metals—not only to block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents of forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.
In Bennett's sense, Kara Walker's creation is representative of slavery, but also of our generalized excess and hyperconsumption, in which organic and inorganic human, animal, metal, and meteorological coexist and co-act in confusion and enmeshment. In the complex game of lights and shadows at the Domino Factory, we see our reflections in pools of sugary water: we are part of this story, this history, either as culprits, victims, or consumers.
We are part of this womb-machine that contains and shapes us in our modernity. The Brooklyn Domino Sugar Refinery, established in its Williamsburg, New York, location in , was the largest sugar refinery in the world, hence, a major belly of the world.
Thompson explains that "The Domino Sugar refinery is certainly an integral part of the story of sugar. Built by the Havemeyer family in , by it was refining more than half of the sugar in the United States, producing over 1, tons of the sweet stuff every day.
They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys,. Our reflections on a rainy day in the pools emanating from the tortured molasses babies, makes us see ourselves in the exhibit. Walker's art demands an ethical response. At last, I am about to face Sugar Baby. A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. The woman sphinx has no proper name and is defined with common nouns referring to things, a recurrent way to misname in situations of slavery or oppression, such as Sapphire, Sweet Thing, Boy, Mammy, etc.
The rarer, confectionary meaning of "subtlety" is overshadowed by our everyday use of the term that refers to something delicate, discreet, moderate, nice, refined, and tasteful. But there is nothing subtle about the scale, weight, enormity, exaggerated features, mouth, vulva, breasts, paws, backside, exaggerated brightness and whiteness of Sugar Baby.
Subtlety acts as a euphemism of the sort used to describe the monstrosity of slavery, as the " peculiar institution. The intersection of sugar production, slavery, and sexual exploitation turns bitter wherever black and colored women become objects of sexual consumption, in a direct metonymic and metaphorical relationship with sugar.
They became fodder for the fields and food for sexual appetites. Whose little girl am I? The monster Walker—or rather slavery—has created is the material realization of the effacing of a woman's body with the sugar it produced or signified.
The "baby" of Walker's exhibit is also to be understood as the offspring: the monstrous child of slavery. The factory becomes the belly birthing that monstrosity. As in the popular expressions "sugar daddy" and "honey pot," "Sugar Baby" might as well be "money baby" in the logic of the inextricable confusion between sugar, money, and sex that the economy of slavery built.
In other words, Walker's creation is the materialization of the monstrous equation of human bodies with sexual and culinary commodities. After detours and musings, I finally draw close to Marvelous Sugar Baby in all her size, brightness, whiteness, and imposing presence. That her eyes are closed—the sphinx awaiting to give the enigma—also puts the visitor in the position of the voyeur who can contemplate without the gaze of the spectacle staring back. This discomfort is particularly strong as we face the back of the statue on all fours with its sexual parts exposed.
The offered large breasts with well defined areolas and nipples are available for the gazer to seize, like enslaved women's breasts were available for the enslavers' infants and toddlers. This reality is present from Toni Morrison 's Beloved 27 "And they took my milk! Sugar Baby's sex is exposed as her behind is lifted up in an offering position while she is on all fours. Puttin' you on my taxes already, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The exhibition of the female organs of sex and reproduction can also, as in Gustave Courbet 's painting, show us " The Origin of the World ," the place where we came from and the place that gave birth to our modernity based on the hubristic consumption of sugar, among other superfluous goods.
The caricatured portrayal of both her protruding lips and vulva veer to an abstraction that makes them resemble geometric circles more than personalized human traits. The round and smooth vulva resembles the fleshy lips as turned from horizontal to vertical, as if the mouth could be violated like the vulva, or, in a more optimistic reading, as if labia could also speak, tell their story of exploitation.
As Walker crucially explains in her interview with Audie Cornish, "She's positioned with her arms flat out across the ground and large breasts that are staring at you. Despite the apparent offering, her strength prevails. The spacious rooms feature wood floors and include a flat-screen TV, desk, and private bathroom.
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