Antonio Obá - Outros Ofícios - Mendes Wood DM 2021

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Mendes Wood DM, Brussels, 2021, the drawings from this Outros Ofícios (which translates to “other trades”) series consist of allegorical representations of an entire instrumental apparatus created by Brazilian slave labor in the 18th century. Many of the enslaved Africans sent to the region of Minas Gerais had technical skills and knowledge of metallurgy, architecture and mining that were foreign to Brazil at the time. This creates a perverse link between the tradition of craft and manufacture and a brutal cycle of hard work and production of objects that, by their very function, afflicted and further violated the bodies of these enslaved people, from the saws, mills and bricks, to the chains which kept them captive – a whole technology focused on physical submission.

EN - 20.8x29.7cm - softcover - great condition