Narratives of Public Art: Subaltern Voices and Necropolitics in the Amazon

Abstract

This study, entitled Narratives of Public Art: Subaltern Voices and Necropolitics in the Amazon, seeks to understand how contemporary visual art and narrative foster an encounter of subaltern voices that oppose the necropolitics of the State in the post-colonial Amazonian reality, specifically in the south and southeast of Pará and in Manaus. The methodology adopted is qualitative and bibliographic. Initially, we reflect on necropolitics and its inseparable relations with racism. We then discuss what contemporary and public art are, and how these forms of art appear in Ashes of the North (2005) and in the Monument of the Dead Chestnut Trees (2021) — site of the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre — as expressions of subaltern voices. The study is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Fanon (1968, 2008), Spivak (2010), Mbembe (2018), among others.