ATLANTICA is the name of my new work with Turbante-se. This work symbolizes a lot of the trajectory I have traced with the experience and research of turbans from the perspective of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora over many years. Here, I aim to approach a number of connections I have made between cultures that are bathed by the waters of this ocean, which covers a fifth of the Earth’s surface, by walking my own path. These connections pass through places of great resistance, resilience, repulsion, pain and re-signification. After all, this ocean was the scene of our forced diaspora, an African Holocaust, which resulted in death and rebirth through the need to re-exist. Making these connections, runs through historical similarities, and the dissonant image of countless people, who like me, represent new routes, new narratives, and other meanings of being in an Atlantic or Indian transit, which it is not always Pacific.
When I think about the relationships of love, admiration versus repulsion, fear of the sea, I understand that I make a binary connection that is present in innumerable bodies. Throwing yourself into the sea has already been / is, for many, the need to break free. Even today we see this way being used for those who seek refuge. The terror of the sea can be an experience inherited from the forefathers, because memories can be transmitted to later generations through genetic switches. This biological transmission of ancestral memory is often ignored, or underestimated. The attempt to connect with my ancestral memory brings much of what has guided my work and research with Turbante-se.
To speak about Atlantica has brought me the reflections about the movement of the waters, as the line that traces my own path, where I create my own displacement as an optional way, and I choose the diaspora as home. The crossing over this sea connects my artistic and intellectual production in Brazil, Europe and Africa. I speak of Africa, without necessarily treading on the soil of that continent, but because it is this (in)visible territory that I transit to arrive at the place of Atlantica.
What´s in this in-between place? What are the powers that waters, and those well thought transits, (which relate to the past) create for a black woman like me, who has reached other places from the time of now? Beyond to the crossing, traversing the sea has been a way of making many possibilities palpable.
Atlantica is also being a place of self-permission for my experimentation in various aspects. Experimenting through collages, poems, writing, and the challenge of dressing bodies from the perspective of the mix. Not to understand me as a fashion designer, but to express myself through the textile.
In this experience of self-identification, of thinking art, image, involvement and history, I´ve selected these prints thinking if women who inspire me would like a cut of fabric like that. Adalices, Elianas, Valdinas, Detes, Jhôs. When I choose for the fabrics with sprinkles of light on the prints, I think of the abundance I want to project for my people. I think of how immense our richness is, and that I want to put away from those Atlantic bodies everything that can be read as ordinary. I like the simple, but I do not like the ordinary. This last one has been imposed on us for many centuries. So here, once again, I take up my place as the heiress of ancestral elegance.
For this work, in addition to the turbans, I wanted to share two models that can be used as everyday clothes or for the waters, along with hair bands, posters of the collages and a video-poem. I crossed the Atlantic with these fabrics; I took them from London to Brazil, and brought them back to Europe. It is disturbing to think that I am repeating the logic of the South Atlantic economic system, which was “centered on the culture of producing commodities and textiles to sell in Europe.” But I am not here to sell products. I´m here to tell some stories along the way, which do not involve pain, but bring intellectual, aesthetic and economic empowerment to my country.
I am extremely proud to say that the workforce for making these pieces is 100% ethical and female, made in Salvador, Bahia, on a small scale, in an honest and sustainable way. All the prints in this collection are African fabrics that I selected at Mrs. Toks shop, a Nigerian woman who owns a fabric shop in South London, and the rest of the raw material bought in Brazil. I crossed and recrossed the Atlantic.
The clothes will initially be available at the Turbante-se online shop for Europe / Worldwide, and depending on demand we will produce more for Brazil. The turbans and head bands will be available in the two shops (Brazil & EU/Worldwide).