Renata Felinto

AMOR-Tecimento: On a Love's Tessitura Damp the Racism Weave the Love

AMOR-Tecimento, 2019, artistic performance, São Paulo/Brazil. Photo: Crioulla Oliveira.

AMORTECIMENTO [damping]

noun

act or effect of dampening (yourself or something);

less commonly used: loss of consciousness; fainting;

decrease or loss of strength, impetus, intensity; loosening, weakening.

A M O R - T e c i m e n t o [LOVE+weaving]

verb-action

the act of diminishing the impact of structural racism on black bodies by touch;

constant, intense and intentional act of conscious touch on the skin of a black body;

an attempt to minimize the trauma of separation of black bodies by careful touch;

redemption of the power of touch as recognition of the humanity of oneself and the other;

to weave love by touch.

Translator's note: In this essay, the verb to dampen, which refers to making (something) less strong or intense becomes the noun damping.

And AMOR-Tecimento (which connects love to the act of weaving and technique of weaving) is a verb that requires action and commitment. In Portuguese, amortecimento (damping) and AMOR-Tecimento have the same pronunciation, but the translation into the English language compromises the meaning; the search for new puns to reproduce what the author has to say falls short. Therefore, we chose to keep the title of the essay in Portuguese, knowing that this verb-action is important for the black people around the world, especially in the context of the black diaspora.

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This essay presents the ideas and aesthetics that inspired and drove the multimedia and multi-sensory artistic performance AMOR-Tecimento, which took place on April 23th, 2019, at the arts and cultural center Serviço Social do Comércio (SESC) in the Vila Mariana neighborhood in São Paulo/SP/Brazil. It reclaims the idea that permeates innumerable religiosities, spiritualities and beliefs; everyone should love and be loved equally. This practice is not strictly based on the concept of Christian love. The Ubuntu concept of "I am what I am by what we are," which comes from some Central and South African Bantu populations also informs it and teaches you to think of yourself as coming from and to the well-being of the whole.

The love that evokes the title of this work uses the art of happening, of herbaceous knowledge, of the knowledge of spiritual healing by touch, of reflections on decolonialization and explores how these can modify our forms of relationship between equals, between Malunga people; it is not romantic white and Western love. Moreover, this later conception of love distances us from our corporealities and realities, because being minted by European and white people, it ignores the transatlantic and diasporic trauma that black people, who are now in the Americas, have suffered.

Among the many forms of healing we have sought, consciously and unconsciously, over the more than five-hundred years that have passed since the first ship loaded with black-skinned African people left the mother continent, we may have forgotten the primordial element that is the one that occurs with the mother and the baby as soon as it comes out of her womb: we look at each other, touch each other. We allow this delicate and careful touch of recognition.

The conception of AMOR-Tecimento arises from reflections on slavery, which white colonizers established in the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and which forced black African populations to this territory, including what we call Brazil—one of its means of control being the fomenting of rivalries between different ethnic groups.

Because black Brazilian people do not constitute a uniform mass in relation to physical appearance, enslavers sowed division by privileging, among the group of captives, those who had a lighter skin to the detriment of those who had darker skin, deeply fracturing the relations between black people of different skin tones and phenotypes.

This practice of treating black Brazilian people unequally, in order to benefit those whose phenotypes...