AREAS

A collaborative artistic research project by the Afrontosas Collective, created by the artists ROD, tony omulu and DIDI, which has been in development since the end of 2023.  The project was created from reflections on the neologism ‘cuír’ and the importance of non-European mythological aesthetics in shaping the identities of black artists in a state of migration.

In the practices of the Afrontosas Collective, we have adopted the word ‘cuír’ as a way of establishing a position in the world on the decolonial resistance of LGBTQ+ people. It derives from the concept of ‘cuírlombismo’, which presents itself as a community strategy. Its objective is to build territories that give meaning to artistic practices and intersectional readings of blackness. Cuírlombismo provides interference in dialogues with artivism, resistance and performance. It fosters collective struggle in the face of the invisibility of our bodies and the lack of representation in the traditional spaces of art, culture, academia, politics and the civil sphere.

Outside of a Eurocentric (white-binary) context, it translates a black-founded conceptualisation that feeds on a dissident-sexual diaspora. It also translates the attempt to create communities that feed on their own raw material in the face of scarce references to our history and our resistance. These new conceptions that we are giving ourselves are only possible through committed research in search of other references. This is how this concept is fundamental to our progress.

The ‘cuír’ concept is an integral part of all the Afrontosas Collective's projects. You can find out more by researching Tatiana Nascimento's work and also follow the Kalunga project: for a black ecology and cuír.