The Shaking of the Casa da Torre & The Shaking of the Maison des Esclaves

Curator: Elina Heikka

The Shaking of the Casa da Torre, 2015 & The Shaking of the Maison des Esclaves, 2015

Sacudimento is a practice in religions of African origin that has the purpose of exorcising domestic environments by brushing sacred leaves all over the building, which drives away the dead and the eguns. In this performance, the artist Ayrson Heráclito exorcises two architectural monuments linked to the trafficking of enslaved people in Africa and to Brazilian colonisation, the Casa da Torre, on the coast of Bahia, and the Maison des Esclaves in Gorée, on the island of Gorée, a few kilometres from the coast of the city of Dakar, Senegal.

In the artist’s words, “in this performance, the death to be definitively driven away from us is that of the history of colonisation and enslavement. Its consequences are very current in places like Bahia and Africa. […] And that bequeathed us racism, inequalities and poverty for the Black populations of the world”.

Co-production Rodrigo Bettencourt by Art Dispersion

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