In case you are still enthralled by the captivating magnetic field of our recent landmark exhibition, THE LIVING ARCHIVES | MEMORIES BEYOND THE ATLANTIC, well may your precious heart be at peace. The curation continues to unfold online.
Taking center stage are the AGOUDAS and NEGO FUGIDO visual chronicles by critically acclaimed photographer and PhD researcher Nicola Lo Calzo. Drawing from his now famed and long term KAM PROJECT, this exceptional body of work navigates complex geographies, shaped by the histories of the transatlantic slave trade and the overarching legacy of imperial colonialism.
With each photographic gem, Lo Calzo guides us, with immodest wit and bravery, through a compelling exploration of memory as a living, embodied, and political act of resistance.
Today, we invite you on a deep dive investigation inside The Nego Fugido Series, which functions as a visual chronicle of a unique performative tradition, held every July in the Quilombola community of Acupe, near Baía de Todos os Santos in Brazil.
Originating in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, this community-based performance re-enacts this violence and the struggle for freedom of the enslaved, through symbolic resistance and collective memory.
Abdicating official historical narratives, 'Nego Fugido' asserts the central role of the enslaved in their own liberation. Today, this tradition functions as a political and cultural space where Afro-Brazilian identities and ancestral knowledge are not only preserved, but reimagined. With this Series, Nicola Lo Calzo explores non-institutional forms of remembrance, giving voice to marginalised histories and gestures of cultural resilience.
In a temporal overlap, several historical moments are brought together to recount the experience of the abyss: from the capture of Sub-Saharan Africans in Africa by slave hunters, to the resistance of fugitive slaves in Brazil pursued by the Capitão do Mato (the slave catcher), culminating to the reversal of power through the revolt of the slave hunters against the entire colonial hierarchy up to the King of Portugal, whose final capitulation leads to the general emancipation of the community.
The 'Nego Fugido' performance seeks to produce a sovereign discourse that emphasises the fight against slavery led by the enslaved people themselves. In this sense, it creates a counter-narrative to the official history taught in Brazilian schoolbooks, which tends to highlight a top-down abolition led by Princess Isabel in 1888.
In the appearances of Nego Fugido, the community of Acupe celebrates the memory of the enslaved ancestors and the strategies leading up to emancipation. This shift in perspective — bringing the enslaved individual and their daily struggle to the center of the choreographic and scenic framework — represents a significant change from the hegemonic discourse on the memory of slavery, which focuses on the heroic figures of large-scale marronage, such as Zumbi dos Palmares.
Since the 1990s, which coincided nationally with a reorganization of the movimento negro and greater visibility of Indigenous peoples' demands, Nego Fugido has been framed not only as a performative practice but also as an intellectual and political space for reflection on identity and memory. The Casa do Nego Fugido, opened in 2021, responds precisely to this need to create a space for creation, preservation, and transmission of Indigenous knowledge surrounding Nego Fugido.
In this sense, the quest for Africa appears central to the construction of a positive and legitimizing identity for Afro-descendant communities — beyond being merely a strategy in the fight for collective land use rights, particularly for quilombola communities. In this regard, the discourse produced by members of Nego Fugido looks to “Africa” as the symbolic and political framework of its legitimacy, invoking an African tradition that becomes a positive sign of social and cultural cohesion (Bastide 1960).
Nego Fugido, like other performative practices, is the result of constant negotiation between its rules and real-world adaptations. The goal of this research was precisely to try to visually represent Nego Fugido in its complexity and with respect for its members, as an organic whole, by intersecting performance and discourse — and to examine how and to what extent these two aspects feed and influence each other.
This project, carried out in collaboration with the Associação Cultural Nego Fugido, is the result of field research developed between 2022 and 2025 as part of Nicola Lo Calzo’s PhD at the École Universitaire de Recherche Humanités, Création, Patrimoine at CY Cergy Paris Université, in partnership with ENSAPC.
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