Em busca de um corpo quimérico - Uma conversa com Dénètem Touam Bona

Moderation: Tatiana Lotierzo Wednesday, July 8, 2026 4 PM | GMT -3 Simultaneous translation: watch here in Portuguese Like Gloria Anzaldúa, I cannot dissociate the colonial figure of the “mestizo” from the painful division that gives it meaning (white/black, native/foreign, etc.): the border does not manifest itself in subalternized bodies and territories, except in the form of an “open wound” (una herida abierta, G. Anzaldúa). Although my father is black and my mother is white, I have never defined myself as “mestizo,” because I have always perceived as an imposture the idea of ​​a world cured of racism and all its evils thanks to “miscegenation.” The violence of the borders concealed by the term “mestizo” is simultaneously intimate and (geo)political. It is from this violence, from this extreme tension between asymmetrical poles, that I write: I contort myself like a serpent or a vine, seizing the smallest opening to extricate myself from this absurd black-and-white reality show, leaning on the accidents of the territories I traverse, drawing strength from all possible and imaginable materials, resorting to the most diverse forms. One of the objectives of my work on the "marronagem" (of which the Quilombo constitutes one of the historical manifestations): to escape the binary logic of "race" and the trap of fossilized identities; to celebrate the art of the metamorphoses of the Quilombolas and the Pajés, a source of inspiration to deflect the fascist becoming of the contemporary world and the apparatus of capture of capital and empires. Visit our website: https://premiopierreverger.com/2026/