Widely debated in the most advanced studies of critical theory, the ideas of intelligence that we are subject to are largely racialized. Ontoepistemological projects, which argue for the inseparability of being and knowing, have historically been weaponized to establish systems of violence and uphold colonial hierarchies. The very consolidation of a global idea of race is intimately intertwined with the conceptual arsenal of modern philosophy and how this violence inhabits our categories of thought, representation strategies, and the symbolic, legal, and economic order.

Over the past three decades, Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino has interrogated and disrupted the relations of science, power, and dominant modes of knowledge production in Brazil and the Black Diaspora. Investigating how these power structures remain deeply entrenched, perpetuating social stratification and racial injustice in the blackest community outside Africa, Paulino exposes the violence embedded in Brazil’s coloniality of knowledge, centering the lived experiences of Black women and the persistent legacies of slavery, scientific racism, and eugenic policies of the nineteenth century.

As a child in Freguesia do Ó, a district on the outskirts of São Paulo, Paulino recalls playing with carnival adornments, as her grandmother lived next door to a factory that produced them. Fascinated by frogs, bees, and other animals, the artist developed an early passion for biology. From a young age, she began understanding Black cultural protagonism and representation through the aesthetics and technologies of Black Brazilian life—rooted in a complex cosmology and modes of knowing. There is a visual memory built through the diaspora, one that Paulino understands as embodied experiences, yet was never taught in a formal academic setting. 

One of the most important projects of her career reflects precisely this attempt to rewrite the history of science and dissect its pretentious neutrality and entanglement with racial capitalism.

In her artist book ¿História Natural? (2016), she appropriates and subverts nineteenth-century naturalist texts and scientific illustrations, revealing the violence of classification systems and racial taxonomies. Throughout the book, she overlays colonial-era imagery—faceless Indigenous figures and portraits of enslaved women—with textile fragments, Portuguese tiles stained red, and anatomical sketches. In obscuring and subverting these historical images, she performs an act of epistemic resistance. Sewing, covering, and reconfiguring these images, Paulino challenges the very foundations of “natural history.” Here, stitching becomes an act of sewing memories, holding together fragments of lives fractured by colonial violence and transforming archival wounds into sites of remembrance and resistance. The double question marks in the title are intended to emphatically unsettle any notion of objectivity, inviting us to reconsider science’s role in shaping Brazil’s racial imaginaries.

The book began when she encountered images from the Thayer Expedition, led by Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz, between 1865 and 1866. Initially aimed at studying the fauna of the Amazon Basin, the expedition shifted toward using scientific methods to justify white racial superiority. The photographs produced—front, back, and profile images of Black individuals—had a forensic, dehumanizing character. Paulino recalls the moment she first encountered one of these images: a Black woman shown from all sides, treated as a specimen rather than a human being. She spent over a year researching their origins, seeking to reframe their meaning through artistic intervention.

For Paulino, the body becomes a site of epistemological resistance. She reflects, “What do representations of the Black body say about our society? How do these images contribute to naturalizing the social positions assigned to Black populations? I appropriate photographs—whether from family albums or colonial archives—to intervene in these narratives. Reworking these images becomes, for me, an act of healing.”¹

Juxtaposing images from Flora Brasiliensis—a nineteenth-century catalogue of Brazilian flora—with photographs of slavery, Paulino reflects on how Brazil has historically been seen as a warehouse of exploitable resources, whether human, animal, or plant. This critique runs throughout ¿História Natural?, which is structured into sections titled “The Progress of Nations,” “The Salvation of Souls?,” and “The Love for Science?”—each exposing the ideological underpinnings of colonial exploitation. Paulino emphasizes the complicit role of science in constructing racial categories, asserting, “Science is not neutral; it never has been.” She traces how scientific intelligence—especially under the influence of white European men—became a powerful tool in justifying racism and power.

Ultimately, Rosana Paulino’s trajectory, steeped in critique, pedagogy, and repair, invites us to imagine worlds outside colonial logic. Her work dismantles dominant epistemologies and foregrounds new ways of knowing rooted in Black memory, care, spirituality, and cultural resilience. Through acts of sewing memories, she offers a powerful vision of how art can intervene in the colonial archive and cultivate epistemologies of resistance. This body of work also marks a pivotal moment within her broader practice, consolidating concerns that would continue to unfold across subsequent series: the interrogation of scientific racism, the violence of archival representation, the centrality of Black women’s experiences. These investigations have become defining threads throughout her practice, establishing Paulino as an unavoidable voice in global conversations about art, power, science, and the supposed neutrality of knowledge systems.

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Diane Lima is a curator, scholar, and one of the leading voices of Black feminism in Latin American art. She is the curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition, featuring Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão. She was also appointed as chief curator of the 39th Panorama of Brazilian Art of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. Previous exhibitions and collaborations include choreographies of the impossible, 35th São Paulo Bienal (2023); Paulo Nazareth: Luzia, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2024); The River is a Serpente, 3rd Frestas Triennial of Arts (2020/2021), and the two-year program Absent Dialogues at Itaú Cultural (São Paulo, 2016–2017).