In recent years we have witnessed a profound historical revision conducted by an anticolonial point of view that seeks to understand the constitutive epistemological violences of art history. In a very singular way, without mimicking formal or discursive mannerisms, the exhibition Ajuntamentos [Joinings], by Afonso Tostes, echoes this movement of change that marks the present. And why in a singular way? Because, in Tostes’s work, what takes place is not a denial of the Western canon, but rather the encounter of two rivers. On the one hand, the river whose waters form the set of works recognized by an official historiography, and, on the other, the river filled with the knowledge of traditional peoples. This is one of the ajuntamentos forged by the artist.
The same historical moment that is witnessing the anticolonial epistemological shift mentioned at the beginning of this text is, moreover, that which is seeing the growth of reactionary waves whose common denominator lies in the idea of union by similarities and the rejection of alterities. Such a communion by resemblance involves a search guided by the notions of purity and exclusion. The ajuntamentos woven by Afonso Tostes over the course of his production bring us to the antipodes of that regressive movement. We stand in light of a gesture that is simultaneously poetic and political, which beckons for us to imagine a more polyphonic and solitary world – a world of many worlds.
