Can Art Heal and Denounce at the Same Time?
Afrotela + COLORS at Fábrica Braço de Prata, Lisbon, Oct 9th
In times of exhaustion, when every gesture risks being consumed by spectacle, can art still hold its original promise — to heal and to revolt?
That was the question pulsing through Afrotela + COLORS’ latest gathering at Fábrica Braço de Prata, where artists Gisela Casimiro, Isabel Zuaa, and Marisa Paulo joined moderator Ella Stattmiller for an evening of radical honesty.
They asked what happens when art becomes both medicine and weapon, when a poem, a performance, or a photograph must soothe the wound and name its cause. For these artists — all working at the intersections of Black identity, memory, and gender — the act of creating is never neutral. It is a means of survival, a tool to confront erasure, and a way to reclaim the right to feel in a world that insists on silence.
“Creating can be a form of dealing with pain,” one of them said, “but it’s also how we expose the systems that cause it.” That dual movement — inward and outward, intimate and insurgent — defines much of Afro-diasporic art in Portugal today. The audience listened as the discussion unfolded between tenderness and tension: How do you protect yourself while showing the scar? How do you resist the aestheticization of suffering?
As Afrotela’s text reminds us,
Art has many functions: it moves, provokes, and transforms. But it can also be a form of personal healing and, at the same time, an instrument of social denunciation.
The challenge is not to choose between one or the other — it’s to let both coexist without cancelling each other out.
In Lisbon, where the arts scene often prides itself on diversity while remaining structurally unequal, such conversations are not decorative. They are necessary acts of reparation, reminding us that expression without accountability is just another privilege.
That night, surrounded by concrete walls and the warm hum of collective thought, Afrotela + COLORS offered something rare: a space where art could breathe beyond visibility — where the personal became political, and the political turned back into care.
Because maybe healing and denunciation are not opposites at all. Maybe they are the two lungs of the same body — one inhaling pain, the other exhaling truth.
9 October, 19h | Fábrica Braço de Prata, Lisbon
