At the crossroads of faith, sound, and belonging, Gê Viana investigates the vibrations that sustain Black and Indigenous communities, in which music is not just a cultural expression but a historical inscription charged with insubordination. Her research starts from experience and unfolds like a living narrative, connecting bodies, territories, and affections by interweaving real and fictional memories. In this way, the artist dismantles scenes crystallized in official historiography and expands readings on cultural heritage in Brazil. Articulating a visual and sound archaeology that reconstructs fragments of records – within the hegemonic discourse or in the popular imagination – she creates works that become symbols of resistance.
By challenging colonial narratives, Viana rescues the dignity of marginalized populations and creates an affectionate practice that moves between the analogue and the digital. Her works displace the marks of racial violence and establish meanings of imaginative liberation, something that Édouard Glissant called “overcoming colonial trauma.” The radiolas of Maranhão, the beats of reggae, and the drums of the terreiros emerge as sensitive layers in her works, resonating with memories that defy historical silencing. The Maranhão reggae tradition, captured by the artist’s senses, reveals itself as a genre that, although marginalized, has built its own territory, rooted in the Black diasporas and the struggle for permanence. Powerful sound systems and ancestral rhythms structure her work, in which noises, echoes, and pulsations act as insurgent forces that intone community celebrations, forming a fabric that transcends the aesthetic experience: they are traces of a collective trajectory that defies oblivion.
Beyond the harmonic impact, her practice carries a non-negotiable political commitment. Her images evoke the past of diasporas but without fixing these bodies in pain – on the contrary, she inserts them into poetic universes of fabrication, resistance, and futurity. Her creations operate as portals where time blurs and the echoes of other stories can still be heard.
The fusion between archive and speculative creation reveals a search for interrupted continuities, for buried narratives that insist on emerging. With each juxtaposition of images, with each displacement of an old photograph onto a new medium, the artist builds a cartography in which all times vibrate together and the future is not just a wait, but a call to invention. Whether reconfiguring images or amplifying centuries-old frequencies, her poetics create a space where continuity and rupture coexist. Her works not only document but open up ways for visual sonorities to remain as pulsating matter, a promise of the future and an invitation to listen to ancient whispers that have never stopped vibrating: melanin, love, faith, struggle, invention, and community.
