In its eighth presentation, this mural piece on the façade of the gallery, examines the political developments of sexual and gender activism. Shapes of Freedom revisits the history of the pink triangle and other sexual diversity symbols. To highlight the importance of collective organizing to achieve social freedom. The mural is accompanied by a historical timeline listing important moments of LGBTQI + history in Brazil and abroad, developed in collaboration with Guilherme Altmayer.

The diptych of portraits of José Francisco Pedroso (2019) – an African enslaved man who, along with José Francisco Pereira, crafted and distributed bolsas de mandinga – is part of the series of contextual works to Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work. Carlos Motta collaborated with Portuguese-Guinean actor Welket Bungué to create this portrait, where Bungué’s wears a bolsa de mandiga offered to him by his own mother.

This video presents an interview with Paulo Pascoal, the actor who plays José Francisco Pereira in Corpo Fechado: The Devils Work. Pascoal is a well-known actor in his home country of Angola, who after coming out as a gay during a TEDxLuanda talk, endured death threats, which lead him to migrate to Portugal. In Lisbon, where he currently resides, Pascoal finds himself trapped in a sort of immigration limbo, unable to re-enter Portugal should he ever leave. As Jack McGrath wrote, “the biography of the actor therefore resonates with the life of his character, mutatis mutandis, crisscrossing oceans of both water and time in spectral fulfillment of Benjamin’s historical method”.

This 2018 film tells the story of José Francisco Pereira, a man who was kidnapped and sold into enslavement in the 18th Century. Pereira was taken from Uidá (now Benin, in West Africa) to Pernambuco, Brazil, where he performed syncretic practices in order to survive. Sold to a slaveholder in Portugal, Pereira was caught making amulets –bolsas de mandinga – for his fellows enslaved men and women. In 1731 Pereira was tried by the Lisbon Inquisition for sorcery. In addition, Pereira confessed to having made pacts and copulating with a male demon, and was thus also sentenced for sodomy. José Francisco Pereira was then condemned to be an enslaved rower on a galley ship, sent into exile, and was forever banned from Lisbon.
The film’s script draws from Pereira’s trial documents, Saint Peter Damian’s Letter 31 – The Book of Gomorrah, and Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, in order to tell the story. Written by the Italian reformist monk Saint Peter Damian in the 11th century, Letter 31 includes the earliest and most extensive damning treatment on pederasty and homoerotic practices. As art historian Jack McGrath writes in his essay for Conatus, a 2019 solo exhibition by Motta in New York, “the discourse of the sodomite also played a central role in European colonialism, a theme Motta has extensively explored in earlier video works such as Nefandus Trilogy (2013) and the installation Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2014), among others.”
On the Concept of History is comprised of 18 theses in which Walter Benjamin critically exposes the conventions of historicism. Benjamin proposes an open-ended approach to history, proposing the construction of different outcomes for the future through the action of the defeated, therefore opposing the idea that the future is the result of both historical evolution and economic and scientific progress. According to McGrath, “in Corpo Fechado, Pereira incarnates Benjamin’s Angel of History, a seraph caught in a storm blowing from Paradise, propelled inexorably into the future yet facing backward, doomed to see only the wreckage of the past. […] Motta’s film brings together little-known figures like Pereira and Damian, retrieved from archives of a distant past, for a story of migration, race, sexuality, law, and belief, whose contemporary urgency reframes conditions of the present.”

This series is composed of a set of photographs that show masked figures manipulating snakes. The images are reminiscent of gay fetish practices associated with “sexual deviations”. The title of the series reproduces the first lines of Inferno, Canto 1, from The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. The epic poem narrates an allegorical journey through what is essentially the medieval concept of hell.

This series is composed of a set of photographs that show masked figures manipulating snakes. The images are reminiscent of gay fetish practices associated with “sexual deviations”. The title of the series reproduces the first lines of Inferno, Canto 1, from The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. The epic poem narrates an allegorical journey through what is essentially the medieval concept of hell.

Motta created the bronze effigy in the image of an 18th century wooden sculpture in São Paulo, an ecclesiastical object crafted by artisans working in colonial subjection. As an artifact of exploitation, the piece indicts the art and religion that assisted the colonial system. As Benjamin wrote in On the Concept of History, ‘There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Motta created the bronze effigy in the image of an 18th century wooden sculpture in São Paulo, an ecclesiastical object crafted by artisans working in colonial subjection. As an artifact of exploitation, the piece indicts the art and religion that assisted the colonial system. As Benjamin wrote in On the Concept of History, “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

This series is composed of a set of photographs that show masked figures manipulating snakes. The images are reminiscent of gay fetish practices associated with “sexual deviations”. The title of the series reproduces the first lines of Inferno, Canto 1, from The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. The epic poem narrates an allegorical journey through what is essentially the medieval concept of hell.

This series is composed of a set of photographs that show masked figures manipulating snakes. The images are reminiscent of gay fetish practices associated with “sexual deviations”. The title of the series reproduces the first lines of Inferno, Canto 1, from The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. The epic poem narrates an allegorical journey through what is essentially the medieval concept of hell.

The Corpo Fechado series is comprised of a series of vintage whips cast in bronze and sculpted in such way that their motions appear as a frozen instant. These pieces are also part of the series of sculptural and photographic objects that relate to Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work. Like in the film, there is a reversal on the handling of the whip as these tools for punishment are inverted in these works, drawing near to BDSM practices where pleasure and pain converge, and where relations of power and submission are consensual.

The Corpo Fechado series is comprised of a series of vintage whips cast in bronze and sculpted in such way that their motions appear as a frozen instant. These pieces are also part of the series of sculptural and photographic objects that relate to Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work. Like in the film, there is a reversal on the handling of the whip as these tools for punishment are inverted in these works, drawing near to BDSM practices where pleasure and pain converge, and where relations of power and submission are consensual.

The Corpo Fechado series is comprised of a series of vintage whips cast in bronze and sculpted in such way that their motions appear as a frozen instant. These pieces are also part of the series of sculptural and photographic objects that relate to Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work. Like in the film, there is a reversal on the handling of the whip as these tools for punishment are inverted in these works, drawing near to BDSM practices where pleasure and pain converge, and where relations of power and submission are consensual.

The Corpo Fechado series is comprised of a series of vintage whips cast in bronze and sculpted in such way that their motions appear as a frozen instant. These pieces are also part of the series of sculptural and photographic objects that relate to Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work. Like in the film, there is a reversal on the handling of the whip as these tools for punishment are inverted in these works, drawing near to BDSM practices where pleasure and pain converge, and where relations of power and submission are consensual.

SPIT! (Sodomite, Inverts, Perverts Together!) is a collective formed in 2017 by Carlos Motta, writer John Arthur Peetz, and artist Carlos Maria Romero. SPIT! wrote a series of queer manifestos that were initially performed at Frieze projects, London. In the 2019 video, Greek artist Despina Zacharopoulos performs WE THE ENEMY, a summary of derogatory slangs and insults to queer people. Spoken by Zacharopoulos with defiant pride, these terms are re-appropriated becoming watchwords or a kind of summoning of the powerless.

WE THE ENEMY (2019) is a series comprised of 41 bronze sculptures based on representations of the devil drawn from art history: historical paintings that portray Satan in hell, drawings, illustrations, and sculptures that represent evil embodied. Each figure defies normative moral standards of beauty, respectability, and behavior. Among this army of demons, there are characters who suggest sexual perversion – as typified by traditional catholic imagery.

WE THE ENEMY (2019) is a series comprised of 41 bronze sculptures based on representations of the devil drawn from art history: historical paintings that portray Satan in hell, drawings, illustrations, and sculptures that represent evil embodied. Each figure defies normative moral standards of beauty, respectability, and behavior. Among this army of demons, there are characters who suggest sexual perversion – as typified by traditional catholic imagery.

WE THE ENEMY (2019) is a series comprised of 41 bronze sculptures based on representations of the devil drawn from art history: historical paintings that portray Satan in hell, drawings, illustrations, and sculptures that represent evil embodied. Each figure defies normative moral standards of beauty, respectability, and behavior. Among this army of demons, there are characters who suggest sexual perversion – as typified by traditional catholic imagery.

In Untitled Self-Portrait #3, is a photograph where Motta depicts himself simultaneously mournful and resolute, showing a clenched resilient fist, and resting his wistful head on a mirrored surface. As Jack McGrath warns: “Sometimes to gaze into a mirror is to see the malefactors of history leering back out, and real progress requires the courage to criticize even oneself.”