BADS_Lab São Paulo @ Black: Cite; Sight–Site: Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences

Overview

Black: Cite; Sight–Site is a layered, participatory exploration of Afro-diasporic world-making practices launching in São Paulo, Fall 2025. Refusing the pathologization of Black relationality, the project aims to redirect financial, material, and libidinal investments toward its flourishing. Convening artists, theorists, and community leaders, it explores Black life as a generative infrastructure of autonomy, memory, relation, and sustainability.

During its São Paulo iteration, Black: Cite; Sight–Site will transform Galeria do Reggae into a living research node: a site of ethico-aesthetic inquiry at the intersection of Black Arts and Decolonial Science.

Seven BADS_lab Fellows will be invited initiate new research projects not as finished artworks, but as sketches, trials, and speculative experiments—improvising toward forms not yet known.

Event Description

Over six days of shared time:

• Fellows will develop works-in-progress — solo or collaboratively — within a hybrid studio-lab.

• Closed studio hours will offer space for focused work, co-presence, and quiet cross-pollination.

• Open studio hours will invite the public to witness, question, and engage the unfolding process.

• Structured conversations with professional art critique will braid together fellow residents and public interlocutors.

• A final showcase will present reflections, fragments, and findings — not as conclusions, but as offerings toward ongoing study.