Fall Exhibitions at the IAS
With sculptures of melting popsicles and artworks of people performing rescue carries, new exhibitions at the IAS are a reminder of the potential...
October 15 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation with Luciany Aparecida, author of Macala (2022) and Aziri (2026). The works are inspired by nineteenth-century photographs of Black women taken in Brazil, shaped by the historical contexts of slavery and scientific racism. The research explores how poetry and fiction can reinscribe these images beyond the colonial gaze that originally produced them. Once confined within systems of economic exploitation and the aesthetic contemplation of whiteness, these women are now reimagined through a poetic practice in which poetry and photography converge as a feminist and abolitionist mode of critically engaging the archive. Following the wake, the work seeks to transform documents of violence into new aesthetic forms of freedom.
This event is organized by lawyer and professor Denise Carrascoa, Visualizing Abolition Scholar in Residence.
Luciany Aparecida is a writer as well as a psychoanalyst in training. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature, with research focused on literature and culture. She is the author of Mata Doce, a novel, winner of the 2024 São Paulo Literature Award and finalist for the 2024 Jabuti Prize. She also is the author of two poetry collections: Aziri (2016) and Macala (2022), as well as Joanna Mina (2021), a play.
Aparecida is a researcher with the Black Ancestry Literature Group at PUCSP and was a guest writer in Berlin at the Middle Ground 2025 Festival; in Mexico at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2025; in Colombia at the Bogotá International Book Fair in 2024; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the FLUP 2024 Literary Festival of the Peripheries and at the FLIP 2022 Paraty International Literary Festival.
Denise Carrascosa is a writer, lawyer, and full professor of literature at the Federal University of Bahia, in Brasil. She holds a Ph.D. in Theory and Criticism of Literature and Culture (UFBA) and completed postdoctoral studies in the History of Slavery in Brasil (UFRB). In 2010, she launched the abolitionist project Indocile Bodies and Free Minds: an art-education program for literary writing at the Women’s Prison Complex in Bahia, where she established, together with sentenced women inmates, the Free Minds Library (2012), enabling Sisters inside to access sentence remission through reading.
Carrascosa wrote Técnicas e Políticas de si nas margens: literatura e prisão no Brasil pós-Carandiru (Appris, 2015); and edited Firminas em Fuga (Ed. Ogum’s, 2023), a poetry anthology by incarcerated women. As a guest author at FLIP 2023, she launched the abolitionist play O Pacto de Bocapiu: a cumplicidade silenciosa do femiNegricídio de Estado nas prisões (Ed. Ogum’s, 2023). At the 2024 Bahia Book Biennial, she launched her book of literary criticism essays from the past two decades, Corpo de Vento: Exu da Teoria – Travessias Crítico-Performativas pelas Artes Negras (EDUFBA, 2024). In 2024, she received the Esperança Garcia Award for her work in combating violence against women and was a finalist for the 66th Jabuti Award in the Reading Promotion Category. In 2025, she launched Bocapiu: the Hush Pact—the silent complicity of the State’s Blackfeminicide in prisons (Ogum’s Toques Press), translated by Jess Oliveira and Bruna Barros, at New York University and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In collaboration with Beatriz Carrascosa França, she edited the anthology Se Anastácia Falasse (Ogum’s Toques Negros, 2025) – a collection of short stories, testimonies, and chronicles by incarcerated women in Brasil.
Free
