Towards a Reparative Aesthetic of Memory
In this doctoral research, Rosa investigates the elaboration of a ‘reparative’ artistic practice through processes of recomposition and exercises of ‘critical fabulation’ applied to historical materials. Taking the opera 'Il Guarany' as an object of study, Rosa interrogates how its libretto and narrative structure might allow for an in-depth study of coloniality within Brazilian traditions of representation and inquires into how indigenous symbols and myths have been appropriated to sustain social hierarchies and power structures still in place today.
Written in 1870, 'Il Guarany' is centered on the love story of an indigenous warrior and a Portuguese noblewoman, using the history of Brazilian colonization to produce a certain kind of foundational myth. Using the opera as an index of factual history as well as a generative material, Túlio Rosa explores forms of speculative writing and the use of choreographic and compositional strategies to expand, displace, or reposition its elements, using imagination and fiction to support aesthetical critical elaborations and processes of disciplinary translation.
Drawing from Eve Sedgwick’s proposition of ‘reparative reading’ combined with the practice of ‘critical fabulation’ developed by Saidiya Hartman, Rosa inquires how processes of analysis, decomposition, and montage rooted in artistic research can operate across the symbolic toward potential healing processes and explores how the opera’s position in between historical drama and fable might function as a platform to challenge the continuous extractivist, genocidal and neocolonial practices still in place in Brazil today.
Túlio Rosa (1989, BR) is a performer, choreographer, and researcher currently based in Brussels. He holds an MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture from the Reina Sofia Museum/University of Castilla-La Mancha and was an associate researcher at a.pass {Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies}.
Combining writing, visual, and performative practices, Rosa's work proposes to place the body in relation to time and history. He explores how the juxtaposition and confrontation of archival materials might foster new sets of relationships and question narratives and visualities that characterize an imaginary of the colonial matrix.
In the last few years, he has been developing the project 'Arquivo Atlântico' in collaboration with Beatriz Cantinho, which proposes a critical and sensible approach to the memory of colonialism in different territories of the South Atlantic. In 2024 he received the Emerging Artist Talent Grant awarded by the Flemish Government for the project 'H(a)unting Songs'.
He is invested in anticolonial practices, the politics of memory, and the possibility of rewriting personal and collective stories as a gesture of reparation.