PortuguêsLocation: Pivô Boulevard — Salvador, Bahia
Address: Rua Boulevard Suíço, 11A, Nazaré
Pivô will host a special program next Wednesday, November 12, connecting two projects that are part of the 2025 France-Brazil Season, both taking the Atlantic Ocean as a space of memory, passage, and imagination: Atlantic Threads (AT) and I’m a Black Ocean (ESUON).
At 3:30 p.m., the talk “Atlantic Threads (AT) + I’m a Black Ocean (ESUON)” brings together artists and curators Olivier Marboeuf and Cindy Sissokho, participants of AT, alongside artists Salimata Diop and Beya Gille, from ESUON. Taking the Atlantic as a metaphor for reconstituting historical and affective routes between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, the projects reflect on how art can rewrite the narratives surrounding the Atlantic — transforming it from a territory of loss and violence into a shared space of listening and future.
Immediately after the talk, at 5 p.m., Olivier Marboeuf will launch his book Fugas Decoloniais (Oficina Raquel Publishing), with the participation of translator Ana Zambi. Originally published in France, the work has quickly become a reference in studies on minority visibility discourses and the cultural diversity policies of major institutions. Taking the art world as a point of departure — not as a space of emancipation, but as one of the strategic sites of colonial continuity — the book offers a contemporary study that reveals the strategies used by culture and neoliberal economics to sustain colonial structures.
The Atlantic Threads project, within the framework of the 2025 France-Brazil Season, is supported by the Institut Français du Bénin and the Instituto Guimarães Rosa, and sponsored by PETROBRAS. It is carried out by the Instituto Cultural Acrópole, through the Federal Government of Brazil, Culture Incentive Law, Ministry of Culture.
📍 Talk: Atlantic Threads + I’m a Black Ocean & Book Launch — Fugas Decoloniais
Date: November 13 (Wednesday)
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: Pivô Boulevard — Rua Boulevard Suíço, 11A, Nazaré, Salvador, Bahia
Curator, art critic, and the founder and artistic director of Pivô, in São Paulo. Alongside her work at the institution, she serves as a Latin American art advisor for the Kadist Art Foundation, is part of the curatorial team of the Italian art fair Artissima, acts as a contributing editor for Frieze magazine, and sits on the development committee of the Milan-based platform Ordet.
Her recent curatorial projects include the solo exhibitions República by Luiz Roque (2020) and Avalanche by Katinka Bock (2019), both at Pivô, as well as the group shows A Burrice dos Homens at Galeria Bergamin Gomide, São Paulo (2019); Neither at Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2017); and the co-curated exhibition Caixa Preta at Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2018).
Her writing has appeared in several publications, including Textwork by the Fondation d’Entreprise Pernod Ricard, ArtReview, Terremoto, Mousse, and Cahiers d’Art, in addition to contributions to institutional catalogues and artist monographs published by Cobogó, MASP, Centre Georges Pompidou, Fridericianum, and MOCA Detroit.
Cindy Sissokho is a curator, cultural producer, art consultant, and writer with a specific focus on anticolonial, social, and political practices within the arts and culture. Her curatorial and writing work is nurtured by the urgency to broaden and disseminate knowledge and artistic production from systemically racialised and marginalised perspectives.
She is the curator of the current major exhibition Hard Graft: Work, Health & Rights at the Wellcome Collection in London. She was also the co-Curator of the French Pavilion — with Céline Kopp, represented by artist Julien Creuzet — for the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Olivier Marboeuf is an author-storyteller, artist, independent curator, cultural theorist and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the early 1990s, together with French-Beninese author Yvan Alagbé, he founded éditions Amok (now Frémok), a research-based comics publisher that launched the legendary Parisian literary café Autarcic Comix. He then became artistic director of Espace Khiasma (2004 to 2018), a visual arts and living literature center based in the parisian outskirts and dedicated to minority representations, which contributed to introducing postcolonial theories to the French art scene through numerous exhibitions and encounters. From 2013 to 2024, he was also a film producer with Spectre Productions, producing some sixty artists’ films and documentaries in all formats.
He currently divides his time between writing, drawing and activities linked to collaborative art practices. He is a founding member of the Réseau Indépendant des Travailleur-euses et Acteur-ices de l’Art (RITAA) in Guadeloupe, member of RAYO, an experimental pedagogy program in the Greater Caribbean, and of the international board of the Akademie der Künste der Welt de Cologne.
Among his recent grants and residencies, for the academic year 2023/2024 he has benefited from the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship at the University Institute of London in Paris (ULIP), where he initiated research about the archive of Caribbean diasporic presences in Paris and London. He is also writer in residence at La Maison Baldwin (Cassis site) in 2025.
In 2022, he published the essay Suites Décoloniales : s’enfuir de la plantation and the poetry collection Les Matières de la Nuit, both published with Éditions du Commun. In 2025, his theatrical text La nuit juste avant le feu will be published by Editions Atlantiques déchaînés, while a Brazilian Portuguese translation of Suite décoloniales is planned by Editora Oficina Raquel.