Abstract

BAZILIO, Emanuele de Freitas; MEIRINHO, Daniel  and  CAMPOS, Ricardo. Architecture of Disappearance: Black Self-Portraits and Counter-Visuality as Reparative Aesthetics. Vista [online]. 2025, n.16, e025019.  Epub Dec 31, 2025. ISSN 2184-1284.  https://doi.org/10.21814/vista.6583.

This article analyses the self-portrait series Arquitetura do Desaparecimento (Architecture of Disappearance) by Brazilian photographer Roger Silva. Silva’s photographs are presented as an aesthetic and political expression of decolonial counter-visuality produced by Black photographers from peripheral contexts. Through self-portraiture, the artist articulates a gesture of re-existence that challenges normative regimes of visibility, identity, and representation. The study draws on decolonial theory (Azoulay, 2021; Fanon, 1952/2008; Maldonado-Torres, 2020), image studies (Campt, 2021), representation (Hall, 2006, 2013/2016) and reparative aesthetics (Best, 2016) to interpret Silva’s images as symbolic devices of resistance to racism and of the reconstruction of subjectivities. The captions accompanying the photographs are incorporated into the analysis as discursive extensions of the visual work, revealing invisible layers of the experiences portrayed. The article demonstrates that contemporary Black self-portraiture, particularly that developed by Black photographers from the peripheries, constitutes an artivist practice of meaning-making, fabulation and symbolic healing, creating new visual grammars that subvert the logic of the coloniality of seeing and knowing. This article argues that these images contribute to strengthening a counter-visuality established through the language of Black peripheral photography.

Keywords : self-portrait; Black peripheral photography; reparative aesthetics; counter-visuality; Roger Silva.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in English | Portuguese     · English ( pdf ) | Portuguese ( pdf )