Dr. Paola Barreto in Residence October 2025
We are pleased to announce Dr. Paola Barreto will be in residence with the Speculative Play and Just Futurities program October 2025.
While in Residence, Dr. Barreto will be developing Marronage Roads.
Marronage Crossroads examines how contemporary art can serve as a field for critical thought on the history of the African diaspora in the Americas, especially through encounters between peoples displaced from the West African coast and the Indigenous peoples of territories colonized by Europeans—encounters that gave rise to diverse cultures, interwoven through memories, technologies, and ways of making and understanding art.
Dr. Paola Barreto aims to develop artistic and reflective practices that engage with these legacies, while also exploring forms of cosmoperception and cosmotechnics. By doing so, Marronage Roads challenges the limitations of categories forged by Western modernity and to propose, instead, Amefrican conceptual models for poetic and theoretical creation in the field of art and media. Through fieldwork and expanded audiovisual creation, this project aims to imagine paths that may liberate and strengthen, in both the arts and technologies, the legacies of the Black Atlantic.
About Dr. Paola Barreto
Paola Barreto (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is an artist, researcher and professor at the Federal University of Bahia, where she has been coordinating the Balaio Fantasma Research Group since 2017. Working with video installations, urban interventions, analogue and digital circuits and hybrid systems, her research focuses on critical reviews of the history of modern technologies, based on the intersection of cinema, surveillance and art studies. Barreto is also Coordinator of the Professional Master Program ProfArtes, which is dedicated to art teachers working in public schools in Brazil by contributing to connecting the University research with our basic and secondary public education system, covering different levels of education, helping to renew the curriculum, and introducing more critical and inclusive perspectives to learning art theory, practice, and history.
She received a Bachelor's degree in film studies from the Federal University Fluminense (1995), a Master's in technology and aesthetics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2009), and a Doctorate in Visual Arts from the same University (2016) after completing a doctoral stage in Art and Media at the Berlin University of the Arts, in Germany (2014-2015). Barreto's work as a researcher deals with memory, disappearances, oblivion, and ways to make tangible subjects erased from history by associating performance, theatre, dance, and urban intervention.
Speculative Play and Just Futurities is made possible through the generous support of the Mellon Foundation. SPJF is a collaboration between the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, the Center for Africana Studies and Culture, and the Ray Bradbury Center. Learn more about the program here.