Tupambaé, is a town of Uruguay, located in Cerro Largo on the border with Brazil, with no more than 2000 inhabitants.
A large part of the population in Tupambaé has some African ancestry, but it was always “better” to sweep it away, hide it and use it to mark and marginalize all of us who have features and skin colors that make our ancestry visible. We live with racism and structural homophobia.
I am twenty-three years old, since I was eighteen I feel that I am a constant mutation, it has been an introspective process that allows me to learn from it and evolve. Inhabiting other territories has led me to occupy new realities and perspectives with my body.
VISUAL-CONCEPTUAL OCCUPATION OF:
Change and get to know myself, they also lead me to love, respect and find myself, go back and understand where I come from.
Over time I understood that the problems were clearly not from a child who was trying to live his childhood in freedom, but from the system generated by a white heterocis society, which singles us out and pigeonholes us.
Whenever I remember this journey I can only feel admiration for my child self, having gone through many situations as a child and having to heal them alone, for fear of not being listened to or that the problem could be minimized.
Living with this ego state is a new part of this whole process. Black people have historically been forced to believe that we don't have the right to feel as worthy as white people.
Learning to live with all that during my childhood and adolescence was the reason for horrible moments, which promoted self-hatred, to the point of not wanting to be the way I am, was one of the most liberating things.
When we can understand that our nose is beautiful, that our spots are the strongest thing we can have, that they were a tool for those who came before us, that our skin color is one of the best representations of ourselves,
that we should always empowering, understanding all this is the most liberating thing that has happened to me.
For me being black today, it drives the desire that all those who are going through the same thing as me can learn to love and connect with the construction of an Afrotranstopia.
When we are in this process of discovering ourselves, it is impossible to arrive at our own story without searching the collective. In those roots of the earth entangled in the remains of original and expropriated cultures, also the cultures kidnapped and brought here. Decolonize Tupambaé as a territory of ancestral knowledge for those who live (in which I live) and not deprive those who will inhabit it.
Whiteness is privileged even with the fact of knowing the origin of its roots, its families and its cultural matrix.
We as black and racialized people must settle for understanding what the older generations, who are still alive, can tell us and from that living story carry out a search that many times can end up being insufficient to rebuild our Afrontranstopia, our past, our present and our future projection.
is an Afro-Uruguayan illustrator born in 1998 in Tupambaé and he
graduated in 2025 with a Bachelor's Degree in Visual Communication Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism in Montevideo. In 2022 Mario Lópes invites him to visually occupy the conceptual website Afrotranstopía.
With his work Bruno takes us on an ancestral journey on his own steps, an afrotransutopic narrative of reunion with the territory he occupied as a child, his reflections on his self-perception as a young black, non-binary and Latin American
Together with her little brother, they record the sounds of Tupambaé, transporting us to a space full of birds, leaves and a breath of innocence.
The self-referential and oneiric illustrations seem to evoke past generations, inhabit the artist's skin today and dream of a future based on recognition and reparation, an ode to the healing and empowerment of blackness.
