A Caiçara Journey: Sônia Batista Stern Explores Cultural Memory in A Luta das Cores

In A Luta das Cores, visual artist Sônia Batista Stern draws on her travels through Europe and her own Indigenous and Black ancestry to revisit Brazil’s colonial period from another perspective. Combining history and fiction in a multimedia installation, the project explores the complex relationships between colonisers and colonised peoples on the country’s southern coast.

The idea took root during Sônia’s European travels. Encounters with the colonisers’ ancestral cultures prompted her to explore the formation of Brazilian identity. Back in Brazil, meeting writer and historian Gustavo Matos in Ilha Comprida, on São Paulo’s southern coast, marked the beginning of the artistic work. The region’s colonial disputes between Portuguese, Spanish and French interests provide the setting for her visual and sonic narrative.

At a fictional round table, five sculptures—representing an Indigenous woman, a quilombola woman, a French woman, a Portuguese woman and a Spanish woman—discuss their experiences and perspectives. Their conversation reveals differences and points of connection. This unlikely gathering, mediated by the colour wheel, invites reflection on Brazilian identity as the result of cultural mixing and the richness of its origins.

The work does more than portray the past. It asks how colonial inheritance still shapes Brazil today. By bringing art, history and technology together, Sônia Batista Stern invites us to rethink that past and build bridges towards a fairer, more equal future.