Archeopoetic Fragments: An Afrofuturist Gaze on Converging Times and Territories in the Diaspora

Lara de Paula Passos

Archeopoetic Fragments is the first solo exhibition by archaeologist and multimedia artist Lara de Paula Passos, presenting an Afrofuturist approach to archaeology through collage and poetry. Her practice operates as a counter-archive, responding to the violent imperial and colonial regimes that have historically shaped representations of African-descendant lives, while proposing new ethical and imaginative ways of knowing.

Drawing on ancestral technologies, memory, and beauty—amplified by the creative diversity of the African diaspora—the exhibition moves across time and space, returning repeatedly to water as a site of rupture, passage, resistance, and possibility. Water emerges as a living archive: carrying layered histories from amniotic fluid to ocean crossings, from trafficking routes to contemporary global networks.

As an Afro-Brazilian artist working from the crossroads, Passos reflects on the fragmented afterlives of enslavement and colonialism that carry both transgenerational trauma and ancestral knowledge. Through an Afrofuturist waterscape shaped by movement, flow, and imagination, ancestral wisdom resurfaces as living, embodied knowledge.

Here, collage and poetry function as methodology—tools for sensing new forms of ethical, collective, and experimental knowing. Archeopoetic Fragments invites viewers to reflect on memory, fragments, and becoming, asking what histories we carry forward and what futures we dare to imagine.