What the Filter Holds

A coffee filter is made to separate: the drink passes through, while the grounds remain. In Gael Rocha’s paintings, this everyday object becomes a surface that asks us to pause.1 Bodies, leaves, water, and orixás inhabit the paper, bringing another set of relationships into view. An object associated with the consumption of a global commodity becomes a place from which to question its history.

Gael graduated in Fine Arts from the Federal University of Espírito Santo and also works in education and cultural mediation. Espírito Santo is in southeastern Brazil, where coffee has helped shape landscapes, livelihoods, and social relations for almost two centuries. In Brazil, the expansion of coffee cultivation was deeply entangled with slavery. The wealth generated by its export cannot be separated from the labour of enslaved Black people.

In Espírito Santo, around 61 per cent of the state’s population is Black, and coffee has taken part for nearly two centuries in the economic and social formation of this territory. In the colonisation process, the Black population was kidnapped and brought on ships to the Port of Rio de Janeiro, a neighbour state. While Black men and women disembarked in chains, sacks of coffee – lots of it from Espírito Santo’s plantation – were loaded aboard bound for Europe and the United States.2

Yet these routes also connected Brazil to other parts of what we now call the Global South. As John Tofik Karam shows, Brazilian coffee circulated across the Maghreb, particularly Morocco, long before the emergence of a shared political project of decolonisation. European firms controlled much of this trade, while Moroccan Jewish migrants returning from Brazil helped establish more direct connections.3 The coffee bean brought distant societies into contact, but those encounters remained entangled with imperial power.

Karam also examines advertisements that presented Brazilian coffee, mostly in 1920s and 30s as a symbol of modernity, distancing it from its origins in enslaved labour. His account invites us to consider what becomes visible, and what disappears, as a commodity travels. Looking at Gael’s painted filters, I find myself returning to that question: What histories accompany everyday material, even when they are absent from the stories told about it?

During nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Brazilian state implemented at that time what became known as the 'official policy of whitening', a series of measures of persecution, stifling, and privileges for white immigrants, as a way of eliminating the Black portion of the nation. While different policies encouraged the arrival of European workers, the Black population had to build its possibilities for life, had to survive. 

The Black population, however, did more than survival: resisted and continued creating ways of preserving and transforming its memories and cultural practices.

It is in these intersections between coffee, the history of the state, and the culture of the Black population that Gael Rocha’s art announces itself. The filter paper supports figures that ask to be seen on their own terms. Gael works with bodies, water, nature, memory, and spiritual references. In Travessia [Crossing], a large green leaf covers the face of a purple-skinned figure. We do not know who this figure is. We can, however, observe how the leaf and the body meet without one entirely merging with the other. The painting makes us remain before a presence that does not offer itself completely to our recognition.

Oxóssi, orisha of the forests, Mother of the Waters, and Procession, in reference to the orisha Iemanjá, point to other relationships among Afro-Brazilian spirituality, labour, landscape, and memory. The sea, for example, can be seen as natural beauty; it also holds stories of displacement, sustenance, and encounter. I do not want to reduce these works to a single explanation about Espírito Santo. What I see in them is the possibility of bringing together stories that are often told separately.

Brazilian coffee maintains a standard of quality owing to the richness of the soil and the technologies developed over the history of its cultivation. Since the establishment of monocultures, it has continued to be one of the main export assets and currently corresponds to around a quarter of the coffee imported by countries such as Germany (25 per cent), Italy (26 per cent), and Japan (25 per cent), and approximately 17 per cent of U.S. coffee imports. 

Today, Espírito Santo is Brazil’s largest producer of conilon coffee, used, among other destinations, in the manufacture of instant coffee. To look at a coffee filter in this context is to remember that a seemingly banal object takes part in an extensive history.

The filter holds back what does not pass through with the water. Gael gives it another task: to hold a painting. I invite you to look at both the images and the paper that supports them — and to discover the questions that arise from this encounter.