OLHO DA RUA

2022, single-channel video, colour, stereo sound, 26’

Courtesy of the artist, Galleria Continua, Galeria Nara Roesler, and Fondazione In Between Art Film

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film for the exhibition “Penumbra,” 21/04/2022 – 27/11/2022, Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice

JONATHAS DE ANDRADE

Jonathas de Andrade (1982, Brazil) uses installation, photography and video to explore the power dynamics and conflicts of Brazil, especially of its Northeast Region and Recife, where the artist lives and works, in light of the consequences that colonialism and slavery have on the country’s labor conditions and national identity.

Olho da Rua [Out Loud] casts a temporary community of homeless people living in the streets of downtown Recife. Inspired by the techniques of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, the film stages a series of performative acts that focus on collective dynamics and exercises of gaze in a public square. Bordering fiction and nonfiction, the aim was to engage the cast of nonprofessional actors in debates about identity, care, family, class consciousness, and social and political visibility through actions and words. Out of the script, the images are delicately receptive to the cast’s personality and emotional worlds, and stand as a powerful testimony of contemporary Brazil, with its rich multiculturalism and structural inequalities. To accompany them is a hypnotic soundtrack by percussionist Homero Basílio that uses instruments rooted in Northeastern Brazil. The film is not only a reflection on power dynamics rooted in colonialism—and on how these may be tied to whoever holds the camera—, but also a provocation to the viewer. Using art and radical pedagogy tools to reposition the stories of people who are marginalized and made invisible, the work fosters ways to collectively rethink reality and imagine alternatives.