Jaime Lauriano

The Portuguese and Spanish navigations, in search of the new world, established a new world historical period - later defined as modernity. With the discovery of new territories, the world was reoriented, and the periphery migrated to the newly invaded territories. With this, a new world order was inaugurated and new maps became necessary. From then on, it became widely accepted that Europe was the center of the world.
This process of invasion had its initial mark on several treaties that divided the territories of the "new world" between Portugal and Spain. Revised, these treaties gave rise to the earliest representations of the "American" continent. The "invention" of this continent, came from a commercial society originating from the alliance between the mercantile bourgeoisie and the nobility. However, the unity established by this imposition did not bring about the union of these new "nations", on the contrary, the cultural differences imposed in each new country originated the separation between all. Marked by an exercise of synthesis of the content of his researches and formalization strategies, my works calls us to examine the structures of power contained in the production of history. In audiovisual pieces, objects and critical texts, shows how violent relations maintained between the institutions of power and State control - such as the police, prisons, embassies, borders - and subjects shape the subjective processes of society. Thus, his production seeks to bring to the surface historical traumas relegated to the past, confined files, in a proposal to collectively revise and rework history. In drawings, serigraphy, and objects, questions are raised about how punitive systems, forced labor, and compulsory migration are contemporary updates of strategies used during the colonization of the "American" continent to justify the enslavement of African and African American citizens.
For the residence in the AIR Programm I pretend to call into question the way in which the inhabitants of "America", especially Brazilians and Northern Americans, deal with these historical processes and with the experience of being "American"; to analyze the reflexes of the colonial period in the formation of the social, economic and political structure of the continent; and reflect on how contemporary artistic production deals with the elaborations of these historical traumas. Therefore I’ll make a new movie and an new series of drawn.