Openings, 2022
video installation
4’20”
The “Openings” is a video installation composed of all the opening animations from learning documentaries about Latin America, made by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), during the Cold War. These films boasted a rhetoric emphasising the inherent cultural commonality between the North and South of the Americas. While promoting a sense of solidarity, those films essentially portrayed the region as a provider of cheap labor and raw materials as well as a valuable export market. Often mixing conventions of pedagogic documentaries with amateur travelogues, these documentaries were produced with recycled footage from US corporations. The animations that introduce each of these films were designed by Walt Disney Studios, overlapping conventions of cultural industry, play, pedagogy, politics, and economy overlap.
“Aberturas” (2022) é uma videoinstalação feita a partir das sequências de abertura de filmes educativos sobre a América Latina, produzidos pelo Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), durante a Guerra Fria. Frequentemente mesclando convenções de documentários pedagógicos com vídeo de viagens amadores, os filmes foram produzidos com imagens recicladas, inicialmente produzidas por corporações Norte Americanas que realizavam atividades extrativistas na região. As animações de abertura, que introduzem cada um desses filmes, desenhadas pelos Estúdios Walt Disney, sobrepõem convenções da indústria cultural, entretenimento, pedagogia, política e economia.