Openings, 2022
video installation
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.The videos are projected into a stand, as if in a propaganda billboard.
[the work is part of the long-term project “Brasil Brazil”]