Brazilian Fruits, 2023
video installation
The painting “Brazilian Fruit” (1643), by Albert Echkout, cutted into little squares, assembled again, and transformed into a disguise. Using one of the earliest modern representations of nature as such, the work questions the theological political concept of nature. It questions the ways that this depiction of nature as “other” contributed to building an image of Brazil as a fecund land for capitalist expansion and colonial extraction. In the European gaze, Brazil was envisioned as an Edenic garden, abundant with resources to be plumbed, thus naturalising logics of domination, exploitation, and circulation that legitimised the expansion of capital’s border. The work turns this logic around, using the image to create opacity. The pixeled square shape, and the focu-unfocus of the camera, connects the separation (and further taxonomization and classification processes) from the past, with similar process of exploitation in the present. The beat in the audio track, produced by beating a fork in a plate, produces a hipnotic rythm, playing with the non-separation between human and nature around.
