2022
video
16’07’’
“Night Geography” is a learning film constructed by the de-assembling and reassembling of pedagogic films about Latin America, made by the US, during the Cold War. These films often used corporate footage to portray the region as a territory of endless resources, open to new ideas of progress and modernity. They boasted a rhetoric emphasizing the inherent cultural commonality between the North and South of the Americas. By promoting a sense of solidarity, these media supported the economic interests of the U.S., who essentially saw the region as a provider of cheap labor and raw materials as well as a valuable export market. Taking these films as starting points, “Night Geography” critically and poetically addresses the dynamics of imperialism and domination, following the supply chain of images and commodities, while imagining different relations, based on interdependency and regeneration. Intertwined, a second story is juxtaposed, following the story of a Starlink satellite piece that recently fell in Brazil, in a nearby region where its metal was mined. In a nonlinear manner, the film connects past and present, in an alternative chornopolitics, reflecting on the relationship between culture, politics, economy, and ecology, and imagining a form of interdependency based on regeneration.
[the work is part of the long-term project “Brasil Brazil”]
