This exhibition includes a newly commissioned video and a selection of archival texts, documents, sculptures, and drawings inspired by documentaries about Latin America that were made for schools in the United States during the 1950 to 1980. These films often used corporate film footage to portray the region as a territory of endless resources, open to new ideas of progress and modernization. They boasted a rhetoric that promoted the inherent cultural commonality between the North and South of the Americas, a sense of solidarity that essentially supported the economic interests of the US. Pedagogy and culture were used as a political and ideological construction furthering asymmetrical relations of codependence.
The film takes as a starting point a text message exchange between Clara Ianni and a friend who, while quarantined saw a strange line of satellites crossing the night sky. This appearance reported by her friend brings Clara, impacted by the current Brazilian context, to ponder how data can be manipulated for socioeconomic purposes. By drawing parallels between past and present, and overlapping historical aspects, the film exposes s relationships between the Cold War, military dictatorship, and the current context of unbridled global capitalism. Through poetic inserts within the filmic narrative, Clara Ianni also imagines coming possibilities.
The exhibition builds further on former works by the artist, such as From Figurativism to Abstractionism, and Commodities that dealt with the relationship between Brazil and the US through culture and pedagogy.