Product Description

Short Info: Luiza Spotorno (1995, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker whose works navigate through the relations between territorial belonging, cultural memory, and the concealed legacies of colonial Modernity in South America. Between 1954 – 1956, an ethnographic expedition to the Amazon was commissioned by the Welt Museum Wien. A PHOTOGRAPH, ERASED departs from the artist s interest in a particular photograph from the museum s archive. The image, taken by ethnographer Etta Becker-Donner, shows an abandoned settlement seemingly left in a hurry by the indigenous group Wari . In her work, the artist zooms into and deconstructs different parts of the original image in an attempt to retell the story of its making. By reframing the photograph in novel ways, minute details are uncovered. The fragmentation also allows for a poetic confrontation with the exploitative history of modern archives in the West. Through the acts of dissecting, erasing and replacing, possibilities of alternative narratives start to emerge.
Year: 2023