The Brooklyn Rail

What would it mean to disengage from notions of empire? Could we create new structures of knowledge, power, and relation? What conditions must be in place for such a renewal? For Brazilian artist Jaime Lauriano, questions like these are essential to understanding colonial legacies in the Americas, and more specifically, to grasping how they have shaped Brazil in the cultural imagination. Why Don’t You Know About Western Remains, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the US, proposes a different rendering of history in which the inheritance of colonialism—our inheritance—is revealed through violence.

Brazil is often viewed as a place of leisure, white sand beaches, brightly colored carnival floats, and smiling, beautiful samba dancers. The country prides itself on being a racial democracy and cultivating a unique Brazilian identity, while downplaying dramatic disparities in wealth and class, which manifest in crowded favelas, an explosion of unhoused people in its megacities, and an epidemic of police violence against its majority Black population. Lauriano brings the roots of these issues to light using archival materials combined with a number of familiar signifiers: toy soldiers and war figurines, pop culture characters, and objects and symbols from the African and European diasporas.

Many of the works in the show, which is curated by Igor Simões, explore moments in Brazilian history that connect the country’s image in culture to the violent realities that undergird it, mainly slavery, which lasted until 1888, and the civil military dictatorship from 1964 to approximately 1985. To show how these legacies echo in the present, Lauriano often recenters Afro-Brazilians, as well as their history and culture.

Invasão de Pedro Álvares Cabral em Porto Seguro em 1500 (2023), Lauriano’s take on a Brazilian history painting by Oscar Pereira da Silva from 1900, tells the story of the first Portuguese settlers to arrive in the country. In Lauriano’s version, the images of people are removed and replaced with symbols of resistance such as an altered image of Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporú (1928) figure, which commemorates the Indigenous Tupi who ate the first bishop of Brazil, and the double trident of Exu, which signifies the crossroads in the Umbanda religious practice. By erasing the colonizers’ narrative, here Lauriano reveals traces of resistance to conquest, however futile they may have been in the moment.

Both Meu sangue latino, minh’alma cativa #1 and #2 (both 2023) upend the colonial notion of cartography as a means of possession and control. In these works, the Atlantic routes of European and North American imperial powers are inscribed on MDF with white pemba, a chalk used for ritual cleansing and protection in Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions. Interspersed throughout the work are stickers of familiar characters like Captain America, Care Bears, toy fighter jet figurines, and the scowling mascot Canarinho, symbolic of Brazil’s 1970 World Cup victory.

Lauriano’s scrutiny of the past extends to a filmic examination of the ways colonial violence echoes down to the present. In Dançando na Chuva, a 30-minute video that ruminates on Gene Kelly’s fanciful signature dance from the 1952 film Singing in the Rain, the Brazilian collective Legítima Defesa, along with other actors, dancers, and singers, enact a performance piece on the hierarchy of racismo e branquitude: the ideologies and structures that perpetuate white supremacy in Brazilian society. The story of Rodrigo Alexandre da Silva Serrano, a Black Brazilian man who was murdered by police at a bus stop as he stood waiting for his wife and two children, haunts the film. He was wearing a child sling across his chest and held an umbrella in one hand, his mobile phone in the other—items the police assumed to be a bulletproof vest and a rifle. As the performers move and recite various meditations on what constitutes a reckoning with the colonial project, their stories and movements lay the foundation for a potential reinvention and reconciliation.

O Condor e o Canarinho (2023) uses archival news clippings paired with the blood red Exu tridents we encountered in Invasão de Pedro Álvares. Propaganda symbols like the dove and condor suggest the reciprocal relationship between Western leaders and the Latin American dictators they installed during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s in an effort to stop the spread of communism. In one image, President Ronald Regan is shown riding horses with João Figueiredo, the last Brazilian leader of the civil military dictatorship, and in another, President Jimmy Carter smiles amicably while in conversation with Argentine dictator Jorge Videla. The didactic metaphor proposed by this work is flanked by the installation A Dança (2023), which consists of interlocking U-locks displayed on a circular table, and Quando a gira girou (2022), a painting that incorporates Picasso’s notions of the primitive.

In the early 1970s, at the height of the civil military dictatorship’s violence, people viewed as dissidents and subversives were jailed and tortured (including Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rouseff, who was imprisoned from 1970 to 1972), and some simply disappeared. In this moment, popular singer Milton Nascimento penned the lyric, “Por que não vocês sabem do lixo ocidental?” for his 1970 song Para Lennon e McCartney. Why don’t we know about Western remains? Why do we have trouble acknowledging the harm that has informed our collective histories, alongside the good? Why Don’t You Know About Western Remains? proposes that we all grapple with legacies that are at once ours and, simultaneously, not. The Americas were created through convergence and encounter, each informing the other to make the world that we now recognize. If history is written by the victors, Lauriano suggests that we must look beneath the surface to truly understand how colonial conquest shapes our present. That way, we are less likely to replicate its violence in a future where empires are no more and the human project can be renewed.