Transparency | POY Latam

Still from a Youtube video of a lynching in Brazil. 21st century; blank paper superimposed with transparent paper; text that gives title to the series. Analog collage.

Frame from Youtube video of lynching in Brazil. 21st century; video title text; texts of user comments about the lynching video. Analog collage.

Photograph of lynching in U.S. 20th century; visual fragment from online image bank with selling price of photograph today; text from period newspapers. Analog collage.

Drawing of the physical punishments applied by the colonizer to enslaved people, 19th century; texts of the Brazilian Penal Code of 1830 that authorized the practice of torture and death of enslaved people. Analogical collage.

Photograph of a lynching in the U.S.A. 20th century; visual fragment of the online image bank with the selling price of photography today; texts from newspapers of the time. Analog collage.

Postcard image of lynching USA, 20th century; Text from the book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, page 108, on the role of photography in the lynching economy. Analog collage.

Photograph of lynching in Brazil, 21st century; texts from Brazilian newspapers about this and other cases of lynching.

Photograph of lynching in Brazil, 21st century; articles from the 1940 penal code, still in effect in Brazil, as it relates to the crime of lynching. Analog collage.

Fragment of a painting by Debret made in Brazil, 19th century; Texts of the Slavery Law of 1835, which authorized the use of physical punishment.

Photograph of the palmer being applied to a child slave in Brazil, 19th century; Texts of the 1886 law repealing the punishment of whipping. Analog collage.

Still from a Youtube video of a lynching in Brazil. 21st century; text of the video title; texts of user comments on the lynching video. Analog collage.

Frame from Youtube video of lynching in Brazil. XXI century; title text of the video; texts of newspaper articles about this lynching; photograph of banner of protest held against this and other such killings.

What if, instead of the spectacle of black suffering, the exposure of the body of the tortured, mutilated and killed victim in popular lynchings, we paid attention to the aggressors and the spectators, voyeurs or witnesses to the brutality?

By exhuming the black bodies from the images, do I make the viewer’s precarious empathy with the victims impossible? Do I make the aggressors and (their accomplices?) the spectators of the scene the target of the gaze? And what could happen if we remove the lynched black bodies from the image? In this series, the removal of the victimized black bodies reveals fragments of the texts (discursive system) that subscribe to them within an ethic in which both their violent death and the economic circuit surrounding the image of their bodies are naturalized.

Transparency is the name that philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva gives to the onto-epistemological and ethical thesis produced by modern philosophers and scientists who justify scenes of violence against black bodies, always in defense of property. The link between race and capital is latent in these images of violence, which were sometimes legitimized by law and sometimes not. Colonial (physical) and racial (symbolic) violence are cultural. In this work, I observe how it materializes in gestures and texts, in visual archive materials that flood the internet networks and, in a diffuse way, either glorify or repudiate such acts of barbarism.

The texts were collected from comments on lynchings on Youtube (Brazil), comments from the time that circulated in newspapers and magazines compiled in the book Without Sanctuary (USA), articles from Brazilian newspapers, Brazilian criminal legislation from different periods and the book Text of the book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940.

Some images of lynchings in the USA in the 20th century are still sold on digital visual databases. At the time they were made, they were marketed as postcards. Even today, profit is made from the spectacle of black suffering.