text by Paulo Kassab Jr.
How much is it worth?
What do George Washington, Princess Isabel, Nelson Mandela, Queen Elisabeth, Simon Bolivar and Luiz de Camões have in common? Besides historical recognition, perhaps only the rapid appropriation of the icon and its symbolism by capitalism. The system accepts everything, takes it as its own, and offers in return small concessions in the name, of course, of the continued maintenance of privilege.
Any image, speech or writing, becomes a product, a possession, money. Alberto Korda's famous photograph of Che Guevara is now on ice cream cartons, cigarette packs, and soccer team flags. If the use of the image by industry displaces and empties the symbol, when taken by the State, it becomes a strategy to, from creating the personification of a country, to disguising a settlement of accounts with its racist and colonialist past. Embellished with sentences, insignias and historical images, banknotes are one of the most explicit symbols of a nation's identity, or of the false reality constructed and masked in democracy. Aware of the human capacity of forgetfulness and systematic erasure of memory, the same country that for years banishes, ignores and massacres its native peoples includes in its bills and coins the faces of Indians, from cacique Tibiriçá (one hundred réis - 1932), to the carajás (one thousand cruzeiros - 1990). Today, while our forests burn in the name of money and agribusiness, the bills celebrate the hummingbird, the macaw, the jaguar, the grouper and the maned wolf.
Capital doesn't care about its contradictions, it simply usurps concepts, as long as it can benefit from them with a gain in social, cultural or financial patrimony. Every movement is thought to maintain the status-quo with an air of social transformation. And the wall rises, invisible. It separates, segregates, elects the old with new clothes and a new name.
"Colonial Mentality" are photographs of currency bills that are part of the series "About Walls", in which I investigate different borders: psychic, cultural, social, and financial. While the wall marks the asymmetry, materializes the difference and the unbalance produced by a separation often desired and suffered, money deceives, excludes, buys dreams, and builds distances in order to perpetuate the system.
Not by chance, this was the first set of images chosen by the artist among many others that explore a world reality reduced to a clear distinction between "us" and the others", between inside and outside, between friend and foe. Between the good and the bad, known and unknown, rich and poor, safe and risky, desired and undesired. Framed, placed side by side in boxes, the faces speak of power, fiction, history, and above all, talk about the invention of capital as the main frontier, far beyond the physical walls, but also their sponsor. In 2021, while millions starve and queue for bones, the veneration of a hideous golden ox, a cheap copy of Wall Street, only confirms: we are walled in.