Luíza Bastos Lages, a Brazilian artist and current ACT Master’s candidate, has been featured in Issue 26 of Breakwater Review, a literary and art journal from the University of Massachusetts Boston MFA program, for her recent work Ordem em Progresso (Order in Progress).
Lages’ current research surrounds the rise of authoritarianism and alt-right regimes with a specific focus on recent political events in Brazil. She explores themes of neoliberalism and capital-imperialism and how current relations between the US and Brazil perpetuate politics of extraction and capital-imperialism.
Lages’ work, Ordem em Progresso, is a work conceived as a sensitive response to the current growth of authoritarian political regimes, and is specifically motivated by the election of Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme right-wing Brazilian politician. The work is comprised of two pieces, Anotações em Exílio (Notes in Exile) and Medida provisória No 870 de 01 Janeiro de 2019 (Provisional Measure No. 870 of January 1, 2019).
In an excerpt from Breakwater Review about these installations:
“Anotações em Exílio [Notes in Exile] (2018) is composed by two videos: Antecipação [Anticipation] and Confirmação [Confirmation]. Antecipação [Anticipation] relates to the tension of the pre-election period, which I experienced vicariously from afar by family and friends, whom shared the rise of threats and violence against marginalized identities; especially of lesbians, facing the debate of the unnegotiable, the discussion around their right to existence. The second video, Confirmação [Confirmation], refers to the desolation of uncertainty through a confirmation. Uncertainty about an attempted erasure; uncertainty if any resistance against this obliteration might be possible.
Medida provisória No 870 de 01 Janeiro de 2019 [Provisional Measure No. 870 of January 1, 2019] (2019) was set in motion by one of the first set of legislative changes made by the new government. Although the unfolding of the decisions is to be experienced as time goes on, they portray how state power is made feasible in that this same state suppresses and shreds. Suppresses and shreds those whose existence, while dominated, are instrumental to the propagation of an oligarchic society – despite its democratic face. The legislative changes made attest to the possibility that authoritarian regimes constitute an expansion of neoliberalism’s exploitation and domestication of bodies: humans and nonhumans…”
