Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão: a visual criticism to the colonialism of power

Abstract

This paper compares and analyzes a corpus of works by Brazilian artists Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão, which deal with the violence inflicted upon nature and the body. From a decolonial perspective, it is believed that the selected works criticize racism and nature's destruction as consequences of the European Conquest. These artists use meaningful aspects of Portuguese culture, such as tiles, to show, together with slave ships, body parts and images of nature, the degree of violence that resulted from such process. It is claimed that Paulino and Varejão criticize the colonialism of power by showing the “colonial wound” and its effects. They show the erasure of identities, the creation of stereotypes and the use of bodies and nature as goods to propose a visual criticism over Brazil’s history and present. A qualitative and transdisciplinary approach with visual studies, history and decolonial studies as a basis will be used to describe, analyze and compare the images.