Multimedia artist and poet, born in 1991 in the Araguaia Valley, a border region between Goiás and Mato Grosso, a crucial place for understanding the essence and motivations of his work. His research emerges from his experience in the Midwest hinterland, marked by the configuration of his marginalized mestizo family. The artist investigates the construction of Brazil by confronting identity, memory, and forgetting projects that underpin official history as he seeks answers about his own origins. Born into a family structure shaped by violence and abandonment, the artist’s history and work blend, denouncing themes of a “forgotten” Brazil born from colonialism and mining on the banks of the Araguaia River.
Unfolding the concept of memory-forgetting, identity, and the “writing-rewriting” of history, the artist appropriates official symbolic objects and documentation processes used in recent decades (such as typewriting, fingerprinting, identity cards, stamps). These materials and technical processes are employed to document the official and are capable of forging the mythology and history of a country, shaping individuality. In his multidisciplinary research, spanning typewritten painting, infogravure, installation, video art, and object creation, Hal Wildson uses official documentation resources to question “memory and forgetting” projects applied as social control policies. His work daringly confronts and disputes the power of the symbolic as an alternative to creating more just realities.