How many words, images, fingerprints, and symbols make up an identity? In the bet of subjective human singularity, the artist Hal Wildson proposes a new utopia for Brazil. More of a fabulation exercise than a guide to be followed, the artist’s proposal is to promote the creation of a collective memory targeting the knowledge from different ancestries that make up the Brazilian social fabric. As part of a generation of artists whose political works propose decentralizing historical discourse, Wildson revises it to recover the memory of faces made invisible by official discourse. It is in this sense that elements associated with the idea of the archive, such as the typewriter, the stamp, and the national identity card, become fundamental tools to repair a system of discursivity that determines the possibilities of enunciation, the right to posterity and the regulation of the country’s formation.

However, through his personal history, he radiates the lure through which the questions that permeate his practice are conducted. Wildson is from the Araguaia Valley, a Xavante indigenous territory located on the border between Goiânia and Mato Grosso that had been invaded by São Paulo’s bandeirantes [settlers] since the 17th century. The city was built a century later, in 1872, by prospectors from Mato Grosso. The artist’s critical consciousness is formulated in the wake of the history of conflicts between the imposition of white civilization and local indigenous resistances against the advance of mining. It is shared through the artistic object’s autonomy, which sometimes calls for denunciation and action, and sometimes enunciates new political and social horizons caused by social uprisings.

Known for his drawings with typewriters, Brazilian artist Hal Wildson creates figurative compositions on large scales. He descends from a lineage of artists from the 1950s, such as Augusto de Campos, Mira Schendel, and Ruth Rehfeldt, for whom the use of this technology made possible the interchangeable symbolic experimentation between image, word, and meaning. Now, Wildson sees in the index of technological obsolescence the possibility of rewriting history, blurring the boundaries between archive and memory, officialdom and discourse, and, therefore, between past and present. It is in this sense that the machine matrices soak the paper, letter by letter, with black and red ink. They not only refer to the technical specificity of their medium but also allude to the red-urucum and black-charcoal paintings of the Latin American indigenous peoples, which frequently appear in the artist’s works.

Nonetheless, this exhibition opens up to recent developments in the artist’s investigative processes: rubber appears as a symbolic element for the understanding of historical erasures, fragmenting a history that has not disappeared; and digital printing, in turn, acts as a metonymic element of what is unique and, at the same time, inseparable, in the Gestaltian formation of the composition. In the British context, Latin American history also calls for thinking about parallels between other immigrant stories within the British social fabric, understanding the points of contact and differences in the conquests and resistances drawn around other European colonies around the world. Convergent, just as the branches of the Araguaia River, this is how Hal Wildson traces the history of his people.

Lucas Albuquerque