Images of Disquiet began concomitantly with the emergence of Covid-19. I gave that name to a set of series that reflect on contemporary issues. Bestiário, one of these series, appears at the moment when the first research is being carried out in the search for a vaccine against the covid-19 virus and focuses on a contemporary bestiary. More than ever, the ways of experiencing the world seemed to pass through powerful filters that modified our view of the now. Such filters seemed and seem to have the function of offering a vision of the world that is sometimes very distorted, based on beliefs and not on the phenomenological experience of being in the world. In this way, irrational fears emerge, barriers and walls grow everywhere and begin to separate those considered inside from those considered outside. The world becomes binary, excluding those who do not fit in, those who do not conform to the established norm. Nationalisms are flourishing all over the world, democracies are suffocating and with it the civilizational gains are also gone. This way of being seems to have deepened as a result of the shock caused by COVID-19. Totalitarian and messianic leaders emerge as conductors of an apparently mindless crowd in need of a Great Father.

 

Irrationality and tyranny take the forefront and adherence to the tyrant becomes a deadly vanishing point. A collective moral suicide dyes the planet red. Passion and desire, the instinct of life, are betrayed and supplanted by Thanatos, death. The apparently sweet siren song is not, on the contrary, it is cold, sarcastic and calculating. The crowd goes wild. So, through banal images of ordinary people's daily lives, of inexplicable historical facts superimposed on other images, especially images of a religious, mythical and mystical character, I sought to provoke a shift in the gaze, a drift of the image observer to draw attention to the now and try to provoke a disengagement, who knows, revert, even if minimally, the entropic movement that is accelerating on the planet. I think we are experiencing a great inconvenience.

 

Learn more about the artist and her work: https://www.sandragoncalves.com/ e< br />htttps://instagram.com/sandramlpgonçalves