The Museum of the City of São Paulo and the Department of Municipal Museums of the Municipal Department of Culture present Panorama of the City of São Paulo, a project by Jaime Lauriano created especially for the steps of Beco do Pinto. On the occasion of the opening, which takes place on October 7, from 2pm to 5pm, the Legitimate Defense Collective will hold a performance procession starting at 3pm at Pateo do Collegio towards Beco do Pinto.
Panorama da Cidade de São Paulo is an offshoot of a recent series in which the artist creates re-readings of great historical paintings from the 19th and 20th centuries, of an academic and official nature, which represent and idealize facts from Brazilian history and seek to reprocess these images that narrate the construction of the concept of Brazilian history. The painting in question is one of the most important works of 19th century São Paulo iconography, commissioned by King Pedro I to be painted by the French artist Arnaud Julien Pallière.
Jaime Lauriano's poetics revisit the symbols, images, and myths that form Brazilian society’s collective visual memory, tensioning them through critical propositions capable of revealing how the colonial structures of the past reverberate in contemporary necropolitics. In this way, the artist reproduces the painting and alters it with stickers, drawings and inscriptions. His changes seek to modify the strongly idealized character of the scene, removing characters and adding other elements, many of them contemporary, in order to highlight the implications and forms of violence that permeate Brazilian history and are still in force today.
For the presentation of Beco do Pinto, the altered panorama has been divided up and reproduced on three large panels that will be placed on the different levels of the Beco staircase. On the panels, the images will be duplicated/altered using a moving image technique. Thus, the reproduced landscape can only be seen in its entirety when the viewer moves through the space.