Alvaro - Cartographie de l'Invasion (2022)

Decolonizing Imaginaries is the title of Alvaro's visual research in Visual Arts, as part of masters degree completed in 2023.

Cartographie de l'Invasion (2022, Mapping Invasion) is an exploratory project on revisiting the Brazilian official colonisation history in order to reveal and discuss whiteness perspective. Understanding the narrative point of view as a place of power, in this project official maps, documents, letters and other Eurocentric pieces of legitimation are reinterpreted as marks of oppression and colonial reshaping of realities.

This project was originally designed as a 12-unique posters-series (and their countless variations), which had some indigenous people representations made by white settlers in 16th and 17th centuries. Even if those representations were reinterpreted and included as part of a new artistique approach, in order to not reproduce the colonial act of reducing indigenous people to a simplistic representation, this project was not completed and its development stopped by the refusal to re-use indigenous people's representations, without their effective participation in the research process.

The sample-images presented here are witness of the creation process until the realization point where using Eurocentric representations of indigenous people in this project was no longer an option. Persisting in using indigenous people representations could trigger past-traumas, instead of being a useful critique tool about white supremacy and its colonial consequences.