Artist Jonathas de Andrade uses photography, installation and video to course through collective memory and history, making use of strategies that mix fiction with reality. His work discusses failing utopias, ideals and world projects, especially in a Latin-American context, speculating over their late modernity. In Andrade’s work, affections that oscillate amidst nostalgia, eroticism and political and historical critique are influenced to approach themes akin to work and the worker and the contemporary subject’s identity almost always represented by the male body.
In the film “O Peixe” [The Fish] a fishing village stages a kind of ritual: they cradle the fish in their arms until their timely deaths. A limiting embrace – a rite of passage – where man retakes his condition as species and face to face with his prey, calms it down through an ambiguous sequence of gestures: affection, solidarity and violence. An embrace between predator and prey, between life and death, between the worker and the fruit of his labour, in which a look – of the fisherman, the fish, the camera and the spectator – plays a crucial role. Placed in a hybrid territory in the middle of being a documentary and fiction, the film dialogues with the ethnographic tradition of the audiovisual.
