Type of work: Photo-Performance
Year: 2016
Material: Fine Art Printing on Hahnemuhle paper sized 60 x 90cm
Conception by Ludmilla Ramalho
Performer: Ludmilla Ramalho ft. Dário Peralta (In Memoriam)
Photos by Ciro Thielmman

Shown at the 1st Latin American Meeting of the city of Nova Lima responding to the political coup d’etat occurred in Brazil in 2016.

Description
A naked woman with her whole body colored golden is sitting on the back of a horse and blindfolded with the Brazilian flag. A man, dressed in an opulent outfit, simulates to hang the woman as he pulls a rope tied around the woman’s neck.

About the work
Inspired by the coup d’etat which deposed the first and only woman who became President of Brazil, “Order and Progress” (saying written on the Brazilian flag used as the name of this performance) produces an image that makes a connection between the Presidential Impeachment in 2016 and other historic processes which Brazil has gone through. The woman strangled by a man dressed in a tuxedo, referring to the patriarchal capitalism, supports the allegory which, eventually, brings about the President deposition in spite of her democratic victory in the Presidential election. In addition to all that, the performer’s nudity with her body covered in some golden powder and blinded by the Brazilian flag, which carries the optimistic and positive dictate “Order and Progress”, leads us respectively to the vulnerability of a female’s naked body as well as to the gold and symbols of a nation full of dazzling guidelines as for instance, boastfulness and, for the want of another word, a “Brazilian jingoism”. Besides, women have no reins of their own horses.

All that lead us to the embryo of the western capitalism such as the exploration and extraction demanded by the colonial endeavor and aiming at the gold of the state of Minas Gerais. The Mineiro movement known as “Inconfidência Mineira” turned out to be the symbol of the Brazilian Republic which still keeps mining as its main economic activity. In the same sense, the female body takes over its relation with the archetypal image of the Mother Earth (linked by fertility among others) which, in this context, due to the female nudity and submission to the male figure, ends up being vulnerable to plundering and spoilment- as in the mining- also to the collapse and blindness caused by the positivist nationalism. Thus, the Republic becomes a mere reproduction of the colonial brutality in which its logics itself is clearly reproduced based on the misogyny of the 2016 coup d’etat in Brazil. Riding a horse, the woman evokes the horsewomen (amazonas), known as mythological tribe of the old times that used to live under the gynocracy, a political regime which the society is ruled by woman warriors with their horses that, here, turn to be powerless and impotent when facing the local and international patriarchy.