Projeto Pacífico

"In 2009 and 2010 I developed several pieces as part of a project named Documento Latinoamerica – Condução à Deriva. The starting point was the fact that Brazilians feel Brazilian much more than Latin American, and a certain historic amnesia in Brazil with regard to the region, which I believed had to do with a post-dictatorship discomfort.

The idea was to travel to several South American countries and create documents using the objects and archives I found, as if the label of being Latin America authorized me to record the histories of others, since I was also a part of that other.

Projeto Pacífico came up when I travelled from Chile to Bolivia and realized that friction due to the Pacific War persisted until this day, both in government agenda and in the feelings of Bolivians, who claimed their own piece of sea. Since much of what I knew about the subject came from school learning materials, I thought that the project could benefit from these educational scale model codes.

Another frequent topic in talks with Chileans and other Latin Americans is a complaint about Chile’s isolation – politically, geographically and emotionally speaking. This was brought up both to complain about the arrogance of official policies and the highly conservative elite that had annihilated the most genuine aspects of that culture, and about the psychology of a mountaineer population who have their backs to the Andes mountain range.

The video Pacífico reflects about these points emulating the assumption of a position from the Bolivian perspective, as a strategy for raising a series of uncomfortable questions regarding to Chile and its position within Latin America today."

Jonathas de Andrade in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (August 2014)