Clara Ianni’s exhibition “Education by Night” at Amant in Brooklyn explored how the United States—particularly through figures like Nelson Rockefeller, Walt Disney, and Elon Musk—has used pedagogy and modern art, tools of soft power, for neo-imperialism in Latin America. Ianni, who lives in São Paulo, is a multimedia artist who draws on disciplines such as radical theatre, education and geography to examine the relationship between ordinary Brazilians and the state.
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The artist’s first solo exhibition in the US, the show brought together reading materials, primary documents, a slide projector and three recent videos. aperture (2022) is a montage of title sequences from school films commissioned by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), directed by Nelson Rockefeller in his early years during the 1940s, and intended in part to to fight Nazi Germany’s influence in South America. Phrases such as “Schools to the South” and “The Amazon Awakens,” backed by bombastic results, suggest how the OCIAA pursued pan-American strategic policies. Another video, From Figurativism to Abstractionism (2017), pairs fragmented images from the same 1949 exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art with excerpts from Rockefeller’s letters to the museum’s director. Rockefeller explains the potential for modernist abstraction to be a “universal” cultural language that unites America. Together, these works provided a primer for rapprochement The geography of the night (2022), the most complicated video to watch.
Projected in an adjacent large hall, the 16-minute work unfolds through a series of black-and-white still slides that a finger swipes across a touchscreen. Each slide contains just a few words (in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles), fragments of a text that begins as if in mid-sentence, reading, “crossing waters and dusting mountains / scattered body / through underground cables and spinning satellites” . Ianni doesn’t speak; we only hear the ambient noise of a city street. Gradually, a story emerges about the extraction and transportation of oil and metals by multinational corporations from the South to the North. We see only a few images between the text slides, some apparently from an OCIAA film about the Brazilian quartz mining process. Instead of using concrete references, the text pushes historical events into abstraction. A slide lists only the names: rivers, jeeps, mines, walls, stones. A duplicate address -“Have you seen?” (“Did you see it?”) – playfully provokes the viewer. Compared to the clear quotation structure of Ianni’s other videos and despite the didactic phrases, the narration in The geography of the night it is obscure, omitting proper names and dates; we are never quite sure what we are looking at or who is addressing us.
Courtesy Amant, New York
Earlier this year, Elon Musk signed an agreement with Jair Bolsonaro to install a satellite network over the Amazon, just months after part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into a garden in the state of Parana. These recent events gave it a disturbing subtext The geography of the night. After several images of a night sky marked by the characteristic broken tracks of satellites, we are told, “it looked like a small / strange train”. The video then vaguely refers to the return of some of the space debris to earth, only “showing” it through a mysterious shot of a falling object, to show a blackout on the process of neocolonial extraction: According To Ianni, people realize that the foreign object contains locally mined metals; after returning home, he is then regained as a planter.
In her use of the digital screen, Ianni mimics the format of analog slide projectors, once a common tool in classroom education. For decades, artists such as Nan Goldin, Dan Graham and Hilary Lloyd have used 35mm slide carousels in installations, but Ianni’s inclusion of an overhead projector – a format developed by the United States military in the 1940s – evokes the use of the medium by American research. Ellie Ga based artist. Ianni and Ga share a discursive and layered understanding of history, but differ in approach. Ga tends to analyze the accumulated archival materials and narrate her research process, while Ianni creates a strange tension between controlled gliding gestures and narrative fragmentation. The geography of the night frees the artist from the scholarly role she occupied elsewhere in the show—an unexpected move given the exhibit’s use of display cases and reading materials. In deconstructing and rearranging her material, she becomes instead a speculative storyteller.
