Attempting to give a watercolor lesson to Zé Carioca

2020 "Attempting to give a watercolor lesson to Zé Carioca" was produced in March 2020, during the period of confinement due to the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout the video, a lesson on the role of watercolor in the colonization of Brazil is given to the fictional character Zé Carioca, developed in the early 1940s by Walt Disney Studios. The lesson seeks to explore myths that permeate the formation of Brazil and highlight how the first representations of Brazilian territory further strengthen these myths—which are now updated in a colonization process that takes place primarily online, through the cross-referencing of data generated by tools such as social media and communication devices. The work is composed of several references. One of them is the period when artists began producing self-portraits with scenes of themselves working in their studios, creating a subgenre within the self-portrait, during 17th-century Dutch painting. This tradition extends to more recent times, such as Bruce Nauman's 1967 work "Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square" and Paul McCarthy's 1995 work "Painter." Another reference is Joseph Beuys's historic 1967 performance "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare." The hare here is replaced by a fictional parrot, an animal with symbolic importance in Brazilian history, as before the territory was named Brazil, one of its first names was "Land of the Parrots." "Attempting to Give a Watercolor Lesson to Zé Carioca" seeks to handle its references in an almost anthropophagic manner, intertwined with self-referential quotations in an unusual, apocalyptic, and seemingly disordered setting.