Carandiru Red. Memory and massacre in visual terms

Abstract

     At the beginning of the 21st century, artist Lygia Pape presented Carandiru, an installation characterized by the use of the red color, in a direct allusion to both the 1992 massacre in the São Paulo penitentiary and the genocide of indigenous peoples during colonial Brazil. The materiality of the works highlighted the dramatic dimension of both events and opened up a series of meanings that are in turn linked to Latin American history and Brazilian art. This topic had been addressed by Nuno Ramos in 1992 (the year of the killings in the penitentiary) in 111, a striking installation made up of stones, light bulbs and tar as basic elements. Based on the book Estação Carandiru by Drauzio Varella, film director Héctor Babenco shot Carandiru (2003), where he portrayed the massacre committed by the military police. This work proposes a revision of visual aspects linked to archives and memory based on given cultural imaginaries including installations, objects and films, where the massacre is represented from different aesthetic, political and poetic modalities.