Yara Pina

Smoky zone  (2021)

shadow attacked with a rifle, ashes from images of

victims of summary executions in Brazil

traces of action

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In Zona de esfumaçamento, Smoky Zone, I explore fields of violence that involve the legal and illegal participation of the Brazilian State in summary execution of bodies as a policy of extermination. A modus operandi structured decades ago as a security policy by Military Dictatorship that counted on the presence of police officers in death squads to repress and eliminate the internal enemy. Today, these murders continue to take place by the hands of these same security agents during police operations or in their criminal activities in militias, extermination groups and drug trafficking. Often motivated not only by impunity and the legal protection of “acts of resistance followed by death”, but also by the profitable logic of the crime. During the action, I attack my shadow projected on the wall with the pipe of a carbine, focusing mainly on the lethal regions of a human body. In a second moment, I use the ashes from images of victims of summary executions, published by the press, to form a silhouette and, also, to highlight the marks of the attacks that remained in my shadow. As a final gesture, I cover the carbine on the ground with ashes.