Jonathas de Andrade

De Andrade’s video, O peixe [The Fish] (2016), borrows the style of ethnographic films made by anthropologists to record the cultures and traditions they study. In a series of vignettes shot on 16mm film, we witness what appears to be an intimate ritual among fishermen in a coastal village in northeastern Brazil. De Andrade’s camera follows individual fishermen as they catch their prey and then hold them to their chest. Alternating expressions of dominance and empathy, the fishermen forcefully but tenderly kiss each fish until it stops breathing. The gesture that appears here as a ritual is, however, the one that the artist invented, as if to push a deliberately exotic portrait to the limits of plausibility. While the conspicuous subjects of O peixe are the fish and fishermen depicted, the absence of language and text in the film generates a poignant ambiguity and invites a range of interpretations: one might feel empathy and grief by witnessing death, or feel encouraged by the expression of solidarity with the natural world, or even captivated by the particular sensuality of this animist rite. Beneath these responses, however, lies an understanding that this gesture disguises violence as benevolence and suggests a symmetry between the power humans wield over other life forms and the power they wield over each other.