Conjured

“Conjurados” proposes an audiovisual fable about loss, historical responsibility and possible rites of rebirth. The video begins with recognizable views of the Museu da Inconfidência, its façade, the city of Ouro Preto, with the sculptures by the so-called Aleijadinho from the Santuário de Bom Jesus do Matosinhos, in Congonhas, and gradually transforms this space into the scene of an “opening”: a symbolic Pandora's box, which starts from the famous painting of Tiradentes's sentence and culminates in the fall of the façade, in wooden angels who caress each other, paintings and objects that gain movement.

From this point, painful memories emerge: Tiradentes's cross, the gallows stone, traces of the slaveholding past and episodes of violence. One by one, these symbols come undone, crack, fall, turn to dust, as if the very matter of history refused to remain intact. But from the collapse a new gesture is born: the façade rises again, now moved by the love of the angels and the joy of the returning spirits. It is nature that takes over the scene: fungi, creepers and plants advance, cover, colonize. The entire city turns into a plant organism; butterflies appear as signs of metamorphosis and fragile redemption.

The project was born in direct dialogue with the contemporary tensions surrounding the Museu da Inconfidência, a collection that lives with the formal glory of history and with the uncomfortable marks of slavery and political violence. By allowing contemporary interventions, the museum opened space for rewrites and confrontations. “Conjurados” appropriates this friction to propose an experience that does not erase the past; rather, it dramatizes it and exposes its contradictions, calling on the public to reflect on authorship, memory and historical justice.

Produced within the Museu em Suspensão program, with support from CNPq.