The Tropical Trauma Misery Tour: Dissecting the ambivalent dynamic of the networked image through an artisticpractice : Reframing Jair Bolsonaro’s media presence
(2025)
author(s): Rafael Franceschinelli Roncato
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
Welcome to the TROPICAL TRAUMA MISERY TOUR. I invite you to take this tour through aroofless theater called media, the stage representing the farce and media opportunism ofthe Brazilian president and far-right populist, Jair Messias Bolsonaro—The Myth.In 2018, Bolsonaro was stabbed during a presidential rally campaign. Against a backdrop ofpolarization, micro-narratives, and misinformation,The Mythstarred in an online politicalcampaign where he had complete control over his narrative and self-presentation. This tourinvestigates how the ambiguity of the stabbing event exposes the network propaganda in theBrazilian political game.Through a speculative documentary photography practice, this piece overcomes the politicalillusions and dissemination of nonprogressive values of digital populists. The fictionalizationof the real is a form of resistance towards such ideological shams and manipulations. Itdevolves into a meta-play, a farce within a farce.
Pandemic performance: A Haunting of Haunts
(2022)
author(s): Garrett Lynch IRL
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
During the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020, galleries, theatres, and performance venues closed in accordance with social distancing, lockdown, and confinement policies. Art practice, and in particular performance art, faced an existential crisis: adapt its form or cease to exist for audiences. To adapt, performance art adopted video on the internet as a means through which to perform posing immense challenges to its understanding of performance, liveness, and what is considered physical or ‘real’. As a response, I started to create a body of work employing the methodology of practice as research (PaR) during periods of confinement of the pandemic.
Titled A Haunting of Haunts (2020–ongoing), the practice is designed to be situated within networks and is therefore classified as networked performance. The practice aims to enable artists to create performance under conditions of social distancing, lockdown, and confinement, to explore the idea of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces, and to critique video as the dominant and largely accepted visual form employed in networked performance. This exposition proposes that while A Haunting of Haunts facilitates practice and assists in the development of a visual language specific to networks that consists of what are termed as networked images, thereby contributing to networked performance as a field of practice, it also highlights the hauntological condition of such a practice.