María Carri / Bruno Oliveira

Small Guide to Build a Nation-State, by Bruno Oliveira, 2022

Bruno Oliveira is a Brazilian visual artist and educator based in São Paulo. He is also a researcher at MALOCA (Group of Multidisciplinary Studies in Urbanism and Architecture of the South) and coordinator with artist Mônica Nador of JAMAC, a community-based space that promotes lectures, workshops, activities, and exhibitions among residents in São Paulo’s peripheral Jardim Miriam district.

Oliveira´s research-based practice explores the relationship between institutions, visuality, and decolonization in Latin America. In Small Guide to Build a Nation State, he reflects on the Nation-State´s components to signal their constructed nature. Inspired by the theory of political scientist Oscar Oszlak in Latin American modern state and its attributes, the piece is configured in a set of instructions for engagement that poses a simple but provocative approach to how political institutions build power. By pointing out the historical quality of the Nation-State and its capacity to trace borders, Oliveira poses the question of those who are left outside: “what constitutes the idea of the no-citizen,” in the artist's words.

Small Guide to Build a Nation-State was first presented in La Paz (Bolivia) in 2018 within the course "Sociology of the Image," dictated by sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. In 2020 was re-staged in Sao Paulo (Brazil) as part of the project Instituto Temporário de Pesquisa sobre Censura [Temporary Institute of Research on Censorship] to reflect on the conditions of censorship and the representations of freedom. For this iteration, the artist adapted the piece to engage with the characteristics of migration and diaspora and problematize the bureaucratic institutions that mediate and complicate that process.

Small Guide to Create a Nation-State encourages visitor’s participation. Booklets can be modified, taken away, contested, or completely ignored.