Mexico City, 1974. Lives in Lisbon

Allying a background in graphic design with an interest in architecture and the visual arts, Héctor Zamora began in his career in the early 2000s, and spent much of it in São Paulo. His work looks at the social and economic reality of countries on the outlying rim of capitalism. In his performances, which are usually recorded on video, he plays with the archaisms, unbalances, dissensions and vulnerabilities common to Brazil and Mexico, achieving a deeper perception of the facts through the lens of direct experience.

Memorándum [Memorandum] (2017) is a video record featuring a multistorey u-shaped scaffold on which uniformed women sit and type. The completed sheets are pulled from their typewriters and sent wafting into the patio below. It doesn’t take long for a situation to emerge that decries the violence to which women are submitted in a patriarchal productive system that has long limited them to subservient, secondary roles. In Ordre et progrès [Order and Progress] (2016), a three-channel video installation, workers in hardhats destroy traditional fishing boats with sledgehammers, reducing them to mounds of broken wood. In the name of technical fine-tuning, work, repetition, disposal and waste seem to take hold as unquestionable elements of labor and its order. In this tug of war between preserving what exists and the imperative to create the new, Zamora underscores the impasse of the capitalist system, which tends to overwrite the collective memory. The trashed remains of the performance attest to a knowledge or material production of which we should never lose sight.