Rodrigo Braga
Provisão
Rodrigo Braga’s video work Provisão opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth. As the camera fades to black, the viewer hears the repeated sound of a shovel striking dirt. The camera fades back to the clearing and zooms in on a shirtless man digging up the ground. The hole grows wider and deeper as he digs, becoming an almost crater-like expanse filled knee-deep with groundwater. The man emerges from the hole and begins to chop the base of a tree next to the hole, hacking away with deep and repetitive strokes until the tree begins to fall and eventually collapse into the massive cavity beneath. A symbol of life and growth, the tree’s collapse is achieved solely by pushing one’s strength to an absolute limit. He emerges from the hole again and begins to shovel the dirt back in, burying the tree under a seemingly endless and inexhaustible pile of earth until it is fully covered, its branches and leaves submerged. The metaphors here between destruction and nature are difficult to ignore. At once both poetic and unsettling, Provisão offers a cautionary tale about the harmful impacts of human interventions on the environment.