The spaces are bland: rooms and cubicles with bare walls, empty shelves, and Formica tables. The webcams, positioned with no concern for framing or lighting, reveal backpacks abandoned in corners, coffee flasks, empty chairs, and hardboard backdrops. The images are out of focus, at oblique angles, distorting the faces of those informing. The characters explain themselves, accompanied by bored lawyers. They alternate between arrogance and nonchalance, as if confession were itself redemption.
(…)
Perhaps it is the primal rawness of these images, preceding any visual language or aesthetic intention, that most helps reveal their ultimate meaning: an absolute disregard for the ethical and social considerations of the plea-bargain testimonies. In their unfinished quality, they are the clearest portrait of what impunity means. There is no need to hear the testimonies. These disposable images show us the most brutal state of surveillance culture: the aesthetics of rewarded denunciation and images of power’s backstage that we could not see until now.
Video made from the Federal Police recordings of plea-bargain testimonies during Operation Lava Jato.
Giselle Beiguelman and Nelson Brissac Peixoto
