Director: Harun Farocki

Producer: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion/Lumiar Cité/Maumaus

Portuguese version, narrated by Manuela Ribeiro Sanches

Year: 2010

Runtime: 17’

Colour

Funded by: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura/Direcção Geral das Artes/Goethe-Institut

Harun Farockiʼs ʻA Cruz e a Prataʼ consists of the Portuguese version of the film The Silver and the Cross, 2010, produced by Harun Farocki to be presented at the Lumiar Cité exhibition space, in Alta de Lisboa. It is a single­channel film in which the image projected appears divided into two juxtaposed parts that are contextualised and complemented by a voice­off. In this film/essay, Harun Farocki analyses the details of the painting Description of Cerro Rico and the Imperial Municipality of Potosí, painted by Gaspar Miguel de Berrío in 1758, which portrays the city of Potosí in Bolivia in great detail. The narration that Farocki introduces in the film is a discourse of Foucauldian ʻarchaeologyʼ of the painting, unfolding from the place and from the people involved in colonisation – the victims and the perpetrators, those who won and those who lost, the Amerindians and the colonisers for the Spanish crown, the forced workers and the free workers, the stonemasons, traders and craftsmen, the mine owners and foundry operators, the colonial administration and the clergy, the Spanish and their descendants.