Hal Wildson (1991) is a multimedia artist and poet, born in 1991 in the Vale do Araguaia, a border territory between the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso, which is marked by land disputes, memory, and power. He lives and works in São Paulo.

His work departs from experiences lived in the sertão of Brazil’s Central-West region, shaped by a mixed, marginalized family heritage that is deeply tied to the contradictions of national history. Hal investigates archives, documents, objects, and symbols of Brazil’s construction, tensioning official narratives and recovering fragments of silenced histories. In his visual poetics, the artist revisits founding images and gestures of the Latin American imaginary, exposing the traces of erasure forged by colonialism, coronelismo, and extractivism along the banks of the Araguaia River.

The artist departs from the idea of a “reforestation of the imagination” as a way to “reclaim the future through the seeds we plant in the past.” By researching the concept and origin of the Brazilian Utopia, he delves into documentary materials, creating an image that merges the documentary and the fictional to address contemporary issues and reflect on how we narrate and record history. The matters related to his place of origin are essential to understanding Wildson’s research, as he believes that revisiting the country’s forgotten stories is also a way of healing open wounds from a family marked by violence and state neglect.

In Floresta Marginal II (2024), he rewrites these erasures by questioning the place of utopia within Brazilian mythology. He explains that his utopia is spelled with a “Y,” as in Re-Utopya, because it is rooted in ancestral knowledge to ground the future. He affirms that it is impossible to imagine the construction of this Brasyl without recognizing the wisdom and importance of Indigenous peoples in protecting forests and in building “a new collective imagination capable of saving us from the abyss staring back at us.”