rotina | routine – Lara Boticário Morais

Based on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, and its reflections on the panoptic concept, to watch and be watched, to not know for sure if one is being watched, but to be certain that it can happen.
The system of surveillance and punishment, increasingly similar to Orwell’s Big Brother – now accepted as a form of popular entertainment – is something that is becoming more and more lauded by the present society, a security centered society that channels its scapegoats to terrorism and emigration. Therein conjuring the profound injustices that are consequential to the globalised model of development.
The daily routine of a person that stands at both sides: as watcher and as subject to a ubiquitous surveillance. A person’s everyday life revolves around the act of surveying – the voyeur is also watched in every place he or she passes through. The person being filmed by a stranger feels both pleased and annoyed, not knowing what lies behind the look that watches him/her. We seldom question the continuous recording of images in the public and private services that is made possible by the alleged pretext of public safety. Our permission for being filmed is never requested; we are subjected to the power mechanism that conditions us.