Over the last two decades, the VideoBrasil art festival and collection forged intensive connections with artists from the Middle East. These collaborations began in the 1990s with early experimentations in video art probing the nature of memory in the process of decolonization. Middle Eastern and Latin American artists deconstructed colonial narratives and simultaneously strove to reconstruct and resurrect local histories. The juxtaposition of stories and histories from vastly disparate geographical regions had the effect of comparing them. The result were compelling visual analogies drawn between differing experiences of colonization and European domination. Works by Lebanese artists like Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad, Rabih Moure, Algerian Malek Bensmail, and Moroccan Bouchra Khalili explore the role of colonial violence committed against indigenous cultural forms—and a concomitant drive to excavate memories of that past. Bensmail’s 1996 entry “Territoire(s),” for example, meditates on the violence of the French occupation of Algeria, interspersing the words “j’irai cracher sur vos mémoires” (I spit on your memories) with revolutionary slogans like “L’Algérie est mon pays, l’arabe ma langue, et l’islam mon religion.” This paper examines the broader institutional history of these collaborations, but also focuses on the intensification of these collaborations during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva forged connections with the Middle East through diplomatic visits to Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and Dubai in 2003. Paralleling these efforts, VideoBrasil’s 2003 Festival focused specifically on Middle Eastern artists and Global South connections—with Zaatari as a guest curator. These Latin American-Middle Eastern collaborations re-emerged in the context of Argentina and the aftermath of its own traumatic “dirty war.” The 2015 “Memorias Imborrables” (Unerasable Memories) at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires featured selections from the VideoBrasil collection. Zaatari’s video “In this House,” about excavating archives of the Lebanese civil war, gestures toward Argentina’s revived truth commission. The video also shows the intense intimacy and local nature of this violence, to homes, families, and bodies. Significant theoretical work charts a conceptual history of the Global South (as in the work of Vijay Prashad), but little work explores artistic collaborations conceptualizing these connections. Excellent historical and anthropological work explores migration between the Middle East and Latin America, but the rich story of artistic collaborations has not been told. This paper draws on theories of the Global South and decolonization, showing how visual artists work toward envisioning what this means.