PHOTOGRAPHY
WORK

In the idleness of periods where nothing happens, regardless of how much or what we seek, there is an invisible potential. In these moments, the suspension of waiting highlights the anguish that the immediate and frenetic demand for new images exerts on artists. Haste is antagonistic to the presence required by analogue mediums, and not only disturbs the natural order of the creative process, but also contributes to an unbridled generation of contents where imagination does not develop, it only reacts.

While I Wait was a photographic series first created in 2021, when it was included in a mini-zine collection alongside 10 finalists of Sô Edições’ photobook open call. Three years later, images previously published are merged with new productions carried out in the meantime, composing a reworked new edition of the series. 

This project combines home-printing and handmade intervention techniques of analog photographs in an effort to portray the frustrations and acceptances present in cycles of inactivity in which the sacred time of life’s mysteries prevails over our desires, attempts and concerns.

The role of images in shaping the future and representing the present asserts itself against an ongoing crisis of imagination. Navigating a historical moment where fatalistic narratives of destruction and apocalypse strengthen amid the tensions of visible collapse and shredding of many realities as we once knew them, dreaming of paths to the future can sometimes sound like naivety.

The series “Affected”, shot at the height of the pandemic, has, over the past years, come to signify my attempt as an artist to affirm my commitment to creating images as a way to make the infinite possibilities that imagination offers accessible to a sensitive experience. By choosing to prioritize photographic-time in its spiral form, photographing and interpreting reality cease to be merely representative practices of a documentary and historical nature, becoming instead tools that allow for the audacity of building something other than what seems to be the only way forward. Making images becomes an active exercise of faith, intertwined with the "beautiful decency” that Paulo Freire describes as integral to critical thinking.

The photographs in this series were taken on 35mm film that was intensely affected by fungi, rendering any predictability about the results obsolete. Like the future, laboratory and experimental processes in photography train us to work within the realm of the impossible. The fungi, in turn, affect films and photographic papers due to the organic composition of the material, intervening as living elements in the latent potential of the image and affirming their participation and co-creation.

It is the nature of all living things to affect one another. Becoming aware of this and insisting in the sensitive contact enabled by artistic practice is a tool for claiming power. Experiences of connection and affection sustain the resilience necessary for imagination to persist as a catalyst for change and a proposer of other stories to inhabit the impossible mystery of what we cannot ever plan for, but can engage with.

The film material is, in essence, an organic medium. Throughout the lineage of experimental photography and cinema, it has been perceived as a living instrument composed of natural elements, sensitive to its environment, to experiences that may destabilize it, and used as a poetic resource representing an extension of the artist’s own body.

The series ‘a silver mirror mimics my body’ follows the decaying process of 35mm self-portraits that weren’t properly archived over the years. The deterioration caused by mold, fungi and the phenomenon of silver mirroring, which naturally affects the emulsion of photographic materials potentialized by humidity and air pollution, results in the progressive rotting of portraits that once crystallized my presence. By documenting the changes that occurred to the negatives over the years, I draw a connection between the damage to the film emulsion and the impact of environmental pollution on my health as a person in an urban environment.

Air contamination, industrial pollution, forest fires, wildland arson, and the increase in global temperatures have exacerbated respiratory issues, with daily alerts issued to higher-risk groups over the past month during Brazil's hottest and driest winter on record. In this series, the destruction of the film emulsion caused by negligence rather than intervention serves as an imagetic representation of the bodily sensations experienced by my respiratory system as it's subjected to the effects of the persistent destruction of remaining life and resources in my territory.