ÎlE BRÈSIL
return to altamira
walls|THE Amazon
audiovisual installatiONS
my body is political
copan
CREATING DESERTS
nnipas
COMISSIONS
EXHIBITONS|INTERVENTIONS
publications
ABOUT
Île Brésil begins with chance and intuition. For various reasons, I settled in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone in 2013. It is a vast territory, more than 50 kilometres from Rio’s tourist areas, yet fully part of the city. There, I encountered spaces that ran counter to familiar representations: very few favelas, no affluent neighbourhoods, low population density, vast wastelands, small gated condominiums separated from one another by walls or fences. Silence. Emptiness. Places without borders or centre, isolated individuals, no real public space. The feeling of isolation was not only geographical, but also subjective, mental. The metaphor of insularity seemed omnipresent.
As I settled in and began working on commissions across Brazil, I realised that this type of space is widespread throughout the country. I started to document the territory where I now lived, moving through it on foot, by bus, or by motorbike, without yet knowing how to structure this body of work. The tension emanating from this world suggested that something was out of place—but what?
A decisive encounter followed, with Brazilian writer João Paulo Cuenca, who took an interest in my work and gave form to my questions. João felt that by showing this “infra-ordinary” Brazil, rarely if ever made visible, I was touching on a reality rooted in the country’s history. He wrote: “In a country that never had its revolution, and never transcended its slave-owning and ethnocidal past, people are like prisoners of a permanent present, with no awareness of the past and no real ability to project themselves into a genuinely new future.”
With this interpretative key, the territories I photograph became complementary pieces of a single puzzle, assembled through encounters, clues, and correspondences. My work is conceived carefully as a whole, coherent both geographically and socially.
At the end of 2018, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro—who built his entire political career in Rio’s West Zone—was elected president. I then decided to extend my research by confronting it with another, comparable territory. I left Rio and moved to Greater São Paulo, the vast circular periphery of Latin America’s largest city. Through a striking mirror effect, as in Rio, public space there appears fragmented, and bodies and gazes avoid one another.
I spent three years moving through this territory in every direction, visiting people in their homes, always guided by the interpretative framework given to me by João Paulo Cuenca.
By the end of 2021, I had reached the conclusion of my work in Greater São Paulo, yet I felt that a final piece was still missing to decipher the enigma. I questioned my next step. Should I return to the margins of another major Brazilian urban centre? In the end, I turned towards Brasília, a small, peripheral capital, deliberately built in the middle of a desert, far from everything. My work there alternates between the Pilot Plan—the centre of Brasília—and the satellite cities of the Federal District.
As in Rio, as in São Paulo, the horizon is lined with housing blocks of varying sizes, resembling barracks. Set apart, one can discern zones of power—churches, ministries, universities, government palaces—overlooking vast, empty interiors. Brasília’s specific feature lies in the way the governmental apparatus appears there in its raw form, as a remnant of a future that has already passed.
The people I photograph seem exiled. They are clearly present in the image, yet they could just as well be outside it. They appear to belong nowhere, or more precisely, to that very nowhere in which they are photographed.
And yet, something larger brings them together. A glimmer at the back of their dark gaze, something calm and powerful, held in reserve, awaiting eruption.
This intuition leads Cuenca to say that there is “always hope that, from the ruins of the old new world, a truly new world might emerge.” Here lies part of the Brazilian enigma: in a country where light both reveals and conceals, where the idea of resistance is grasped through an ambiguous duality—at once a force for movement and an obstacle to change.
Ten years of uncompromising personal immersion were just enough to begin to sketch the outlines of this compelling singularity.
Seventeen years ago, I travelled to Altamira, a town in the state of Pará, on the banks of the Xingu River, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. At the time, it was my first journey to Brazil. Language, people, history—I knew almost nothing about the country. I was far from imagining that I would devote nearly two decades of my life to it, living successively in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, Greater São Paulo, then Brasília and the Federal District. Years spent working, in particular, on a personal project entitled Île Brésil, which took the form of a monograph published by Éditions Dunes in the autumn of 2025.
But what happened in the spring of 2008, amid the dust and heat of Altamira? A signal? A revelation? I have often asked myself these questions, without finding an answer. And then, as sometimes happens when a long cycle comes to an end, the desire to retrace my steps, to return to the place where part of my story began, gradually took hold. A desire coupled with the need to provide context—perhaps a horizon—for the work I have carried out in Brazil over all these years. If there was a turning point, it came from rereading the final lines of the powerful text that writer and friend João Paulo Cuenca devoted to my project Île Brésil. In it, João poses an open-ended question: “Perhaps the world ends here. Or perhaps the end of the world has already taken place, and we are standing before its still-warm ashes. Or perhaps this is where, from the ruins of the old new world, a truly new world will be born.”
Between July and August 2025, I therefore returned to Altamira. The images from this project, a natural extension of Île Brésil, follow here. To produce them, I notably used expired analogue films that I had taken with me to Brazil in 2008.
On the margins of the work I devoted to the city of Altamira and its surrounding region, I was struck by the sheer number of walls with no apparent function. In a part of Brazil where the question of land ownership—and appropriation—has always been central, and helps explain a persistent, endemic violence, where the only law that truly prevails is that of the strongest, these walls say a great deal about a culture, a state of mind.
A wall, in the conventional sense, defines a plot of land, a property. But this is not the case in the Brazilian Amazon. Here, walls emerge—small or large, intact or crumbling, straight or built at right angles—and serve no purpose in the landscape other than to exist. Useless walls in the middle of nowhere. The recurrence of this sight, and its incongruity in Brazil, a country where I have lived and worked for fifteen years, led me to document this singular phenomenon.
An immersion in Copan, the largest residential building in Latin America, an icon of São Paulo and of Oscar Niemeyer’s genius, a true barometer of Brazil’s pulse. What began as a commission gradually evolved into a personal project, one on which I am still working today.
Alongside the photographic component of the Île Brésil project, Vincent Catala sought to recover, through moving image and sound, the sensations that run throughout this body of work: space, silence, symbols. As he explains, “These are clues that, together, form a single narrative.” He therefore returned to locations that were already familiar to him and that belong to the areas he photographed. The result is a series of short sequence shots, all sharing the aim of extending and expanding the visual universe developed by the artist.
Artist Charlotte Sarian composed an original soundtrack for each of these films. Drawing on the real sound recordings captured on site by the photographer, she developed an electroacoustic language that is both instrumental and experimental. The result is a singular sound world, acting as a bridge between what is seen, what is heard, and what is felt.
This audiovisual proposal takes the form of video capsules with integrated sound, incorporated into the exhibition scenography of the Île Brésil series.
Video, sound / 4’26’’ | Link to the movie
In this video, a young woman stands still, facing the camera. To her left, a steep, dark-coloured slope. In the background, a mountainous landscape of tropical forest. The scene is set in Cubatão, on the outskirts of São Paulo, within an industrial site owned by Petrobras, one of the most toxic areas in the country. The ground is black, covered with a layer of tar, from which moisture seeps and lingers.
For more than two centuries, Cubatão was one of the strongholds of the Bandeirantes, the slave-hunting groups emblematic of Brazil’s colonisation. The sound accompanying the video was recorded directly on Petrobras’s massive pipelines, located just a few metres from this sequence shot. These metal pipes carry gas down from the mountain to the valley. The noise is dull, insistent, and regular—like a troubled and troubling pulse.
Video, sound / 1’ | Link to the movie
The camera focuses on a pine tree, slightly stirred by the wind. One can make out the structure of a residential building, a garden, and, omnipresent, a thick mist with the milky light typical of Rio de Janeiro’s mountainous landscape in winter. The soundtrack captures the sounds of the building: an electrical generator, followed by a crackling radio.
Video, sound / 1’ | Link to the movie
Another sequence shot shows a section of the Rodovia dos Imigrantes, one of the main highways leading into São Paulo. Night is falling, a storm is approaching. Trucks move through the clouds, like large animals fleeing from an unknown threat.
Video, sound / 3’40’’ | Link to the movie
A fourth sequence shot shows a jagged coastline, seemingly eroded by ocean mist. An anchored vessel slowly emerges from the fog, only to disappear into it once again. The soundtrack captures maritime sounds that unfold into infinity. The scene is set in Salvador de Bahia, one of the first points in Brazil where Portuguese colonisers arrived, followed by the enslaved people they brought with them. These waters have witnessed history and still carry its memory.
Two sequence shots were filmed on the outskirts of Brasília. On the left, a drift scene unfolds—the name given to car competitions in which modified engines perform circular manoeuvres, burning through the rubber of their tyres to the limit before the engine gives out. This is a speciality of the Federal District region—leading the country in ethanol and rubber production—which consistently draws large, predominantly male audiences.
On the right, two young women sit on a sofa, staring fixedly at a screen that remains unseen. Between the two shots, a circular closed space takes shape, echoing the strangely languid arabesques traced by the vehicles, like a metaphor for an absurdity condemned to repeat itself endlessly, driven by some unknown mechanism.
Two sequence shots were filmed in Brasília on 31 October 2022, the day after the presidential election. In both cases, helicopters were circling overhead. The sound of their rotors, at times loud, at times more distant, forms the basis of a curiously similar soundscape that gradually imposes itself with inescapable insistence.
On the left, we see the entrance to the National Congress, the Brazilian parliament. The building is austere and perfectly ordered. It appears to dominate—almost to crush—a solitary man, probably a civil servant, whose gait is hesitant, even erratic. Ten weeks later, the Congress would be invaded and ransacked by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
The scene on the right was filmed a few hours later and at a short distance, on the margins of Brasília’s Pilot Plan. In a chaotic setting typical of Brazil’s urban peripheries, a group supporting the far-right candidate blocks a highway. The phenomenon would repeat itself across Brazil, paralysing parts of the country in the final months of 2022.
These images are drawn from a body of work focused on São Paulo’s LGBTQIA+ community, and more specifically on its transgender community, which is highly active in Latin America’s largest city. Begun in 2019 at the start of Jair Bolsonaro’s term, and extended through the pandemic, the project continues today within a new political context. The photographer highlights the resistance and vitality of this community, despite the violence and rejection emanating from parts of society. He follows the daily lives of its members, moving between artistic performances, visibility-driven events, and more intimate moments drawn from everyday life.
Over time, this approach developed into a collaboration with Vicenta Perrotta, founder of the “Trans Moras” workshop, a place of support and guidance for transgender people experiencing homelessness, located on the outskirts of São Paulo. The trans artist and activist is photographed in spaces such as the National Congress (in Brasília), a bank, land owned by commercial groups, and the street. The aim is to confront regulated, transphobic sites of Brazilian public space with transgender corporeality. The project questions the origins of this transphobia and the means by which it can be challenged, seeking to suggest a form of awareness that allows for the articulation of radical alternatives for the future.
The resulting work operates through a constant back-and-forth between the intimate body and the social body, echoing the ambivalence of Brazilian society, torn between the violence of exclusion and a deep desire for change.
“Here is a country where governing means creating deserts”
This cry of despair was voiced by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro when he learned of the fire at Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum in September 2018—the worst museological disaster in the country’s history. For me, this powerful statement marks a moment of awareness and the starting point of a project currently nearing completion, which accompanies and extends the series Île Brésil and My Body Is Political. The images presented here address Brazil’s predatory relationship with its own natural environment.
From the time I settled in the country, and as I gradually took root, I quickly sensed that the relationship to the surrounding environment—almost systematically conceived as something to be exploited rather than preserved—reflected a singular mindset, specific to Brazil. It took me several years, however, to begin to decipher this specificity, in a country where, as Brazilians themselves say, “light reveals as much as it conceals,” and whose complexity is deeply compelling.
In Brazil, the mechanism of conquest begins, etymologically, with the invasion of the territory by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. The forced appropriation of land was immediately extended through the implementation of forced labour, based on the transatlantic slave trade—half of all enslaved people deported worldwide were sent to Brazil. Historically—and this has not changed today—the predation of nature has always been encouraged by Brazil’s vast scale, its isolation, and the fact that it is largely made up of immense, sparsely inhabited territories. Until relatively recently, it was difficult to assign a specific political colour to this culture of environmental exploitation, as it stemmed from a mindset that had permeated all levels of society.
Over the past decade, however, a conservative and far-right bloc—still highly influential despite Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in the 2022 presidential election—has come to embody and promote a form of predation unprecedented in its intensity, and which, in environmental terms, represents a threat to Brazil’s future and far beyond.
Through a perverse interplay of ideological alliances and converging economic interests, this movement brings together advocates of order and representatives of the powerful agro-industrial sector. In military schools, whose numbers have surged over the past decade, discipline and love of country are taught as core values. Evangelical pastors relay the same message, giving it a spiritual and millenarian foundation. Agribusiness, which dominates the centre-west of the country and now surpasses the traditional southern elites in wealth and power, draws on the immense popularity of sertanejaculture to impose its rural and conservative values.
Their message is simple: God has endowed Brazil with almost limitless natural resources. Exploiting these riches on an industrial scale is presented as a patriotic act, one that concerns Brazilians alone. Formulated in 2018, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s bleak diagnosis has never seemed more relevant—or more prophetic.
This was followed by successive economic cycles of exploitation—always tied to raw materials: sugarcane and coffee in the past, intensive agriculture and hydrocarbons today—which have shaped the country’s topography and its social structure.
NNIPAS (Excerpts)
The NNIPAS project—an acronym for Nous N’Irions Pas Si—is a collective body of work inspired by the Situationism of Guy Debord, developed through several artistic residencies in France, England, and Jordan. The NNIPAS protocol is simple: to engage with a place, urban or otherwise, over the course of a few days. The project’s ambition is to offer an interpretation of that place by constructing a universe shaped by lived situations. It is these situations that determine the arrangement of the narratives, bringing them together into a single story.