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.