Statement

I have always been captivated by landscapes. They make me feel something that perhaps I would feel even if I wasn't there. This interest in observing everyday spaces from new perspectives is rooted in the potentiality of sense to guide us through a reading of reality, and allows us to develop it even when confronted by its most haunting form. To paraphrase the geography of Milton Santos, “Everything that we see, that our vision embraces, is the landscape (…) made up not only of volume, but also of colour, movement, scent, sound (...)”. And it is being able to conceive of landscapes as a crossing that enables us to realise everything is connected.
When I look back on my childhood in the neighbourhood of Águas Claras, on the edges of Salvador, I see how the lack of contact with other forms of nature that were socially unavailable affected me. I realise how the desire for new places of existence that the construction of landscapes facilitates for me becomes a work tool, a haven, and a means of relating to my own territory.
Before experiencing the state of suspension offered by aerial photography, I used to explore the landscape from the tops of buildings. Silence, scale and perspective are compositional elements that enable me to reflect on how we are immersed in (pre)fabricated realities, and on how such socio-historical engineering can rob us of the ability to understand these in other ways. It is in attempting to develop such realities that I start to understand the political and fictional substance that is involved in the construction of this work.
My relationship with the coast and with water also stems from childhood. The sea has always been within reach to our family and although my memories are hazy, I still carry within the sensation and tug of the tides, whose impermanence and power transmit something deeply familiar to me. In this sense, the production of images that flex the differences and similarities between space and nature through the abstraction of the living territory itself, allows me to build visual enigmas that, photographically, open up what is in fact real into a new reality.