Among us

Microfilme, ou O dia em que o rio Grande virou mar [Microfilm, or The Day the Rio Grande Became the Sea], 2013, by Letícia Ramos (Santo Antônio da Patrulha/RS, 1976)

"What would a place in the future look like where man no longer exists and nature begins to return to its original form look like?" To answer this question, the artist Letícia Ramos ventures along the narrow border coast that connects Rio Grande do Sul to Uruguay, in the vicinity of the Patos Lagoon. In a landscape of dunes, ponds and wild horses, the artist seeks traces and subtle movements: the trail of wind and birds; a Styrofoam meteorite; human traces and plant specimens. Lengthy 30-minute expositions, amplified film grooves, and blinding clarity lend a supernatural appeal to scientific rigor. Accustomed to uninhabited territories, Ramos knows that the construction of a landscape is the construction of a language, so the journey begins with the historical and material investigation of the work instruments, such as improvised cameras with Polaroids and microfilm. Used for decades to archive documents and give them authenticity, microfilm reappears here as the missing link between the past and the future, fiction and reality. As in other works, Ramos conducts her tour with the voice of an imaginary character, in this case a forgotten lighthouse keeper. It is he who guides her through this kingdom of heaven and earth, of dreams and mysteries.

(Thyago Nogueira) ZUM/IMS Grant 2013

Desvio [Deviation], 2015, by Helena Martins-Costa (Porto Alegre, RS, 1969)

The conventions of photography, and not exactly the people portrayed, were the decisive impulse for the creation of this series by Helena Martins-Costa, who is also a professor and researcher. The artist has spent countless hours in collections, fairs and antique markets in search of a mistake. This flaw causes the lines that guide us through the image to run in an apparent imbalance. The figure resists and even smiles, though everything else suggests an inevitable fall. Martins-Costa also took countless hours that to analyze each image, revealing the subtleties, testing imbalances and scale. If some artists have become notable for incorporating error into their work, Martins-Costa takes it as a starting point, and sees in it the potential for a series of twists and turns. Here is room to question what we feel when implicit rules are not followed and how our own bodies respond to an image that indicates disorder.

The artist invites us to let herself be carried away by estrangement, vertigo and its consequences. The breaking of a structure that guides the viewer may be the beginning of the fall of other conventions, a crooked but necessary way to understand the treacherous nature of the photographic image.

(Ângelo Manjabosco) ZUM/IMS Grant 2014

Zoo, 2014, by João Castilho (Belo Horizonte, MG, 1978)

In Zoo, Castilho places wild animals in domestic spaces, such as living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms. Each animal selected generates a single image. Causing estrangement is one of the central ideas of this series, developed in partnership with the caregivers of each of the animals photographed.

If locating the animals required perseverance and patience from the author, the photo shoots were short and in carefully delimited spaces, since the work involved uncomfortable situations with real risks. Such discomfort appears in the photographs, and is ingrained in all involved, whether photographer, animal or spectator. As a cougar lies on the living room carpet, a rattlesnake shows little appreciation for the warmth of an armchair, and an armadillo turns its back on the artist. Such images, which trigger metaphors for everyday situations, are present in Zoo and in other series by the author. They deal with "existential and political issues of life and death, of innocence and guilt, of drive and fear, of survival and extinction, through landscape, color, living beings and other beings," says Castilho.

(Ângelo Manjabosco) ZUM/IMS Grant 2013

A anatomia da água [The Anatomy of Water]: book 1 of the series Corpoflor, 2022, by Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (Vitória, ES, 1996)

Under the façade of a nineteenth-century anatomy manual, the artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro elaborates a libertarian and biographical manifesto of her own history of transmutation. Using texts, photos and drawings, the work aligns evolutionary theories, interplanetary travel, African spirituality and self-analysis to scrutinize the desire to live a radical hybridity: the possibility of mixing with the lives of other kingdoms and worlds. The book is an offshoot of the Corpoflor series, a photographic performance she began in 2016 in order to deal with her "moments of fear, pain, courage, anger, horniness," according to the artist. In numerous self-portraits, Vitorino experiments with gestures, paintings, symbols, colors, and other elements, in a process of discovery and healing. In The Anatomy of Water, the series Corpoflor unfolds in partnership with the artist Gê Viana from Maranhão, among other friends and collaborators. "I am the fruit of the black hole, so my skin is dark, because in the blackness of the abyssal seas, I am not black, I am the sea, liquid," he declares, bringing his ancestry closer to the Bantu word "kalunga" – the great mythological river that connects the world of the living with the forces of the ancestors. By choosing water as a metaphor for the body, Vitorino also frees herself from a fixed and anatomical way, subverting the scope of the book. “No espere cambiar de forma para ser feliz con aquela que já tienes en tu memória”, ("Don't expect to change shape to be happy with the one you already remember"), she says. The texts combine ideas and languages in the same sentence, extending the scope of physical transmutation. Transmutation is freeing oneself from the body, time, space, and language, from the domains that oppress. It is also to dodge death in search of full life or its end.

(Thyago Nogueira) ZUM/IMS Grant 2021

Postais para Charles Lynch [Postcards for Charles Lynch], 2015, by Coletivo Garapa (São Paulo, SP, 2008)

In February 2014, a teenager from Rio de Janeiro was pinned to a pole by the neck while receiving kicks and punches. Commenting on the scene, television journalist Rachel Sheherazade said it was na understandable act practiced by good citizens. In this artist book, Coletivo Garapa captures video frames of Brazilian lynchings available on YouTubeand inserts comments left by users, who often identify with the lynchers, in the source code
of the image. At the end of the book, a piece of steel holds a magnetic tape used for backups, with about 200 videos downloaded from the platform.

The title of the work could be an allegory, but postcards with photographs of lynchings were common during the nineteenth century in the United States (the term "lynchin", according to one version, originated from the performance of a Virginia state judge named Charles Lynch). In them, adults and children smile while trees hold hanging bodies "pastoral scene of the gallant South", as Billie Holiday sings when describing the horror in the song "Strange Fruit". In the early 2000s, these mostly racial crimes disguised as justice gained new and efficient forms of circulation, with the popularization of video-sharing sites.

Heavy and clad in steel, the work of the Garapa Collective resembles a capsule that preserves the fragile virtual contemporary memory, or more precisely, the records of a violent social behavior whose image has been used to spread supremacist ideas over the last centuries.

(Ângelo Manjabosco) ZUM/IMS Grant 2014

Venus, 2023, by Val Souza (São Paulo, SP, 1985)

How to define black beauty that crosses times facing attempts at erasure? In this panel of more than a thousand images taken from books, magazines, newspapers, websites, and social networks, Val Souza gives a new body to the white and lonely Roman goddess. "Who is Venus? Traces, signs, clues, vestiges, abbreviations. A noisy and vibrant paradise or a wild territory, ready to be invaded, braved, conquered, penetrated, explore", the artist teases. To weave his mantle, Souza invoked Ninas and Beyoncés, Serenas and Camilas, Suelis and Anastasias, Zezés and Todynhos – women who overshadow clichés with the brilliance of their own existence. They radiated eroticism and seduction, freedom and independence, pleasure and power emanate as infallible weapons against oppression and violence. The repetition of gestures, head tilts, smiles and nods is charged by metaphorical associations with landscapes and food, fauna and flora, as well as the iconography of slavery and travelers. In the midst of her own atlas is the artist, who lives the images in front of and behind the camera, in a continuous and emancipating cycle. Souza shows that the black Venus is not a new anodyne icon from a distant past, but a multiple and revolutionary force that unites women of all times, with the certainty that true beauty is the courage to face one's own desire.

(Thyago Nogueira) ZUM/IMS Grant 2021

Casulo/palco [Cocoon/Stage], 2019, by Dias & Riedweg (1993)

Since 2012, the collective formed by artists Maurício Dias and Walter Riedweg has been investigating the psychiatric universe, its territorialities and borders. As a result of a continuous partnership with A Voz dos Usuários – a group of 15 patients from the Psychiatric Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro –, the videos Casulo and Palco discuss cloistered spaces, the creation of safe places of exchange and communion between patients, and the imaginary that surrounds discussions about mental health in this country.

Casulo addresses the daily life of the group after periods of hospitalization, evoking the enclosure to which the patients were subjected. The title of the work reflects both the psychiatric confinement and the spaces of collective reception that were formed throughout the 35 meetings between the group and the artists. As symbols of a temporally and spatially uncertain space, cocoons could be found in various parts of the city during the more than 35 encounters that made up the research.

The video Palco arises from the question posed to each of the patients about an "object that could never be missing in their cocoon". By bringing the chosen item into this collective choreography, the patient-performers inform us about the subjectivity of the idea of home, expanding and blurring the territories usually defined between reason and madness. Aarranged in space in the manner of a living room, the objects interrogate the visitor about such notions, proposing a cocoon within the exhibition and reverberating mental health issues beyond the walls intended for them.

(Daniele Queiroz) ZUM/IMS Grant 2018

Brasil x Argentina (Amazônia e Patagônia) [Brazil x Argentina (Amazon and Patagonia)], 2017, by Dora Longo Bahia (São Paulo, SP, 1961)

The work has sound and projections that show the melting of Perito Moreno glaciers in Argentina, and the fires in the Amazon. In parallel, two uniformed children play football slowly, representing complicity and a seemingly friendly exchange of passes between the two countries, despite the well-known rivalry in the sport.

The installation's landscapes offer a frontal perspective of the most visible consequences of global warming, while panoramic photographs of the glacier and the remnants of the forest in turn convey the scale of the tragedy. Bahia shares her perception of the environment: "In the forest, there is a feeling of constant fire. On the glacier, you wait, and suddenly part of it falls. They're very different sensations of time."

The boys who kick the ball and then receive it point to a political game shared by two nations. As ecosystems disappear, rulers use the popularity of sports to promote a nationalistic and superficial ideology, a fact that was particularly evident during the dictatorial regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, decades in which both teams won important titles while the countries loosened – or even discarded – rules to protect their biomes.

(Ângelo Manjabosco) ZUM/IMS Grant 2016

Eclosão de um sonho uma fantasia [Outbreak of a Dream, a Fantasy], 2023, by Igi Lola Ayedun (São Paulo, SP, 1990)

In the traditional understanding, photography is a reproduction of the world cut out by the eye and captured by the camera. What if we didn't need a camera or an eye to take a photograph: would it still be photography?, wonders Ayedun, who as a child had his optic nerve and one of his eyeballs removed due to retinal cancer. In Eclosão de um sonho, uma fantasia (Outbreak of a Dream, a Fantasy), Ayedun looks to the future with an inquiry into the history of images. To compose three large visual panels, the artist feeds an artificial intelligence program with self-portraits, paintings and drawings from various sources, creating new versions of herself surrounded by a mosaic of visual references. Apocalyptic landscapes, mythological creatures, elements of the zodiac, ancestral deities and other entities line up around figures reminiscent of a version of the Renaissance Venus or a
distinguished Egyptian queen. The tone of lapis lazuli, already present in the artist's work, predominates in the panels. Accustomed to the routine of medical examinations and the scrutiny of her own face, the artist delivers her image to the unfathomable universe of algorithms, while trying to formally protect it with applications to the National Institute of Industrial Property. The research continues with software that produces color gradations through text programming, and that will produce images from neuronal electrical impulses, overcoming the centrality of eye vision. As we have learned from Big Tech, behind each face is our data, which can be modified, manipulated or marketed in ways that are still poorly mapped. By venerating images of a digital future, the artist idolizes herself in search of ensuring a physical and – perhaps – immortal existence.

(Thyago Nogueira) ZUM/IMS Grant 2022

Teatro para o artifício [Theater for the Device], 2018, by Sofia Borges (Ribeirão Preto, SP, 1984)

The impossibility of language to unite existence and meaning is the engine of the artist's visual research, which involves photographs, masks, collages, performance and theater. In an eight-hour performance, Borges created plays, living collages that invited artists to become images. To this end, the artist printed six of her images as a stage background and used photographic cutouts of ancient masks and other artifacts as instruments for the artists. Using pigments, paint and other materials, Borges directed the artists as in a play, blurring the languages and creating overlaps of layers and senses.

Borges' work deals with the impossibility of language to take matter out of its encrypted condition and therefore to present its full meaning. By attentively frequenting spaces of representation, such as natural history museums, libraries, and prehistoric caves, the artist creates ways to approach and face this condition, seeking in the origins of the world both the human need to represent life and its failure to represent things themselves. In the end, everything ends up as representations of the self, just as Borges' actions end up again as images.

(Daniele Queiroz) ZUM/IMS Grant 2016

A água é uma máquina do tempo [Water Is a Time Machine], 2018-2023, by Aline Motta (Niterói, RJ, 1974)

Originally titled Memory Game, this book doll gave rise to the book A água é uma máquina do tempo (Water Is a Time Machine), published in 2022. In it, the multimedia artist works between archive and fabulation to create a kaleidoscope that deals with her family lineage, permeated by mourning for her mother, while crossing the history of Brazilian colonial violence.

Understood as a single and complex research, the project unfolds in writing, photography, video, and performance. Using water as a metaphor and as a primordial element for the transmission of memories and teachings, Motta intertwines the different languages, and turns time into a spiraling condition: the daughter is the ancestor of the mother, the past imposes itself before the future, modifying it but also being modified by it.

The artist shapes memory materially with the same fluidity. The use of poetry and blanks in the pages plays with the oral traditions of song and storytelling, while the images of public and personal archives are composed of reflections, transparencies, mirrors and overlaps – physical distortions that inform about a collective past permeated by breaches, gaps and erasures.

(Daniele Queiroz) ZUM/IMS Grant 2018

Nós somos pássaros que andam [We are birds that walk], 2023, from Glicéria Tupinambá (Tupinambá Indigenous Land of Olivença, Bahia, 1982), with Mariana Lacerda and Patrícia Cornils

In this three-channel video, the artist, teacher and activist for indigenous rights narrates her mission to recover materially and culturally the tradition of the mantles of her people. Filmed in the Tupinambá Indigenous Land, in the south of Bahia, the work inscribes the stories, songs and manufactures that involve the production of the mantles, whose few original copies are in European museums, and accessible only by photographs. It was by studying these images that Celia resumed the production of the sacred items of her people, made from bird feathers collected from the ground by her, by children, and by other people in the community.

The images and writings about the Tupinambá, recorded in books by non-indigenous people, serve only as an oracle for the artist, who values oral memory, first-person accounts and the teachings of the “ house backyard " as a compass to present her territory and her struggle. The experience of the community, the communication with the birds, the dreams, and the language of nature are the raw material of the symbolic and material reconstruction that Glicéria presents in the video and in her artistic and political trajectory. As a continuation of her work and struggle, the artist now seeks to recover the very mantles of the museums to which they were taken, reinforcing the Tupinambá people's autonomy to tell their story and maintain the right to their traditions.

(Daniele Queiroz) ZUM/IMS Grant 2022

Memento, 2015, by Trëma Collective (São Paulo, SP, 2013). Formed by Filipe Redondo, Gabo Morales, Leonardo Soares, and Rodrigo Capote

"Memento" is everything that reminds us of something; it is everything that triggers a memory. Touched by the new waves of immigration that arrived in Brazil in the 2010s, the collective visited immigrant reception centers in São Paulo and interviewed people of different nationalities. Many came to the country in search of a new life, leaving behind not only family, but also personal trauma and armed conflict. That's how they met the Colombian
Danny Vásquez and the Angolan Theresa Senga, interviewed for this project. Determined to fix the memory of these two immigrants as symbols of resistance, the members of the collective traveled to Colombia and also the Congo (where Senga lived from an early age) in search of reconstructing an album of memories. For Vásquez, the routine of the banana plantations, the drug trade, or the loss of his virginity are striking memories; for Senga, the accident at the border, the death of her mother, or the violence at work resurface in her memories. Also present are friends and family, favorite foods, significant items and places. Far from the facts, Memento's photographs dwell on the reality of memories to honor the daily heroism of immigrants who, even facing historical violence, keep struggling to exist with dignity.

(Thyago Nogueira) ZUM/IMS Grant 2015

Retrato falado [Facial Composite], 2020, by Eustáquio Neves (Juatuba, MG, 1955)

To create these 12 boxes of objects, the artist started from descriptions of relatives and reports of physical similarities in the family to reconstruct the image of his grandfather, whom he did not know and of whom there is no picture in the family albums.

A chemist by training, Neves brings to his research the restlessness linked to the ideas of memory, identity and the structural and systemic racism that marks his origins. Through visual manipulations in the images, the artist weaves complex layers of creation and fabulation of stories about the forced and violent immigration of enslaved people, the Atlantic crossings, and the way the enslaved were portrayed in official historical documents. Neves combines these elements to trace a particular timeline, merging self-portraits and images of family members with institutionalized images in the nineteenth century.

In Retrato falado, the artist used glass negative boxes found in an antique shop as a support for his images, which mix photography, text and painting. The title of the work refers to the portraits created by law enforcement authorities, who often incriminate black citizens without evidence, and to the absence of black people in the history of photography.

(Daniele Queiroz) ZUM/IMS Grant 2019

Na espiral do Atlântico Sul [At the South Atlantic Spiral], by Tatewaki Nio (Kobe, Japão, 1971)

During his time living in Tanzania, the Japanese photographer Tatewaki Nio, who now lives in São Paulo, became interested in the relations between Brazil and African countries, particularly in the history of human trafficking. However, this project began to take shape years later, when the artist was living in Salvador. There, he encountered Pierre Verger’s photographs and devoted special attention to a set of houses built by formerly enslaved people who returned to their cities of origin, taking with them the construction methods used in Brazil. With Verger's photos taken in the 1970s and a vague map in hand, the artist returned to Africa in search of the same houses. After mobilizing an extensive network of Brazilian and Nigerian researchers, he found dozens of other buildings with similar characteristics roaming Nigeria and Benin. "In many cases, I only knew the town where the house was located," Nio reveals.

The photographs of these buildings form the first and most extensive part of the work (“Nas pegadas dos retornados” [In the Footprints of the Returnees]), but the research has grown and gained two other series. In "Megacidades” [Megacities], the photographer investigates the encounters and distances between São Paulo and Lagos, a city of nearly eight million inhabitants, on its way to becoming one of the largest in the world. In the third and final part, "Estou aqui, sou daqui” [I'm Here, I'm from Here], he uses photography to promote imaginary reunions between Nigerian immigrants and refugees living in São Paulo and their families in various cities in Nigeria.

(Ângelo Manjabosco) ZUM/IMS Grant 2017

Samba Shiva: as fotografias de Sambasiva Rao Patchineelam [Samba Shiva: The Photographs of Sambasiva Rao Patchineelam], 2017, by Vijai Maia Patchineelam (Niterói, RJ, 1983)

Vijai grew up amid his father’s photographic work, an Indian immigrant who arrived in Brazil in the 1970s and made a career as a geologist and professor at the Fluminense Federal University. With a Minolta camera, Sambasiva Rao Patchineelam intensely recorded the daily life of the profession in expeditions around the world, the Brazilian family, as well as relatives and friends who remained in India, especially in Rajahmundry, his hometown. Growing up, Vijai Patchineelam had the idea of organizing a photobook with pictures taken by his father. "The exchange of roles between artist and editor, on the one hand, and between scientist and author, on the other, is fundamental", says Vijai. In the first few pages, we see a sequence of a boat sailing down a river. Gradually, this tour takes us to larger boats, oceanographic research, and from there, we find the author's life in scenes with other people, places, rocks, and animals. Without proposing a chronological or thematic order, the edition offers many times unexpected approximations. The book also includes an interview with Sambasiva and a text by the art critic Hemant Sareen, which highlights the difficulties that residents of India faced throughout the twentieth century in accessing photographic equipment due to the restrictive policies of the British Empire and the subsequent failure of the local government to favor Indian industry. The result was a scarcity of records during this period, restricted to professional photographers.

(Ângelo Manjabosco) ZUM/IMS Grant 2016

Mestres de cerimônias [Masters of Ceremonies], 2016, by Bárbara Wagner (Brasília, DF, 1980)

Since the mid-2000s, artist Bárbara Wagner has been researching popular culture, especially that related to music and dance. In these photographs, Wagner presents the backstage of the production of music videos of brega-funk, in Recife, and funk ostentação, in São Paulo – musical phenomena that emerged around 2010 with the economic rise of the lower classes and the popularization of cell phones and social networks. Lulled by funk, young people from various capitals started their own careers as MCs in search of social and professional recognition. Clips like those of MC Bin Laden have reached 100 million views on YouTube, breaking through invisible barriers that silenced mass culture. To make his photographs, Wagner approached the production companies Pro Rec, in Recife, and KL, in São Paulo, proposing to collaborate with the artists, often taking the photos used to disseminate the songs. In Recife, miniskirts and low-cut necklines echo brega-funk sensuality; in São Paulo, dollars and vans symbolize São Paulo's ostentation. The new musical culture, nourished by both reality and fantasy, also rose to stardom as a spokesperson for new social values, reducing prejudice, stigma, and the distance between the center and the periphery.

(Thyago Nogueira) ZUM/IMS Grant 2015

Avenida Brasil 24 horas [Brasil Avenue 24 Hours], 2022, a film by Aleta Valente (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1986)

In this documentary feature film, artist Aleta Valente follows the daily lives of acquaintancesand strange rs as they commute along the Avenida Brasil. The most important expressway in Rio is used by the working class and residents of the North Zone to reach the jobs and leisure of the rich South Zone. Valente, who lives in Bangu, has been commuting along the avenue since she was a child. In her debut as a director, interviewer, and character, the artist gives a face and a voice to the population that remains invisible on the drawing boards of urban planning. Heartbreaking stories alternate with curious and funny situations about the need to face tens of miles of traffic jams every day in order to work, study, or play. In addition to exposing the neglect, the director brings together a lucid and irreverent generation that turns their situation into a political strength. Known for her Instagram profile @ex_miss_febem, in which she deals with topics such as drugs, abortion and menstruation, Valente also thinks about the impact of the city on the human body. Pollution, violence, and fear arise as physical and mental aggressions in this work, which lasts as long as a day’s traffic on the avenue.

(Thyago Nogueira) ZUM/IMS Grant 2019

Chão de estrelas [Starred Floor], 2022, by Tiago Sant'Ana (Santo Antônio de Jesus, BA, 1990)

The friction of the official systems of legitimizing memory is one of the cornerstones of the artist's research, who in this work deals with the history of mining in the Brazilian colonial period. The popular sayings linked to the allegedly illegal practices of enslaved people in their search for freedom are the guiding threads that give life to a fictionalized story, building an inventory of escapes that defy the violence of maintaining a system based on serfdom.

In the video Chão de estrelas, Sant'Ana seeks to understand the possibilities of circumventing such systems, building scenarios and new possibilities of memory inscription. The expression "lavar a égua" (literally “to wash the horse”, freely translated as “to hit the jackpot”), on which the video is based, refers to the fact that enslaved people allegedly hid small nuggets of gold in the hair and manes of horses so that they could be recovered when the animals were washed in fountains and rivers. The intention is not to investigate the veracity of the facts, but to construct an alternative narrative, provoking the official iconographic representations, circumscribed within the bonds of power. In the images, the man with his teeth covered in gold leading the horse has control over his reality and representation.

The project was carried out in Mucugê, in the region of Chapada Diamantina, Bahia. By relying on local production – as well as post-production in Salvador –, Sant'Ana also seeks to strengthen the region artistically and economically, updating discussions on the control of image production and the escape from the exoticization of the Other.

(Daniele Queiroz) ZUM/IMS Grant 2021

Publications

Samba Shiva: as fotografias de Sambasiva Rao Patchineelam. São Paulo: ZUM/IMS, 2017
Vijai Maia Patchineelam (Niterói, RJ, 1983)

A água é uma máquina do tempo (Jogo da memória). Boneco de livro, 2020.
Aline Motta (Niterói, RJ, 1974)

A água é uma máquina do tempo. São Paulo: Círculo de Poemas, 2022.
Aline Motta (Niterói, RJ, 1974)

A anatomia da água (livro 1 da série Corpoflor). São Paulo: Author’s edition, 2022.
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (Vitória, ES, 1996)

Postais para Charles Lynch. São Paulo: Author’s edition, 2015.
Coletivo Garapa (São Paulo, SP, 2008)

Videos

Brasil x Argentina (Amazônia e Patagônia), 2017
Audiovisual, 20’45”
Dora Longo Bahia (São Paulo, SP, 1961)

Casulo/palco, 2019 (with the group A Voz dos Usuários)
Audiovisual installation, 30’ e 4’40”
Audiovisual and items
Dias & Riedweg (1993)

Avenida Brasil 24h, 2022
Video, 3h30'
Aleta Valente (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1986)

Themônias, 2021
Video, 23'
Rafael Bqueer (Belém, PA, 1992)

Chão de estrelas, 2022
Video, 8'51"
Tiago Sant'Ana (Santo Antônio de Jesus, BA, 1990)

Estudo I, Pálpebras cansadas, córneas de molho, 2023
Video, 18’12”
Igi Lola Ayedun (São Paulo, SP, 1990)

Nós somos pássaros que andam (with Mariana Lacerda and Patrícia Cornils), 2023
Audiovisual. 3 channels, 17'45"
Glicéria Tupinambá (Olivença Tupinambá Indigenous Land, BA, 1982)

Aline Motta
Hello, my name is Aline Motta, I'm a visual artist. I'm presenting the work A água é uma máquina do tempo in this exhibition of the recipients of the ZUM grant. I started this project in 2018, that was the year I was awarded, and, at that time, the project had another name, Jogo da memória [Memory Game], and after a few years of working, you know, with the themes of this project, its name changed to A água é uma máquina do tempo [Water Is a Time Machine]. This project, it has a video, a book that was published, a fictional book that was published by the publishing house Fósforo and the Luna Park Editions within the circle of poetry. This book, it is available, on display in this exhibition, it was publisged in 2022. it also has a performance. This performance, in fact, is a performative reading of excerpts from the book and behind me, I usually do a video mapping and there’s a video that accompanies my reading, and it's different from the video of this project. So I’ve been doing this research for many years. It is a research, like other projects of mine, that has a lot to do with my family, especially the women of my family. I’ve already been researching this subject for many years, and in this work I'm focusing on Ambrosina, my great-great-grandmother, who was from Bahia. and who came in that wave of Bahians to Rio de Janeiro in the late 19th century. I found documents about her, her death certificate, funeral announcements in the newspaper, and from this documentation I've put together several points about her history. Also, this work makes a reference to the short story “Father against Mother”, by Machado de Assis, because of the many coincidences that link the history of Ambrosina to the story of this story, and also talks about the passing of my mother, which was in 2011, talks a little bit about our relationship as mother and daughter, talks about my experience of being 5 years old and being part of a...being the fruit of an interracial marriage and the consequences of that for my childhood and how it affected me. So it's really a lot of fragments. and I'm presenting one of those fragments in this exhibition. In this case it’s an overhead projector, I bought an overhead projector, I imagine it must have been in 2019 and I started doing various experiments with it. So it's part of the book, from this initial book called Memory Game, which was delivered as the work of the ZUM grant, which is also exhibited in the exhibition, has several photographs, experiences with this overhead projector. Then it connects with the work that I just did, now in 2023, especially for this exhibition, which is this projection on the glass table of the overhead projector and the inverted reflection of the wall. These photographs that appear they're all 3 by 4 cm pictures of my mother, and I'm trying to organize them somehow, with my hands, and I have these lace cuffs, a costume that I also created and which is part of the video, it's part of the performance, it's part of the book, and I'm trying to rearrange these images and these memories.

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro
Hello. I am Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, a visual artist and a psychologist. I hold a Master’s Degree in Psychology and I am also a person destined to the oractice of medicines of Bantu African origin, which originate in Brazil from medicinal and religious schools, such as Umbanda, Candomblé, and Omolokô. I am also a member of a community called Morro da Fonte Grande, where I was initiated into several important cultural manifestations which are the ontological pillars of this Afro-Brazilian Bantu culture coming from the Central African region, especially from what is known as Angola. In 2016, I started the research that offers this work with which you have contact today in 2016. This research is called Corpoflor and it is a research of metamorphosis, change, transmutation, transfiguration over time: so, a photographic research where I interfere in my body from different techniques such as painting, clay, creating prostheses with animal feathers, also with clothes, in short, there are countless possibilities that I have created in my body and also with other people. This is what Corpoflor is about. It is a work that I have been doing since 2016: they are photographs that always differ from the previous one, and over these 6 or 7 years, you can see and feel a change. At the same time, a change in transfiguration, but also a consistency, a connection with all these phases, these images. In 2021 I was contemplated by the ZUM grant edict, whose 10th anniversary we are celebrating on this occasion. For this project that I decided to carry out in the ZUM photography grant, I decided that I would like to do Corpoflor in other people besides myself, to understand this collective dimension that can be created from the flower body, i.e., scenes of collective, communitarian transfigurations, as if it were a pack, a shoal and also because in my work I am usually alone, so I saw this possibility and created a project to travel. I am a black transgender woman and I have an ancestral memory of traffic, of moving, of commuting, so many of my ancestors, as well as my contemporaries, traveled, went elsewhere to escape from something. I didn't want to travel because I was running away from something: I wanted to travel to find something to love, to be happy; so I decided to spend a month in Maranhão, developing works also with black and indigenous people. Therefore, I spent a month in Alcântara. Developing these photographs that was a very beautiful process, a very deep process, of dedication, of trust, because working with the images of others is of an indescribable magnitude and a responsibility for life; and I spent that time in Alcântara, which is a Maroon territory, an indigenous territory, I met several... I met the Quilombo of Itamatatiua, which is a very beautiful quilombo (maroon), which also inspired me to stay alive, and after a moment in Alcântara in Maranhão, I returned to my city, in Espírito Santo and here I am recording this audio. From that time I also developed a work of Corpoflor also in Espírito Santo, in Vitória in 2022, together with Rodrigo Jesus, my assistant for many years, Maxwell Brasileiro, my cousin, and Carol Oliveira, a friend, and at the end I built an anatomy book about these Corpoflores, I made on the beach, in the forest, by the rivers. Here in Vitória I made them at night, on the beach at night, and all the Corpoflores had this dimension of water, so I created A anatomia da água [The Anatomy of Water]: a series of six handmade books where there are texts, drawings done in a unique way in each book, and also the photographs of these 7 years of Corpoflor, including these most recent ones. This great book is presented here. The book measures 48 cm x 33 cm and is displayed in this exhibition. The exhibition has a large, wide dark, black pilaster, because the page of the book, the cover of the book is black and there is a pilaster that you can walk around, and then around it you have the pages printed in a way... Because the book is handmade, so there's no way... As a measure of safety and conservation, there's no way you can touch and pass them, [because] the pages are very fragile, so pictures were taken of each sheet, of each page, and these sheets were printed on another paper, and this paper was arranged in a circular way on this large and wide black pilaster. It is a very beautiful expography that is also part of and corresponds to the circular history, history-crossroads, configuring and forming our processes of change, transfiguration, metamorphosis. I’ve tried to contextualize 7 years of research, so it's very difficult, but it's also a very pleasurable challenge. I hope you can feel Corpoflor from my words. That's it. Have a great visit. Kisses.

Dias & Riedweg
I'm Mauricio Dias, and I’m speaking on behalf of the artist duo Dias and Riedweg. We are the authors and initiators of the video installations Casulo [Cocoon] and Palco [Stage], exposed here. The displacement of these objects which permeate both narratives, both for an empty lot forgotten among the buildings of the city, a non-territory of the urban fabric, and for the theater stage, suggests the idea that madness is a territory that exists only in its temporality. Casulo and Palco focus on the daily life of patients after outbursts, after psychiatric admissions, and in the post-asylum integration process into other non-enclosed spaces. The videos question us on the territory destined for madness in each individual’s perception and in society. The metaphor of the cocoon was chosen to address the issue of the theatrical psychiatric cloister, of isolation as a territory, that, although perhaps necessary, cannot have a predefined or generalized spatiality. The idea is to present the theme of psychiatry as a territory that only exists when it is in a constant state of transformation. All the texts written and read, or said in the videos, are authored by the group A Voz dos Usuários [The Voice of the Users], of the Institute of Psychiatry of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the IPUB/UFRJ. They are: Antonio Carlos dos Santos, Elizabeth Sabino dos Santos, William Carei Matos da Silva, Luiz Eduardo Mendonça de Souza, Maria Aparecida Lopes do Nascimento, Milton Pena de Oliveira Santos, Olga Maria Matos Salazar, Orlando dos Santos Batista, Orlando Vinicius Diasmara de Barros, Renato Moraes Ponte Verissimo, Bernardo de Lima Filho and, in memorian, Antonio Afonso da Costa, Dalila Meira de Azevedo Marques, João Batista dos Santos, and Wilmar Gastão de Carvalho Filho.

Eustáquio Neves
Pretty much all of my projects arise from a restlessness related to issues of memory, identity, my origins, and systemic structural racism. With this project, Retrato falado [Facial Composite], that won the ZUM Photography Grant, I keep insisting on the issues I just mentioned. This essay of mine, Retrato falado, came out of one of those concerns. I accidentally went through my personal archives, family documents, and ran into a total lack of photographic records of my maternal grandfather, the side of the family with whom I had the most contact. It intrigued me a lot, this absence of photographic records of this grandfather and from there I began to inquire with the family, the older ones, about the characteristics of this grandfather, everything about him, and from the testimonies of these family members, I built this facial composite series – hence the name retrato falado. In the material elaboration of this essay I use different features such as photo-painting, drawing, collage and I finish this work in 12 boxes altogether, where each box brings information received from my relatives about my grandfather, then some information that I received, and inside the box, the portrait built from a conception of mine. And this work, it can also be seen as a book.

Garapa
Hello, I'm Paulo Filauer, from Coletivo Garapa, one of the authors of the work Postais para Charles Lynch [Postcards for Charles Lynch], which is an object book on the subject of lynchings in Brazil, more specifically about the images of this type of violence circulating on the internet. The work was motivated by 2 images that circulated a lot in 2014: the video of Fabiane Maria de Jesus, lynched in Guarujá, accused of witchcraft, and the photos of a black teenager chained to a pole in Rio de Janeiro. These 2 images are part of the work. The execution of this work involved an archival research on the depiction of violence, from Debret's engravings on slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, to the twentieth-century postcards of the United States that inspired the title. The term “lynching” comes from the surname of Charles Lynch, a kind of 18th-century American colonel. The book has printed and stitched pages in a steel structure; its dimensions are 17 by 28 cm and 5 cm high. The images were found on the internet, in hundreds of lynching videos that occurred in Brazil and then digitally manipulated. Initially we transformed these images into a text, by opening them in a notepad, which results in a kind of code. Then we inserted hate comments, which we also found on the internet. When this code is saved again as an image, the inserted text causes noise and distortions in color and shape. This technique is called “glitching” in digital art. For example, the first image in the book shows a man's head pressed to the rough ground by a hand that squeezes his neck, but both men’s skin color has a dark green tint, and the edges of the image has also have vertical and horizontal lines, as if the center had been moved alightly to the side. In another image, legs and feet surround a body lying on the ground. A person seems to be about to kick it, but the image is scratched and stained by vivid yellows, oranges and greens. We also intersperse pages that show the process of digital intervention: they contain alphanumeric codes that take up the entire page in symmetrical rows and columns, interrupted at some points by the same hateful comments inserted into the images. One comment, for example, reads: "It’s nice to see a thief being lynched, too bad he didn't die." At the end of the book, there is a script of a fictitious lynching based on real testimonies found on the internet. The script begins as follows: Fade in, scene 1. Street on the outskirts of Barra do Fogo. Outside, day. Images of an unpaved street with small, sparse houses, mostly without plaster. A crowd gathers disorderly. The image is captured in the first person by a cell phone camera that moves unsteadily down the street. The cameraman accompanies the group approaching a mud and straw house on the left side of the frame. Many voices are heard, mixing into an indiscernible noise. The last item in the book is a magnetic tape in LTO format, widely used for backups, fitted to a cutout in the steel frame. On this tape are recorded all the videos used in the search, and it is accompanied by an index with their original titles. For example, the letter A: A chronology of lynching in Guarujá; A cruelty of lynching, lynched woman dies; Accused of burglarizing houses is lynched by residents; Accused of stealing wallet inside the bus is lynched at the terminal of Boqueirão; and so on. To conclude, this work basically wants to discuss how we, as artists, can or should deal with the images of violence. In 2015, there were over 31000 lynching videos only on YouTube. How, then, can we react to this incessant flow? Our conclusion, summarized in this work, is that if we cannot escape from these images, then we must face them with a critical eye and decipher their codes.

Helena Martins-Costa
Hello, my name is Helena Martins Costa. I am a visual artist and a teacher. The starting point of many of my works is the photographic portrait made by amateur anonymous amateur photographers. They are portraits that have been discarded for sale in popular markets, in used bookstores, in archives, and on the internet. My practice over the past more than 20 years has been to search, collect, and archive these photographs that I buy or take. In this exhibition, I present 8 images from the series Desvio [Detour], out of a total 36 that I gathered and worked on during the period of the ZUM Grant. These portraits have as a common characteristic a distortion of perspective, which is considered a mistake resulting from positioning the camera a little too low in relation to the subject photographed. As a result, and contrary to expectations, the subject appears tilted in the image. This idea of error interests me, both for the estrangement it causes, and for the subversion it generates in the sense of the image. During the 8 months of the grant, I searched intensively for these images, which are mostly photographs from the mid-20th century, discarded either because of the disappearance of the families, or perhaps because they contain these errors. They are full-length portraits, originally in black and white, and some of them were colored. The originals are small and already in the process of disappearing. The images, after being scanned, have been manipulated and enlarged to life-size in order to approach the viewer from the original photographer’s point of view, as if they were face to face with those photographed. In this way, a mirror relationship is created, and in this state, its strange diagonal axis is able to affect us and suggest an imbalance in our vertical axis. And these images seem to suggest that this man in the center of the picture, who represents a stable and unchanging world in which everything revolves around him, has been toppled along with all its attributes.

The first portrait is of a black man wearing a suit and shiny shoes. He is standing on a sidewalk, but because of the perspective error, he appears tilted to the left of the viewer. The second portrait is that of a young, brown-haired white woman. She poses standing on the sand of a beach, wearing a short dress with a floral print in shades of pink, and sandals in the same shade. This photograph has been hand-colored with pastel colors. She's smiling, and seems to tip to the right of the viewer. The third portrait is of a white man in a dark suit and hat. The image, originally black and white, has acquired a warmer tone provoked by the action of time. He appears next to a building and he seems to tip over to the left of the viewer. His stature in the picture is equal to that of the building. The fourth portrait is of a military man, he's wearing a white uniform and a dark cap that shadows his eyes. He was photographed in a directional position and the rectitude of the pose makes him look like a tumbling column to the right of the viewer. The fifth portrait is of a teenage girl. She's white, with Chanel-cut hair that falls over one eye. She looks at the photographer, and now at us, with as a firm, direct gaze. Her hands are delicately intertwined over her belly. She's leaning to the left of the viewer. The sixth portrait is of a white woman with short blond hair wearing a dark swimsuit typical of the 1920s. She wears high-heeled shoes. She poses smiling with straight arms extended along her torso. It looks like she's going to tip over to the left of the viewer. The seventh portrait is of a man in a swimsuit. He's white, he's barefoot, he wears sunglasses, has a thin mustache, and wears a kind of cap on his head. He is posing standing on grass, in front of a rural landscape. His body is tilted to the left of the viewer. The last photograph is a portrait of a white man with a mustache. He’s wearing a player's outfit and has his hands hidden in front of the soccer field. This picture was also colorized in the past. He's slightly inclined to the left of the viewer.
Well, I hope this description allows you to open these images in the field of the imaginary. I wish you a good exhibition.

João Castilho
Hello, my name is João Castilho. I'm a photographer, an artist, I work with photography, right on the edge where photographic thinking receives influences and contamination from other artistic activities and other ways of thinking, such as painting, sculpture, literature, and even philosophy. In this exhibition, I'm presenting a series of photographs in different formats, ranging from 60 x 90 cm up to 1 m and 10 x 1 m and 60. There are 16 photographs from a series called Zoo. I developed this series, part of it, in 2014, and the images in this photo essay show… each image, each photograph, shows a wild animal displaced from the environment where it normally lived and taken to a domestic environment. So I worked in partnership with some NGOs and some institutions that receive animals from confiscations, animals that have suffered some kind of mistreatment or have been run over, and these NGOs work in the recovery of these animals. So I worked with them. to make a short commute. We were always looking for an environment that was closest to where the animal lived, so that we could photograph each of these animals in a part of a house, of a domestic environment. So, for example, we can see a macaw on a chair, a brown jaguar lying on a carpet, a monkey on a table, an armadillo in a drawer, a giant anteater on top of a bed, a boa constrictor on top of a couch, a little alligator baby also on a sofa, a fox, a tortoise, a couple of lizards, a rattlesnake on a chair, so it's these images that I've been building throughout this work with the ZUM grant, and the images cause a certain estrangement, a certain short circuit when we look at them, because it’s something that… we don't expect it, whether you like it or not, it's something you don't expect, because it implies an exchange of places, of environments, which for me discusses exactly the idea of a separation, which comes a lot from modernity, between nature and culture. So I think other thoughts that we are currently beginning to access, which are not Eurocentric and colonialist, make us see that the idea of a separation between the beings and their environments, between humans and non-humans, as a separation that hurts more than it helps to think about many of the questions of the moment in which we live on Earth, right? So this work is a little bit about that. Thank you very much. I hope you like it.

Leticia Ramos
What would a place look like where nature began to return to its original form? What would this transient space look like, where man no longer exists, where there is the swinging of the tides, where the landscape is subject to the force of the winds, all the time? The series of works of the project Microfilme [Microfilm] illustrates this movement: the ebb and flow of water, sand, and wind, through past and future ages, in a region in the extreme south of Brazil, the region of Lagoa do Peixe, which was formed exactly by the ceaseless work of geomorphological elements. Microfilm is a near-extinct material, but it is still used for reproduction, preservation, and legal replacement of document originals for physical compression of files, mainly in banking and accounting. By microfilming this film ,I tried to create an original document of this ephemeral and timeless landscape that nature is in charge of conquering day by day. In this exhibition, I'm showing a part of these works that have been done, and the physical space here at Pivô is organized as follows: in front of us is a deep corridor, about 4 meters by one and a half meters wide, which gives a very narrow appearance. On the right there is a large iron frame at the top and the left part and the bottom are painted black. The one on the right side is white. The space projects this vanishing point, which goes to a center of the photograph that takes up almost the entire width of this back wall. It is white and black, is about one meter by sixty centimeters and it is all scratched horizontally, also dotted and with white light stripes in the base of the photograph. The horizon of the image is formed by a flock of birds that changes over these white lines and stripes. The side of the photograph has a narrower white stripe and a gray band, and we can't say for sure what the date of this image is. Each panorama has a kind of border, which gives the impression that the microfilm was printed in its entirety and didn't have any kind of cropping of this image. On the left, there’s another panoramic photograph, Panorama 15. It's quite large, has 2.25 meters by 90 centimeters, and it’s a landscape of a vegetation that’s mainly visible on the sides, and that overlaps because of the long exposure process of a small drive that I did with this lens. It forms an abstract image, but over time we notice a tree, a branch, everything is very subtle. Both images relate a lot to the drawing. These 2 panoramas are framed with a reddish wood, there’ss no glass and that's why we can see the texture of the paper, its shadow and the scratches that are on the microfilm, on the paper, seem to happen in the material itself. It's as if the photographic paper itself had been scratched. On the right, there are 3 sets of smaller photographs. The first group, Meteorites, consists of 4 images of about 20 by 25 cm in size. They are made with direct negative paper, with brilliance. The background is black and in the center there is a kind of rock, all pierced and spongy. The concavities are white. These meteorites are in fact pieces of Styrofoam collected near this region of the lagoon and eroded by time, by the tides, but in the landscape they had this very meteorite aspect, of a volcanic rock. The object was filmed on a micro-camcorder machine and then enlarged on direct photographic paper, which made it look the same like the negative. Each image is the microfilm of one side of these objects. Next, there is a small photograph, about 10 by 15 on a white passe-partout of 20 by 25, also framed with this reddish wooden frame. A Polaroid photograph and all the elements of the Polaroid have been preserved. There is a silky paper around the photographic paper, you can still see a little bit of the photographic chemical stuck on this paper. The image is composed by a very dark grassy soil with blue background and a grid of black lines is on the image. The photograph has a bluish-violet coloration and there is the perception of being something like a device display, a kind of machine, so to speak, that scans this vegetation. Next, we have a microfilm of a plant specimen. This specimen is on a kind of leaf botanical catalog; at the bottom of this sheet there is an unfilled table and, on the left side, 4 perforations. The image also has an entirely violet background, which refers to microfilm files that we usually consult, and this plant species it has somewhat triangular leaves, kind of geometric. It’s white and casts a bright shadow, white too, on this violet background. When we leave this corridor and look again, what you can see that it is a set of documents from a fictional place, a kind of cosmogony of a timeless traveler, showing this perpetual motion of nature.

Rafael Bqueer
Hello, I'm Rafael Bqueer, I’m a visual artist from Belém do Pará, I currently live in São Paulo, I'm a non-binary black queer and I'm 30 years old. In the visual arts I have been developing projects with an emphasis on photography, in audiovisual and performance. For the ZUM grant, I proposed a project entitled Themonias, which stems from my experiences and background as a drag demon artist from the Amazon. The Themonias Collective is a collective that emerged in mid-2014, in the city of Belém, at the parties produced by the production company Noite Suja, and from these parties, which brought together artists of different languages of the city, who began to dress up, drawing on references of the clubber scene, of the cultural festivals of the Amazon, of the musicality of the Amazon, we gradually understood that what we were doing it was much more than drag: it was a monstruosity, it was at the same time a transgression that was not common to what we understood as drag. Then, collectively, a terminology was constructed, that at first was a joke and then it became a statement: yes, we are demons; we are these figures who, viewed from a conservative Christian perspective, we are the sinners, and we are the demonic, or the demonized. So being a demon it is precisely to be this monstrous figure that transgresses the traditional sense of what means to be a drag, and at the same time to be a demon becomes an artistic language, a transgression that comes out of the night scene and goes to museums, to theaters, to art exhibitions, to multiple languages that we began to take, and to understand that from this would come the Themonization. So we started to themonize the scene, not only the drag scene, but the art scene of Belém do Pará and the Amazon. So from all this experience I thought of bringing, for the ZUM grant, a series of 4 short films, produced in Belém and Manaus, scenes that take place with a lot of action soundtracks. They are action scenes where the Themonias star in performances, in scenarios critical of the deforestation of the Amazon, of the violence that the Amazon suffers, not only nowadays, but a secular violence, a critique of the overvaluation of Eurocentrism, with performances that happen, for example, in the Palacete Bologna, which is a mansion from the Belle Époque period, and scenes that also happen in front of Havan store, where Monique Lafon stages a kind of fight against the Statue of Liberty. So they are references that criticize and mock these foreign perspectives, perspectives that are also part of drag culture, that are also part of our global culture, and that we always understand as figures from this territory so dense and so rich, which is the Amazon. So it's scenes that happen as a political statement of the existence of this LGBTQIA+ collective that will complete 10 years of political and artistic existence, and we also have in the exhibition a big photo of about 90 cm by 1 meter and 50. So, a pretty big photo where all 14 Themonias, who are considered the oldest of the group are invited for a kind of family album. But this family album, this photo was taken in the Ver-O-Peso market at 7:00 a.m., in the middle of the scene we did for Hierogritos, which is precisely one of the short films that is part of this saga of the Themonias, and this photo is very symbolic, because we are all there in makeup, dressed up, characterized, and these 14 artists are references for this group. And among them there are trans artists, trans women, non-binary artists, trans men, cis women, showing the diversity of the Themonias collective and the importance of having this narrative also pointed out to the rest of Brazil, as an affirmation of a creative Amazon region, that is politicized and that today has a huge protagonism of this community that is there to themonize the Brazilian art scene.

Tatewaki Nio
Hello, my name is Tatewaki Nio. From my name and my Portuguese pronunciation, you must have noticed that I'm not Brazilian. Yes, I'm Japanese-born, and I’ve been living in Brazil for more than 25 years. The project entitled Na Espiral do Atlântico Sul [At the South Atlantic Spiral] is an artistic and documentary approach on the interrelationship between Brazil and West Africa, specifically Nigeria and Benin, conducted between 2016 and 2018. The photographic production focuses on the historical and contemporary displacement of people between the two regions, as well as on the dynamism itself of São Paulo and Lagos, the two largest megacities of the Atlantic Sul. The project is subdivided into three parts: the first subseries, called As pegadas dos retornados [The Footprints of Returnees], is the result of a search for the houses built by the returned formerly enslaved people to West Africa, during and after slavery in Brazil, or by local followers who imitated the style of architecture. The style of these houses, which became popular in the vast area of the Yoruba region, is known as Brazilian architecture by African scholars. In the mid-1970s, the Brazilian philosopher Mariano Carneiro da Cunha conducted a pioneering two-year study of Brazilian architecture in Nigeria and the Republic of Benin and then asked Pierre Verger to photograph them for the book Da Senzala ao Sobrado, published in 1985. In addition to mentioning the book, I researched the unpublished images at the Pierre Verger Foundation, in Salvador, Bahia. With small samples of Verger's photos in hand, I searched and photographed in Nigeria and Benin the same houses photographed by the French-Brazilian photographer approximately 40 years ago, or houses of the same style. I took photos in Porto Novo, Benin, in Lagos, Nigeria, e in inland cities of the Yoruba region of Nigeria during a 3-week run trip. Most of the images of this subseries were taken with a typographic approach by using a large format analogue panel to capture the details of the houses. The second subseries, Estou aqui, sou daqui [I'm Here, I'm from Here], consists of 6 portraits, diptychs or triptychs of contemporary Nigerian individuals. While one side of the diptych features a full-body photograph of a person in the urban environment of São Paulo, the other side shows the person’s family in Nigeria, photographed in an environment close to their residence, holding the portrait of the person who lives in São Paulo, enlarged to full size. The diptychs present the presence and absence of the characters, and at the same time show landscapes on the move. The third subseries is called Megacities: Lagos and São Paulo. Both are megacities that contain the largest populations of the continents on which they are located. I photographed the cities from a personal perspective and from places where one can feel expressive visual impacts on the landscape, regardless of their historical, political, or economic importance. For the exhibition, I enlarged the images to different dimensions and placed them together to form a large mosaic together. The images are positioned without discrimination by locality. I want to express a dynamic of energy in the Global South megacities, which is very different from the North. I have had the opportunity to visit and live in different regions of the African continent to this day. For an individual born in the Far East, those who were captured by the senses in Africa, especially in childhood, they were striking and shocking. and are forever recorded in my memory and subconscious. The project was a quest that was objective on the subject, but at the same time, it was a subjective rediscovery of ancient memories by my wandering journey in West Africa. I hope you enjoy my project. Greetings.

Trëma
I am Gabo Morales, and together with Philip Redondo, we are the collective Trëma. In this exhibition you will see a project of ours called Memento, produced in 2015. To understand a little about this work, imagine that a person invites you to tell them in detail how your life has been until now. After gathering hundreds of notes about your memories, they use each of them as inspiration to compose an opera, a rap, or a song. Memento is a project about this idea, but instead of sounds, it created images. Together, they form a collection of memories of two foreigners: Congolese Teresa Esamba Senga and Colombian Daniel Alberto Pérez Vázquez. The only thing they had in common was that they had just arrived in Brazil. In this work, their memories are represented by photographs that were conceived, imagined, and created from drawings of hours of interviews with them. They are images that evoke objects, people, places, and experiences from tehir past. To produce this inventory, we went to the countries of origin of each immigrant mainly in search of textures and fidelity that only that territory could express. It's as if in your song we were looking for a timbre that represents the territory where your memories were formed. It is important to remember that even in the pursuit of fidelity, given the complexity of each human being, both memory and photographic art are chronically inconsistent and incomplete. This work has no desire whatsoever to hide this fact. It's not a biography. It's almost impossible to tell the difference between a memory and a projection, so we don't try to make that distinction here. Whether a report was true or false is irrelevant: the important thing is that it was made. Memento starts from the idea that memory and photography complement each other, not in the [sense of being a] faithful copy of the real, but in the nuance, the subtext: they have, each in their own way, a manner of saying more than it seems. In addition, the work tries to find, in the memoirs of two foreigners who are setting foot on Brazilian land for the first time, emotions, images, contexts that may be similar to the ones of those who have lived here in this country all their lives.

Well, now we're going to talk a little bit about the work itself. The work consists of two panels. In each of them, in the center, is the portrait of an immigrant, and around it, as if forming a cloud, we have the images that represent their memories. Each panel also includes text about each character in the project. The tone here is encyclopedic: we prevent our freer interpretation of the memories from coming here and invading this media, because it must serve, as opposed to everything else, as a breather for the viewer and the listener.

How about we talk a little bit about the images from Danny's portrait? Altogether there are 26 photographs in different formats. We have a banana tree wrapped in a yellow mist, a view of a city with a soccer field, a tunnel, a river, a machine gun, there's a man sprawled on the floor in a soldier's outfit. In one of the images, a child is under the bed: she looks at the lens with a look that seems startled. In another, a hospital setting. In a neonatal ICU, a newborn baby sleeps under ultraviolet light. The photo of a woman in a white bra is right next to the [?] of an ice cream. We also have the facsimile of a card with several handwritten notes. The portrait of two children, the face of one of them already totally hidden by the wear of the paper, is just below. In another photo, four objects are arranged on a table lined with a white sheet: a shoe, a crank, scissors, a knife. What memory does each of them represent?

Well, now let's also visit the panel of Teresa Essamba Senga. There are 25 images. Men talking around a table, a city seen from above from two different angles. A bus crossing a bridge. A green suit hanging on a hanger. A stacked radio on the yellow studio background. Just below, an old television turned off, and in what appears to be a series within a series, we have different foods photographed from a perpendicular angle. To the left of this series, a group of people are seated in the hall of a church. On the right, dozens of curious people around a car. In one of the photos, a person poses for a portrait sitting in a blue plastic chair. Her face isn't exactly hidden, but still it seems very difficult to discern her features. Below the portrait with the red background, are the [???] of two statues. There is also a shoe in the aftermath of a fire, the façade of a house, a blackboard scrawled. Below, a photograph of the photograph.

Val Souza
Hello, my name is Val Souza and today I’m going to talk about my research for the ZUM grant and also about the work Venus. My research begins with the question of who Venus is. In this sense, I’ve tryed to move away from this single idea and deepen my thoughts about the grammar of desire and beauty. To achieve this, I built a panel with more than 1000 images of varying sizes and shapes, arranged side by side. This panel is more than 10 meters wide and almost 1 meter and 20 high. This collection of images that I’ve taken from family albums, books, magazines, social networks, to me, they weave for me a kind of atlas, or we can also a kind of inventory. By studying the poses and gestures present and repeated in these images, I was able to create a metaphorical association that matches my portraits and self-portraits with images of, for example, landscape, food, fauna, flora, and slavery archives. All this, because, for me, the pose itself is a monument.

Avenida Brasil 24h, Aleta Valente | Project awarded in the 2019 grant edition
(Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1986)

Aleta Valente debuts as director, host, and character in this documentary about Avenida Brasil, which deals with the relationship between the body and the city along Rio de Janeiro’s most important expressway.

A água é uma máquina do tempo [Water Is a Time Machine], Aline Motta | Project awarded in the 2018 grant edition
(Niterói, RJ, 1974)

Aline Motta combines audiovisual, photography and text in an artist’s book to address family relationships and, at the same time, collective relationships. The artist presents her long-term project, A água é uma máquina do tempo, supported by the ZUM/IMS grant, which deals with the erasures and memories that accompany the Atlantic crossings of black people and black families.

Mestres de cerimônias [Ceremony Masters], Bárbara Wagner | Project awarded in the 2015 grant edition
(Brasília, 1980)

Bárbara Wagner studies popular events, mainly those related to music and dance. In the exhibition, she presents a series of photographs taken during the shooting of brega-funk music videos in Recife and “funk ostentação” in São Paulo, in partnership with the producers Pro Rec and KL.

A anatomia da água [The Anatomy of Water]: book 1 of the series Corpoflor, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro | Project awarded in the 2021 grant edition
(Vitória, ES, 1996)

As an artist, writer, and clinical psychologist, Castiel engages with concepts of Bantu ontology, positing healing as a moment of freedom through notions about spirituality and ancestry. Her artist’s book, composed of photos, texts, drawings and other interventions, tells the experience of a body that moves, no longer for the need to escape or in response to violence, but driven by signs of freedom. The project was done in collaboration with the Maranhão-born artist Gê Viana.

Postais para Charles Lynch [Postcards to Charles Lynch], Garapa Collective | Project awarded in the 2014 grant edition
(São Paulo, SP, 2008)

The collective is composed by journalists and visual artists Leo Caobelli, Paulo Fehlauer and Rodrigo Marcondes. In the artist book Postais para Charles Lynch, the collective discusses the visual representation of lynching in contemporary Brazil, based on an episode of violence in Rio de Janeiro in 2014.

Memento, Trëma collective | Project awarded in the 2015 grant edition
(São Paulo, SP, 2013)

The Trëma collective, composed by photographers Felipe Redondo, Gabo Morales, Leonardo Soares, and Rodrigo Capote, is dedicated to documentary and editorial photography. In Memento, the collective creates photographs based on the memories of Dany Vásquez, from Colombia and Theresa Senga, from Angola, two immigrants who live in Brazil.

Casulo/palco [Cocoon/Stage], Dias & Riedweg | Project awarded in the 2018 grant edition

A duo created in 1993, formed by Maurício Dias and the Swiss artist Walter Riedweg. They participated in the 1999 Venice Biennale, the 2002 São Paulo Biennale and the 2017 Documenta 12 in Kassel, 2017. In recent years they have been developing works on the psychiatric universe. The audiovisual installation Casulo/palco records the daily life of a group of patients from the UFRJ Institute of Psychiatry in order to make visible the territory designated for madness and the new forms of enclosure to which these patients are subjected during psychiatric treatment.

Brasil x Argentina (Amazônia e Patagônia) [Brazil x Argentina (Amazon and Patagonia)], Dora Longo Bahia | Project awarded in the 2016 grant edition
(São Paulo, SP, 1961)

Ph.D. in Visual Poetics from ECA-USP, with a postdoctoral degree in Philosophy from FFLCH-USP. The video installation Brazil x Argentina shows the effects of global warming and the environmental policies of both countries in the Amazon and Patagonia. A recurring question in the artist's work, the work highlights violence – in the form of environmental degeneration – as a consequence of an unsustainable economic and social system.

Retrato falado [Facial Composite], Eustáquio Neves | Project awarded in the 2019 grant edition
(Juatuba, MG, 1955)

A chemist and self-taught photographer, Eustáquio develops a body of work characterized by manipulation and intervention in negatives and copies, through which he addresses the identity and memory of people of African descent in Brazil. In the project Retrato falado, the artist starts from descriptions of relatives, family similarities as well as photographic manipulations. Analogic and digital resources, in order to rebuild the portrait of his grandfather in photographic objects, whom he did not know and whose image does not exist in the family albums.

Nós somos pássaros que andam [We Are Birds who Walk], Glicéria Tupinambá (with Mariana Lacerda and Patrícia Cornils) | Project awarded in the 2022 grant edition
(Tupinambá Indigenous Land of Olivença, Bahia, 1982)

In the film Nós somos pássaros que andam, the artist and teacher Glicéria Tupinambá, also known as Celia Tupinambá, tells her mission of materially and culturally recovering the tradition of the Tupinambá cloaks. The cloak rescue took place on the Tupinambá Indigenous Land in southern Bahia, from images of European museums that today keep the only available samples of these sacred cloaks. The film is supported by filmmaker Mariana Lacerda and journalist Patrícia Cornils.

Desvio [Deviation], Helena Martins-Costa | Project awarded in the 2014 grant edition
(Porto Alegre, RS, 1969)

She is a visual artist, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Photography from the UFRGS Institute of Arts and Master’s degree in Visual Poetics from ECA-USP. In her work Desvio, Helena presents photographs of unknown people, rescued from second-hand bookstores, antique fairs and private collections to identify typologies and question the optical systems of photographic equipment.

Eclosão de um sonho uma fantasia [Outbreak of a Dream, a Fantasy], Igi Lola Ayedun | Project awarded in the 2022 grant edition
(1990, São Paulo, SP)

A self-taught artist, director and founder of the HOA Gallery/Residence and MJOURNAL, she works with painting, drawing, text, video, 3D images, photography and sound. In Eclosão de um sonho uma fantasia, Igi presents images artificially created by artificial intelligence and interpretation programs of brain impulses as a way to overcome the optical limitations of photographic cameras or even the eye system.

Zoo, João Castilho | Project awarded in the 2013 grant edition
(Belo Horizonte, MG, 1978)

He is a visual artist who works with photography, video and installation. He received the Funarte Marc Ferrez Photography Award in 2010 and the Conrado Wessel Art Award in 2008. In Zoo, Castilho photographs several wild animals in household environments, with the intention of “discussing the issues around animality and opening a door for the investigation of what I called the 'human mystery,'” he says.

Microfilme [Microfilm], Letícia Ramos | Project awarded in the 2013 grant edition
(Santo Antônio da Patrulha, RS, 1976)

As an artist and videomaker, Letícia’s artistic research focuses on the creation of photographic apparatuses for capturing and reconstructing images, and the creation of fictions with such apparatuses. In the Microfilme project, the artist records a trip to a wild place, building paleontological evidence from panoramic extensions made with microfilms and Polaroids.

Themonias, Rafael Bqueer | Project awarded in the 2020 grant edition
(Belém, PA, 1992)

Rafael Bqueer, who holds a Bachelor’s degree and a Licenciate from the Visual Arts course of the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), has produced four short films starring members of the Themonias drag queen collective, which is made up of more than 150 people who dress up and perform in Belém’s cultural scene. Bqueer is one of the founders of the collective.

Teatro para o artifício [Theater for the Device, from the Performances para se tornar uma fotografia [Performance to Become a Photograph] series, Sofia Borges | Project awarded in the 2017 grant edition
(Ribeirão Preto, SP, 1984)

Graduated in Visual Arts from the University of São Paulo in 2008, she was one of the photographers nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2010 and 2014. In 2016 she published the book The Swamp. In Teatro para o artifício, Sofia Borges photographs an artistic performance that uses photographs, masks, and collages, to investigate the origins of the world and its visual representations.

Na espiral do Atlântico Sul [At the South Atlantic Spiral], Tatewaki Nio | Project awarded in the 2017 grant edition
(Kobe, Japan, 1971)

A graduated in Sociology from Sophia University in Tokyo, Nio studied photography in São Paulo after living for a year in Salvador, where he discovered the work of French anthropologist and photographer Pierre Verger. His project at the South Atlantic Spiral takes up the theme of the African ebb and flow between the two continents, seeking traces of the presence of freed enslaved people who had returned from Brazil in the architectural style and promoting imaginary reunions between Nigerian immigrants and refugees living in São Paulo and their families in various Nigerian cities.

Chão de estrelas [Starred Floor], Tiago Sant'Ana | Project awarded in the 2021 grant edition
(Santo Antônio de Jesus, BA, 1990)

Tiago is a visual artist, curator and Ph.D. candidat in Culture and Society at the Federal University of Bahia. His work deals with the representation of Afro-Brazilian identities, reflecting on the permanence of colonial structures, structural racism and the dynamics involved in the production of history and memory. Shot at the Chapada Diamantina, Chão de estrelas, examines strategies of escape and liberation strategies in the Brazilian colonial period and discusses how these tactics continue to resonate in the Brazilian visual imagination.

Venus, Val Souza | Project awarded in the 2020 grant edition
(São Paulo, 1985)

Val Souza lives and works between Salvador and Sao Paulo. She has been working with performance since 2012. Her practice includes photography, dance, theater, video and installation. In the project Venus, the artist built a panel with more than a thousand images, tracing the relationships between the different forms of representation of black women – including herself – from the history of colonization to contemporary Brazil.