brasilia, off the map by Cyrille Weiner

 
 

BRASILIA, OFF THE MAP

BY CYRILLE WEINER

Arriving in Brasilia is a strange feeling: an illusionary city that would reveal itself very slowly. From afar, the landscape is flat. Then, above the emptiness, a vibrant shape appears in the bright sun, like a giant model growing up from the ground. The vision speeding faster as the city progressively appears. Unbelievable.

Brasilia is the capital of a vast country. But it is not a city. It is the drawing of a city, a cross in the middle of the desert. An act of possessing a territory, perfectly and globaly achieved from scratch by architect Oscar Niemeyer and urbanist Lucio Costa, under the impulse of president Joscelino Kubitschek.

I came to see a city. I discovered an infinite garden. A wasteland. A suspended space that stretches out of human dimension.
I walked for hours. Off the map and its limits in an urban space that has not yet been conceived for a walker. I met a few men, as my own reflection in a mirror. They walked to the rodoviaria – the main bus station – at the crossing of the two wings of the Plano Piloto.

The public space in Brasilia is the whole territory. Cities’ grounds are covered with ashalt. In Brasilia, despite the sophisticated urban shaping. the red earth does not disappear.

Time is suspended. Life seems to have stopped the shining day of April 21st 1960 : the inauguration day of its new capital, built ex nihilo. Strange scenes of parades of workers, soldiers and officials, between scattered brand new futuristic buidings, like an oversized movie set. A utopia that became real in a thousand days.
Perpetual comeback, perpetual availability for the future.
I came to Brasilia with the feeling of coming back. I left it asking myself if Brasilia exists. It seems to. Not as a myth or a symbol of the modernist utopia, but an available open playground for all the improvisations of all of us.
The real monumentality of Brasilia is its emptiness.

Bio
Photographer born in 1976 and trained at the Ecole nationale supérieure Louis Lumière. His work has been published by numerous international magazines (M Le Monde, Foam, British Journal of Photography, foam, Art Press…) and exhibited at MAC Lyon, at the Rencontres d’Arles, the laurent mueller gallery in Paris and at the Villa Noailles in Hyères. He was the laureate of the Prix Lucien Hervé and Rudolf Hervé in 2012 and the author of Presque île (2009) and Twice (2015). Cyrille Weiner recurrently poses the question of space, and how individuals appropriate themselves to their living spaces, distanced from directives coming from “on high.” Progressively leaving the documentary register, he proposes a universe crossed by fiction, that he establishes with exhibitions, editorial projects and installations.

www.cyrilleweiner.com

 

To Name A Mountain by Alfonso Almendros

 
 

TO NAME A MOUNTAIN

BY ALFONSO ALMENDROS

In the spring of 1863, the landscape-painter Albert Bierstadt, started his second tour across the Rocky Mountains with his friend the American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow.

The story says that during their expedition, the painter was astonished by the view of an enormous mountain. Immediately he made a sketch where a dark grey storm crosses an imaginary horizon of gigantic peaks blown out of proportion. Bierstadt entitled his painting “A storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie” in honor of his traveling companion’s wife. The work was interpreted as a representation of his emotional anguish and the mountain, unnamed until that date, was named Mount Rosalie in honor of the woman that Bierstadt secretly loved.

Most critics thought Mount Rosalie was impossibly high. The painting and Bierstadt’s work seem to talk about desire, but always through the excess and the violation of a reality that only seemed suggestive for the artist when it was conducted by his imagination. His idea of beauty oscillated between the sublime exaltation of his emotions and the calculated effectiveness of the forms. Both contradictory notions though, is it not an audacity and a frustration at the same time to try to reach a summit? Nevertheless, the purpose of naming a mountain is an act charged of poetry. It tells us about the desire of possession and permanence. It reminds us, through creation, of the memory of those we have loved.

Bio
Alfonso Almendros is a Spanish photographer and lecturer living in Madrid. He graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor in History of Art from the University of Valencia, an Associate Degree in Artistic Photography from E.A.S.D Valencia and a MA Photography in Efti Madrid.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions in Encontros da Imagem in Braga, Sala Kursala from the University of Cádiz, the Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico, the King Juan Carlos I Center of New York, Article Gallery in Birmingham or Guernsey Photography Festival and granted in several international competitions like the V Galician Prize of Contemporary Photography, the Roberto Villagraz Grant 2016, the Photographic Museum of Humanity 2014 grant or the Grand Prix Fotofestiwal 2011.

Since 2015, he is a visiting professor at the Instituto Nicaragüense de Enseñanza Audiovisual and the National Cinematheque of Nicaragua, Node Center of Curatorial Studies in Berlin and the IED Madrid.

alfonsoalmendros.com
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ELEGY by Justin Kimball

 
 

ELEGY

BY JUSTIN KIMBALL

Statement
Between 2012 and 2016 I photographed in small, all but defunct towns in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.  Most of them were company towns that relied on natural resources to survive: coal, steel, lumber, paper and farming. These businesses are long gone now, the local economy dried up and blown away. The pictures I have been making in these towns are of the people who live there now, their homes, backyards, the streets and the buildings that once supplied the town its livelihood and economy. While the pictures are about a specific region, they also point to a growing invisible, yet ubiquitous, part of the American landscape. The body of work is meant to pose questions about what happens when things get hard; these are questions about struggle, hope and what it is to be human. These are always important questions, but in this  political moment they are, if possible, even more critical.

-JK



Bio
Justin Kimball was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1961.  He earned a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an M.F.A in Photography from the Yale University School of Art. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographers Fellowship, a Kittredge Educational Grant from Harvard University and the Project Development Grant from Center in Santa Fe NM, he is the author of the monographs Where We Find Ourselves, Center for American Places, Pieces of String and Elegy, Radius Books. His work can be found in numerous museum collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the National Gallery of Art, the George Eastman Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Kimball’s images have been included in such publications as DoubleTake, Harper’s, PDN, Photo Metro, Photograph and Picture magazines. 

Kimball has taught photography for more than twenty years and is currently a Professor of Art at Amherst College in Amherst MA, USA.

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Fade Away

 

FADE AWAY

BY MICHELE PALAZZI

During the past decade, China is experiencing the largest internal migration in its history, involving especially the minorities living in the remote areas of the country. In Guizhou, the poorest province of the China, two million people, mostly from the Miao minority, are being pushed, through economic incentives, to leave their villages situated in isolated mountain and to be relocated into neighborhoods in urban cities, specifically built for them. This ongoing relocation, started in 2012 is expected to end by 2020, according to the local government it will allow the villagers to alleviate their poverty conditions.
The photographic project analyze the loss of identity of the people who chose to abandon their household surrounding themselves of a new extraneous environment, portraying also the daily rural life of those who decided to resist in a traditional world, where everything around them is rapidly fading away.


Biography

The italian photographer Michele Palazzi (b.1984) works with current social issues through a subjective approach, confronting the contemporary man with his origins, through a look that investigates the past in order to interpret the present. He has won several recognitions, among which the First Prize of the World Press Photo Award in the category Daily Life - Stories.
He is currently working on FINISTERRAE, a long term project concerning the southern European crisis and he works as a photography teacher at the Rome University of Fine Arts.

michelepalazziphotographer.com
instagram.com/michele_palazzi/


 

When The Dust Settles

 

WHEN THE DUST SETTLES

BY JOEL JIMENEZ

Joel Jimenez (b. 1993) is a photographer based in San Jose, Costa Rica, currently pursuing a B.A. in Photography while working on personal and collaborative projects.
His work is influenced by the theoretical and conceptual analysis of space and its possibilities to convey human conditions, emotional and psychological states, and how it correlates in a broad sense with social issues in our contemporary society.
Throughout his images, he reflects on the dynamics of identity and memory between people and the environment they inhabit and reveals landscape itself is a practice that constructs, rather than records, the world.

Synopsis

There is a symbiotic relationship between humanity and the landscape, continually evolving, changing and influencing one another; this thought is better understood by the notion of the atmosphere.
Atmospheres can be defined as perceptual states emerging from the resonance between the body’s senses and affective capacities, and the spatial and material qualities of a place.
This approach to the study of place and man is concerned with the psychological and emotional stimulus that arise from that dynamic.
Even though sociological and ecological issues are represented throughout the series, they are the outcome of subjective processes related to affections manifested through phenomenological discourses of time, memory, and identity imprinted in space.
These traces of human intervention deal with themes of longingness, solitude, and nostalgia in contemporary society, through ambiguous and elusive imagery that respond to the personal experience of the land we inhabit.


Website: http://joelrjimenez.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joelr.jj/

 

Totem

 
 

TOTEM

BY FRANKY VERDICKT

Franky Verdickt, born in 1971 in Belgium and author of two books “The South Street Village” and “Nobody Likes To Be Hindered by Worldly Troubles“, mixes documentary photography with conceptual ideas. His work suggests a thin line between reality and fiction. His personal work has been awarded and published internationally.
Later this year, he will publish his third book on the ambivalent situation of Taiwan.

The project of TOTEM examines the notion of living as the fundamental key experience that opens and unlocks other experiences. It’s the co- existence between man and reality and is the most fundamental of human existence, it creates a frame where in all becomes possible. Living can not be seen as an activity, but is foremost the symbolic transformation of the endless time into history, to create the wild and nameless nature into a world. Living in this undefined space means to create a center, to mark a point, a topos, to create a place to whom one can connect. From that moment the totem is placed, the space is structured, one can leave and return, and can be at home in a human world.

T O T E M shows how men create a place for living. Before these places became into living places, they were farm fields or wastelands outside the nearest town or city. Now they are a sort of urbanized countryside, pretending to be still rural.They seem like 21st century tribal settlements.These places should give identity and create a sense of community, where commuters charge their being-at-home or share the same park.

The images were taken in the Egyptian desert, Jewish settlements in the Westbank, Belgium, Azerbaijan, Brazil and China.

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CLOSED CITIES

 
 

CLOSED CITIES

BY GREGOR SAILER

SYNOPSIS
Closed Cities (2009–2012)

In his impressive photo series Gregor Sailer examines the forms taken by closed cities in Siberia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Chile, Algeria / Western Sahara and Argentina. The term closed city was originally coined for the Soviet Union, where, for various reasons, the existence of numerous towns was long kept secret. Some of them were not officially "opened up" and added to maps until the early years of this century. Even today, there are still artificially created urban zones across the globe that are hermetically sealed off from the outside world either by walls or by the hostile landscape that surrounds them. These might be places where raw materials are extracted, military sites, refugee camps – or gated communities for the affluent. Such time-limited forms of urban settlement strikingly illustrate the turning point humanity is facing at the beginning of the 21st century in view of dwindling resources, climate change, political conflicts and the yearning for unqualified security.

BIOGRAPHY
Gregor Sailer was born in 1980 in the city of Tyrol, Austria where he currently lives and works.
Between 2002 and 2007, Sailer studied communication design, with a focus on photography and experimental film, at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Germany).
In 2015 he was granted his master’s degree in photographic studies from the same institution. He has since received numerous international awards and produced several publications and exhibitions in New York, Washington D.C., Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Barcelona, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.

CONTACT
info@gregorsailer.com

 

Paradise Fell

 
 

PARADISE FELL

BY DARSH SENEVIRATNE

Synopsis
Being raised by a Sri Lankan father meant pieces of his culture were scattered throughout our home and daily life. It has been strange but intriguing to watch how all these parts of my upbringing are now weaving their way into my everyday interactions in the cultural climate of Australia.

Drawaing inspiration from William Christenberry’s musings of rural Alabama and Lyndal Iron’s raw documentation of Sydney’s notorious Parramatta Road, my series “Paradise Fell“ aims to capture a portrait of my father’s home country of Sri Lanka - a nation struggling to define themselves in a post-war economic climate.

In only my second visit to Sri Lanka, I began a photographic exploration of the effects that the civil war and tsunami had on the landscape and its inhabitants. With an aim to visit wartom Jaffina in the north, and surfing hotspot Trincomalee and Arugambay on the east, my father and I retraced a route he had travelled with his family fifty year prior. Many areas we visited were quite sensitive: roofless, shells of houses with years of vegetation regrowth claiming back the structure; abandoned factories still manned by military checkpoints; parts of the city still inaccessible.

In a way, Sri Lanka is the quintessential battler. Rebuilding a society, both physically and psychologically, after a twenty-six year civil war and a deadly tsunami that killed over thirty thousand people is no simple task. Add to that the exponential influx of tourism and the economic politics it brings, and you have a country struggling to focus on the necessities, neglecting their people, and falling to rebuild what was so violently taken away.
Sri Lanka is going through a rapid development that it is not que ready for, and to this I wanted to turn a camera to further explore with an open-minded, positive conscience, and to shoot with respect and purpose.

Artist Statement
Darsh Seneviratne is a twenty-four year old photographer specialising in series-based work. With a passion for documentation and collection cultivated from a young age, his series range from being compiled over a few days to several years. Drawing on technical knowledge founded in traditional analogue photography, Seneviratne documents personal spaces and their inherent human interactions, collecting momentary happenings and structured portraits. These scenes compile series that seek to highlight the lasting traces of people. With a thorough focus on colour and image structure, and bound by the precision of accuracy demanded by analogue technology, Seneviratne creates these series to serve as a reflection of human interaction with per- sonal and public realms and how we perceive them.

Contact
darsh.seneviratne@gmail.com
www.cargocollective.com/darsh
@darshmallos

 

Una Provincia

 
 

UNA PROVINCIA

This work is a journey into my daily landscape, to smaller places - areas where changes take place slowly and where ties to the past are evident. 

The series is the result of an exploration of the northern area of Lazio, where I was born and where I live. This territory, located on the borders of Rome, has undergone, like many other Italian provinces, many changes over the years, mainly due to the transition from the agricultural model to the industrial one.

The series aims to investigate the characteristic aspects of the places and its transformations creating images in balance between the real landscape and its representation.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michele Vittori (Roma, Italy, 1980)  is a photographer specialized in landscape documentary photography,  he began studying photography in 2008 attending “Graffiti” school and “Officine Fotografiche” in Rome. 

Since 2015 he has been a contributor for the “Limine” collective, with his photographic series entitled “La montagna di Roma” . The project developed under the supervision of Massimo Siragusa, has been presented at “Officine Fotografiche” and is published in limited edition. 

Since 2017  he has contributed to “Lo stato delle Cose”, a project to document the earthquake of 2016 in the center of Italy.

He is currently continuing his photographic research between Rome and the central Italian Apennines.


Connect:

https://www.instagram.com/mhlvittori/

https://www.michelevittori.com/



 

Z-AXIS

 

Z-AXIS

BY CHAN HONG YUI CLEMENT

Born in Hong Kong in 1992, Chan Hong Yui Clement is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Savannah College of Art and Design. Chan connects photography to the larger field of art. He believes that a photograph is not a duplication of reality, but a subjective interpretation of it. In 2014, Chan was selected as the winning candidate of New Light V - an annual program that is organized by Lumenvisum and sponsored by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council to support talented young artists and provide them with an opportunity for a solo exhibition.


synopsis
Hong Kong is situated on a hilly and mountainous terrain. Because of the lack of natural flat land, Hong Kong simply does not have the prerequisite to be designed into a grid system - a town planning method that is found in many other world cities such as New York. According to the Hong Kong Planning Department, about 47% of the land in Hong Kong lies above 100 mPD. Almost half of Hong Kong therefore has to be built on uplands, resulting in what is commonly known as a multi-level urban design.
Z-Axis aims at documenting the type of multi-level urban design that is shaped by the hilly and mountainous terrain in Hong Kong. Z-Axis, in mathematical terms, refers to the depth of an object in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Looking into the Hong Kong urban landscape along the Z-Axis, one can gain more understanding of (i) how the topographical factor impacts Hong Kong people’s habitation and (ii) to what extent the land has been altered in an attempt to adapt to the natural environment.
Through observing the Z-Axis the interrelationship between factor (i) and (ii) can be visualized and understood.

editor's note
Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers.

 

VOLUNTEERS

 

VOLUNTEER

BY PAUL SEAWRIGHT

Paul Seawright (born 1965, Belfast, lives Belfast) studied  at Foundation of Art, University of Ulster, Belfast. He took BA on Photography Photography Film and Video - West Surrey College of Art & Design (Tutors Paul Graham and Martin Parr) and a PhD at University of Wales. He is Professor of Photography at the University of Ulster, and was formerly Dean of Newport School of Art, Media and Design at the University of Wales, Newport, United Kingdom. He was awarded a personal chair by the University of Wales in 2001, and is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, Royal Ulster Academy of Arts and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Seawright is a Council member of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Vice President of the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts.

Paul Seawright is both an artist and academic within the world of contemporary photography. An accomplished author who has seen his series published and exhibited internationally. His extensive and inspiring work is mostly characterized by an artistic strategy that undermines the obvious and many times depoliticizes images, creating diverse series focused on troubled or conflicting situations that encourage viewers to see and understand those realities in new ways. Many of his projects could be highlighted, and there is a consistent strategy and conceptual framework on his work that can be traced to his earlier series i.e. Sectarian Murder (1988).

Much of Paul Seawright projects i.e. Invisible Cities (2002), Volunteer (2010) and others alike call our attention to the core of many contemporary individual or collective political, social, cultural and economic problematic boarders and boundaries, which seem for many people invisible.

Volunteer is a survey of sorts, photographs from today's fraying, centreless post 9-11 North American cities. Each photograph made at the location of a military recruiting station, where a different battle is being fought – to find young men and women to volunteer for service in Afghanistan. Starting in Texas, the highest recruiting state in the US, Seawright visited over 500 military recruitment offices in fifteen states. These new works comment not just on the ongoing war and the battle to recruit new soldiers, but the contemporary North American city, a landscape littered with thrift stores, gun dealerships, fast food outlets, nightclubs, car dealerships beneath super-sized American flags, strip malls and pawn shops.  It is in these spaces on the margins of small towns and cities that the recruiters look to find the volunteers of tomorrow.
Southern states account for 36 percent of the nation's young adults, according to the Department of Defense, but provide 41 percent of the nation's recruits. Texas is the top state in the South, supplying about 10 percent of military enlistees each year. The services sign up between 280,000 and 300,000 new soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines annually and, typically have little problem hitting their numbers. In 2010, for the first time, the four largest branches of the armed forces- the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, comfortably exceeded their recruiting goals. About 99 percent of enlistees have a high school diploma, and scores on the military entrance exam are the highest in the history of the all-volunteer force. in Paul Seawright’s “Volunteer”

A more recent case in point of this is his ongoing project The List (2014), a series that deals with an invisible America: the non-places where those convicted of sexual offences have to live and work. Thus, viewers of Paul Seawright work are first intrigued by his enigmatic imagery and then led to search for the meaning of his series and vantage point discovering the several layers of meaning behind the images.

 

THE GREAT ESCAPE

 

THE GREAT ESCAPE

BY RICARDO DOMINGUEZ ALCARAZ


My work is focused in my physical environment, whatever be urban or natural. It is essential for me to be able to investigate this environment because I consider it a key for know better ourselves as society and, thus, myself.
I think it is important to know where you move daily and why your surroundings are like that and what kind of importance have them for your own life, your social relationships, your way of thinking or for your own identity. For all this reasons I’m interested in our environment, I’m interested in the way it affects us and in the way it marks us. I’m interested in the way it is used, for what and why, whatever be seen in a public point of view or in a private point of view. I believe that the environment determine us, but we are who build it, who decides to use it in a certain way or who leaves ourselves in what these environment propose. Our near and quotidian surroundings are both built and imposed.
For these reasons I believe in the importance of investigate our surroundings. They are a reflection of us, as individuals and as society. And, thus it, is how ourselves can be seen, how we can see our fears, actions or uses. I think is the best way to know better ourselves: through our track into our own territory, whatever it be physical or cultural or emotional.
My work method always begins with a key question: “why”. Through it, is developed all the investigation of the photographic subject, as well in the conceptual way and in the visual way. This question is complemented with another of how, for what, in what sense, why this way, … so I can get a complete vision of the environment that I’m working.
After that I have to feel this environment in first person, which cost some time, but it is essential in order to get of them all what can be give. The method is simple: walk, walk and walk. I think is the best way of realise how is the environment and appreciate it, so you can talk about the atmosphere, of what is heard, how it smells and, then, you can feel more intensely what you could see. For me, walking through these places is essential in order to talk properly of them through images.
On the other side, being a graduate in History of Art helps me to ask the point question, helps me in the search of a new points of view and helps me to appreciate the pictures can be done. The Photography, in addition, works for me not only as a language or as a tool, but as a way of being, of life and to see the world. For me it is not a job, it is my way of life, my way of being. I can’t understand the world without a camera, without being able to take photos. Even, it is therapeutic for me, because through the pictures I can understand better our environment, our society and myself as a human being.

Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz


sinopsys
the Great Escape talks about you, about me, about us as a human beings. Talks about our past, present and future. Talks about our fears and hopes, about the absences, about the melancholy, about your life and what to do with it. Talks about the need of find a way, about the need of find the serenity.
They are pictures of yourself in front the need to be yourself. They are pictures of questions that require an answer. They are pictures of your own life, of your own soul.
They are pictures where you, simply, are.

 

THE DISCONNECTED LANDSCAPE

 

THE DISCONNECTED LANDSCAPE

BY NICOLÒ SERTORIO

 

This series evolved from driving alone for thousands of miles in the American Southwest over the last few years. Here I noticed how the scarcity of the natural element makes human interventions particularly evident.  

I explore our relationship with the perceived natural environment: 'nature' is not the ideal postcard void of human presence, but more realistically the 'outdoor' views we experience when moving from one place to another. This new modern landscape cannot be separated from human constructs. Epitomized by 'the road'; freeways, overpasses, vehicles, ads, poles, and signs are what we truly experience. We look at them every day and yet we choose not to see them. We experience them without acknowledging them. And in so doing, we perpetuate our disconnect: nature as something external, to exploit, and at our service. We work against nature instead of within it.

 

About the author:

Nicolò Sertorio (1968, Princeton NJ USA) is an internationally exhibited artist with over 15 years of experience in visual storytelling.  

Sertorio works in fine art and commercial photography, mixed media, collaboration, and conceptual art. His photos directly respond to the surrounding environment by emphasizing aesthetics and everyday experiences. Sometimes radiating a latent violence, these photographs show through their disconcerting beauty multiple layers of meaning. With his conceptual approach, Nicolò Sertorio investigates the dynamics of 'landscape' and how we relate to the environment around us based on cultural and social assumptions.  

In past years he has lived for long periods of time in Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, India, Germany and United States. Sertorio has thus a cosmopolitan understanding of contemporary issues that makes his perspective unique.  

Sertorio's work has won several important awards, including American Photography 33+32+30+29, International Color Awards 2016-15-14-13, International Landscape Photographer of the Year top 101, Prix de la Photo Paris, PDN Photo of the Day, The Center for Fine Art Photography 'Portfolio ShowCase 6', Photo Week DC International Awards, among others.  

His work has been featured in Wired Magazine, LensCulture, Kontura Art (Croatia), Domus, AdWeek, Fraction, Time, Curator, Format, Nacional (Croatia), Fast Company, Feature Shoot, Google ChromeCast, AIGA, Wacom, ViewFind, and many more.  

In 2017 and 2015 Nicolò Sertorio was recognized and selected as Critical Mass Top 50. In 2016, solo exhibitions traveled across US (Philadelphia) and Croatia (Koprivnica Art Gallery, Split Diocletian Palace, Virovitica Castle) museums.

Sertorio's works tell a story about the effects of the interaction between self and others. His series are notable for their conceptual nature and the grand humanistic themes in his approach.  

Nicolò Sertorio currently lives and works in Oakland (CA), USA. He is board member for PhotoAlliance.

Site: http://nicolosertorio.com

 

TESTEMUNHO OU CHACADO

 

TESTEMUNHO OU CHACADO

POR ADRIANO PIMENTA

 

"Chacado - ap.m.ant., de (Xahâda) "Testemunho (da fé islâmica)"  

Adalberto Alves, Dicionário de Arabismos da Língua Portuguesa - Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, Instituto Camões  

Vivi 4 anos na Arábia Saudita. Estas 14 imagens testemunham alguns dos elementos fundamentais da cultura, história e território saudita. Os seus erros e suas mudanças.     

Não são um julgamento fotográfico, mas sim um relato duma fé que esconde as suas contradições. O deslizar e levantar do véu é reclamado por uma nova abordagem na elevação da cultura saudita, livre das restrições interpretadas no livro sagrado.    

Estas imagens simbolizam uma vivência de alguém que aprendeu a observar através da sua máquina fotográfica a singularidade de uma nação, através dos elementos visíveis e invisíveis, que marcam a sua cultura, história e território.    

Nestas 14 imagens o testemunho da solidão é tão presente como a fé para uma nova abordagem.        

Adriano Pimenta                      

Porto, 26 de Fevereiro de 2018

 

About the author

Adriano Pimenta nasce no Porto em 1968. Estuda Arquitetura na Universidade do Porto tendo-se graduado em 1994. Trabalha entre 1992 / 2007 no gabinete do Arquiteto Souto de Moura. Em 2007 funda o seu escritório Adriano Pimenta Arquitetos Lda. Entre 2013 e 2017 vive em Riade, Arábia Saudita, onde trabalha como consultor para a Linha 1/2 & 3 no desenvolvimento do projeto e construção do Metro de Riade.

Em Maio de 2011 é convidado a integrar a revista multimédia Flânerie no 2, editado pela fotografa Susana Paiva, com o trabalho em telemóvel intitulado “IntantI” para o capitulo “Lomoville | Life throught Plastic Lenses”. Em Dezembro de 2015 ganha o 1.º prémio na 6ª edição do Art Jameel Photography Award (AJPA), uma competição fotográfica envolvendo os países parte do Médio Oriente e com a orientação de descobrir fotógrafos emergentes. Em 21 de Março de 2017 publica na revista multimédia norte americana Bosco Magazine. Em Maio de 2017 é escolhido para ser parte integrante da revista “Not For Print, Issue 2” sob o tema “Resist” integrante na plataforma digital ELLO e patrocinado pela empresa Holandesa WeTransfer. Em Janeiro de 2018 é parte de uma exposição coletiva no Dubai “Saudi Seen”, uma nova geração de fotógrafos presentes no Reino da Arabia Saudita pelo Project Space Art Jameel. Em Janeiro de 2018 recebe a Menção Honrosa no Prémio FNAC, Novos Talentos 2017.

 

TERRAIN VAGUE

 

TERRAIN VAGUE

BY ANA BORGES

Ana Borges nasceu em 1987 no Porto, Portugal, onde vive e trabalha.
Em 2010 terminou a licenciatura em Pintura - Artes-Plásticas pela Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto.
Atualmente encontra-se a concluir o Curso Profissional de Fotografia no Instituto Português de Fotografia do Porto.

synopsis

Terrain Vague, conceito que nomeia este trabalho, define, pelas palavras de Ignasi de Solà-Morales, espaços expectantes, (...) mais ou menos indefinidos nas periferias difusas. São manchas de “não-cidade”, espaços ausentes, ignorados ou caídos em desuso, alheios ou sobreviventes a quaisquer sistemas estruturantes do território.(1)
As ruas e estradas fotografadas são o arranque de novas infraestruturas, espaços de expectativa, são também, lugares de ambiguidade e de indeterminação, de instabilidade e de incerteza que apenas garantem a metamorfose, em infinitas possibilidades, da malha urbana.
Este trabalho pretende representar uma espécie de “Outro" da cidade onde se questiona, através do distanciamento, um processo de apropriação acrítico. Estas imagens procuram colocar o indivíduo/espectador num espaço, físico e mental, cujo modo de percepção vai passar além dos limites desse mesmo espaço, criando uma oportunidade de alternância, de utopia, de distância para a contemplação, que não deixa de ser parte integrante da cidade. Procura uma compreensão do espaço urbano como um território vivo, em metamorfose, que responde e respira a diferentes estímulos. Estas ruas e estradas são como o repertório do potencial, do hipotético, do que não é nem foi nem talvez seja alguma vez, mas que poderia (ou pode ainda) ser.(2)


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(1) Ignasi de Solà-Morales in "Terrain Vague" in "Anyplaces", 1995
(2) Italo Calvino in "Visibilidade" in "Seis Propostas para o Novo Milénio", 1988 (a expressão entre parêntesis - ou pode ainda? - não pertence ao texto original)

 

TEEDOFF

 

TEEDOFF

BY ARTUR LEÃO


Teedoff is a photography series communicating the intimate relationship I was able to establish with Ireland in a recent trip. As I explored the country, I could feel the pulse and rhythm of the whole landscape in a much significant way and with an enormous intensity. The train journey enabled me to be immersed and enthralled by the immensity of Ireland´s East and West territory, something that helped me to capture its essence. The spontaneous and surprising nature of the photographs in this project mirrors the passion to know these spaces and of how they became vital inside me in an urgent way. Thus, the spectator is invited to travel in a deep and enigmatic way through the rivers, cliffs and architecture in a space covered by mysteries and ancient traditions where all the elements suggest a necessity to create a story.


About the author
Artur Leão was born in Porto 1997,graduating at Esap on the  course of Artes Visuais Fotografia. First collective, exhibition July 2017 in Esap. Three Photobooks accomplished. Video Clip created for Benthik Zone.

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ROSE COQUILLAGE

 

ROSE COQUILLAGE

BY ELISE BOULARAN

 

Elise Boularan is a photographer born 1984, Narbonne, France who has a Master’s degree in Creation and Artistic Research from the University of Toulouse, having studied photography at the Toulouse School of Photography.

Pursuing a career as a photographic artist, her work is extraordinarily powerful for its calm and enigmatic aesthetics. Time seems to stop with her images and there is a powerful rhythm on her series that draws our attention for its profound interiority and quietness. The work of Elise tries to respond in an enchanting way to life´s secrets, creating photographs that allow for truth to appear as a process of emotion and thought.

She has been published extensively and has exhibited in Europe and the USA, notably in Madrid, Denmark, and New York, as well as the French Institute of Ukraine, The Museum of New Art (Mona) and The Russell Industrial Center (Mona Detroit) in Detroit; the Instituto Cultural de México, San Antonio, Texas Hill Country, Usa. Her work is in several private collections.

Her preoccupations concern the human reality of our time, trying to reveal what can be secret at the individual’s as in the works Rose Coquillage, Vapors or Ça reste. With Boulard´s photographic series the viewer is constantly trying to find the meaning of the juxtaposed images, as well as the poetical relation between the series and the titles.

Around My Legs and Désœuvre(ment) seem series more related with space, architecture and territory. The non-spaces of Auge (Désœuvre(ment) and then the way the territory is punctuated by man´s constructions and infrastructure that have an economic and cultural logic that confronts nature (Around My Legs) are also powerfull aesthetic visual narratives of contemporanity and its contradictions.

 

Pedro Leão Neto

 

PLANTALTO BARROSÃO

 

PLANTALTO BARROSÃO

BY SÉRGIO ROLANDO

Sérgio Rolando studied in IPF, holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication and a Master degree in Documental Photography and Cinema by Polytechnic Institute of Porto, ESMAE in Portugal. He is currently working as a freelance photographer and Documentary Photography lecturer in Polytechnic Institute of Porto, ESMAE.

He exhibits on a regular basis and has a great deal of published work. Is much focused on our territories and how they are transformed and appropriated. Between document and fiction, the work of this author gives us a mapping of contemporary life governed by technology, political and economic forces, and how territories are transformed and appropriated by man.

Sérgio Rolando’s “Planalto Barrosão” puts into question the traditional idea of the protected rural landscape of the Barrosão Plateau, while this territory emerges as a cultural (un)built space, permeated by a set of conflicting transformations. The conflict between identity, heritage and protected rural landscape is a challenge that Sérgio presents through images that reveal various infrastructures that tear the landscape apart, and many built elements – unfinished buildings and other architectures – representative of our concrete-made economy and our culture of blindly importing models. Sérgio also adopts an artistic strategy that draws attention to the conflicts of nature and the destruction/transformation of the environment by man, choosing viewpoints and patterns that reinforce the visual and abstract qualities of these landscapes.

Pedro Leão

Maria Neto