This group includes photographs in which the Amazon rainforest is the main character, highlighting its flora and the life that emerges in symbiosis with the vegetation. Fungi, leaves and dew appear in the foreground, evidencing Claudia Andujar’s experimentalism with films, filters and photographic manipulations.

This group includes photographs in which the Amazon rainforest is the main character, highlighting its flora and the life that emerges in symbiosis with the vegetation. Fungi, leaves and dew appear in the foreground, evidencing Claudia Andujar’s experimentalism with films, filters and photographic manipulations.

This group includes photographs in which the Amazon rainforest is the main character, highlighting its flora and the life that emerges in symbiosis with the vegetation. Fungi, leaves and dew appear in the foreground, evidencing Claudia Andujar’s experimentalism with films, filters and photographic manipulations.

This group includes photographs in which the Amazon rainforest is the main character, highlighting its flora and the life that emerges in symbiosis with the vegetation. Fungi, leaves and dew appear in the foreground, evidencing Claudia Andujar’s experimentalism with films, filters and photographic manipulations.

This group includes photographs in which the Amazon rainforest is the main character, highlighting its flora and the life that emerges in symbiosis with the vegetation. Fungi, leaves and dew appear in the foreground, evidencing Claudia Andujar’s experimentalism with films, filters and photographic manipulations.

This group includes photographs in which the Amazon rainforest is the main character, highlighting its flora and the life that emerges in symbiosis with the vegetation. Fungi, leaves and dew appear in the foreground, evidencing Claudia Andujar’s experimentalism with films, filters and photographic manipulations.

In Máscara de Punição [Mask of punishment], Eustáquio Neves started from an old portrait of his mother on which he carried out several physical and chemical interventions. The most striking of the interventions is the superimposition of the image of a metal mask, known as the punishment mask, or tinplate mask. The object was used as instruments of disciplin and torture during the Brazilian slavery period. The object prevented enslaved people from ingesting food, drink or dirt – a common method of suicide.
According to Eder Chiodetto, in the series Neves “reflects on contemporary forms of silencing the black population”.

About “Abdiáspora do Nascimento (2022) is a tribute to Abdias do Nascimento’s arrow/serpent’s tongue in “Oke Oxossi” (1970), which points over the Brazilian flag, like a pointer, that the future is just a point in the forced path of western time.
Crossing Odé’s cry, the diaspora is a cut, a nation’s identity that paradoxically forges itself at all times as hunt and hunter. It’s where Abdias is one of my biggest references. May the black diaspora become a cardinal point.”
-André Vargas

In this work, the objects evoke the presence of the invisible. It is possible to imagine, by the arrangement of the paintings, the body of two people sitting on the benches and using the objects that orbit them. They are objects of religious use by the pretos velhos, but which refer, as it should be, to the culture and customs of the enslaved black peoples in Brazil.
The work is done with raw cotton rags, pencil and coffee. With that, Vargas elaborates a construction that makes use of some of the most recognized commodities of the period of slavery in Brazilian lands – coffee, cotton and sugar – and, not by chance, products that tell the story of his ancestors who were forced to work in mills that had these plantations.

Edgard de Souza’s vases are representations of decorative and domestic objects. Imbued with strangeness, they become reservoirs manufactured in skin and fur, suggesting something intimate or visceral, like bodily orifices.

In Arturos, Eustáquio Neves portrayed a black community reminiscent of Arturos’ Quilombo, in Contagem, Minas Gerais. The accumulation of interventions in the images registered in Arturos reflects what the critic and curator Eder Chiodeto called “Photographic Thickness”. This “thickness” can be seen in the images as overlayings and perimeters around the main images.
A chemist by training, Eustáquio Neves works from matrices that receive many interventions before reaching the final images for printing. These layers signal the ancestral traditions that are behind documentary records.

In Arturos, Eustáquio Neves portrayed a black community reminiscent of Arturos’ Quilombo, in Contagem, Minas Gerais. The accumulation of interventions in the images registered in Arturos reflects what the critic and curator Eder Chiodeto called “Photographic Thickness”. This “thickness” can be seen in the images as overlayings and perimeters around the main images.
A chemist by training, Eustáquio Neves works from matrices that receive many interventions before reaching the final images for printing. These layers signal the ancestral traditions that are behind documentary records.

The plant, which in France is known by the name “Langue de belle-mère”, in Portuguese is called “Espada de São Jorge” [Saint George’s Sword], or, as we see in the cults of religions of African origin in Brazil, “Espada de Ogum” [Ogun’s Sword] and it is generally used in homes as an amulet, a plant that is capable of removing energy from the house, because it has the strength of the holy warrior and the general Orisha.
São Jorge and Ogum are syncretized in Umbanda, the most popular syncretic religion that emerged in the early 20th century in Rio de Janeiro, which makes the feast of the Catholic saint one of the most frequented and ecumenical in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

There is a traditional Peruvian clay modeling technique for building water-powered sounding vases. Maneno Llinkarimachiq, a renowned ceramist from the Chulicana community, has created, on an unprecedented scale, three pairs of these in different sizes. They are manually activated by a mechanism similar to a seesaw. The liquid in their interiors pushes the air out, which in turn blows the whistles located in the upper part of the structures. They are traditionally decorated with birds’ heads. This fact contributed to the title given to the work.

There is a traditional Peruvian clay modeling technique for building water-powered sounding vases. Maneno Llinkarimachiq, a renowned ceramist from the Chulicana community, has created, on an unprecedented scale, three pairs of these in different sizes. They are manually activated by a mechanism similar to a seesaw. The liquid in their interiors pushes the air out, which in turn blows the whistles located in the upper part of the structures. They are traditionally decorated with birds’ heads. This fact contributed to the title given to the work.

The series O Encomendador de Almas [The Soul Commissioner] was produced from the meeting between Eustáquio Neves and Crispim Veríssimo at Quilombo Ausente, in Serro, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Mr. Crispim, as he is known, has the task of freeing the souls of the dead in the quilombo so that they can walk their spiritual paths. Eustáquio’s images are built in pairs that reaffirm the relationship between people, territory and tradition in Ausente.

The series O Encomendador de Almas [The Soul Commissioner] was produced from the meeting between Eustáquio Neves and Crispim Veríssimo at Quilombo Ausente, in Serro, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Mr. Crispim, as he is known, has the task of freeing the souls of the dead in the quilombo so that they can walk their spiritual paths. Eustáquio’s images are built in pairs that reaffirm the relationship between people, territory and tradition in Ausente.

This series of actions and paintings proposes to prophesy, through the streets of the city, black references that can dispute the spaces where different values prevail. This painting was activated on Avenida Rio Branco, one of the most important axes in Rio de Janeiro. Vargas says that Lélia’s meeting with Rio Branco generates a crossroads of importance in the physical and philosophical displacement in the city. This piece honors the Brazilian intellectual Lélia Gonzalez, author of the concept of Pretuguês [a combination of the words ‘black’ and ‘portuguese’], which refers to the Africanization of the Portuguese language.

The guides, or threads, are necklaces made of colored beads that represent the orishas and spiritual entities in Africanbased religions. In the Fios de Conta series, the guides appear organized in 7 lines, which will open to writings that relate to the Orixás-theme of each work. 7 is a fundamental number in religion – there are 7 main Orixás, for example. In O rei silêncio [The king silence], the phrase refers to the greeting given to Omolu. “Atotô!” is a request for silence for the arrival of the great king of Earth.

“I was always imagining the things that the open mouths of the characters in Heitor dos Prazeres’ paintings could be saying. The joy and jubilation of each scenario created by this master always invited me to sing.

Today I sing in color… All Hail Heitor dos Prazeres!”

André Vargas

“I was always imagining the things that the open mouths of the characters in Heitor dos Prazeres’ paintings could be saying. The joy and jubilation of each scenario created by this master always invited me to sing.

Today I sing in color… All Hail Heitor dos Prazeres!”

André Vargas

“In this series, Eustáquio recreates in layers the fields of ‘peladas’ (soccer matches between friends or communities) as transitory places of the urban fabric, which become spaces of sociability, but which will soon disappear in the logic of the civil construction market”.
Excerpt from “Other Ships. Photographs by Eustáquio Neves”, by Eder Chiodetto.

“In this series, Eustáquio recreates in layers the fields of “peladas”, transitory places of the urban structure, which become spaces of sociability, but which soon disappear in the logic of the civil construction market”
Excerpt from “Other Ships. Photographs by Eustáquio Neves”, by Eder Chiodetto.

“In this series, Eustáquio recreates in layers the fields of ‘peladas’ (soccer matches between friends or communities) as transitory places of the urban fabric, which become spaces of sociability, but which will soon disappear in the logic of the civil construction market”.
Excerpt from “Other Ships. Photographs by Eustáquio Neves”, by Eder Chiodetto.

Through her practice, Garrido-Lecca employs a range of symbolic materials and languages that focus on highlighting the tensions between ancestral knowledge and colonial structures. Using historical references, she traces cycles of cultural, social and economic transformation around changes in the use of natural resources. Her work deals with the relationships between nature and culture, while questioning the traditional hierarchies of knowledge.

Edgard de Souza’s vases are representations of decorative and domestic objects. Imbued with strangeness, they become reservoirs manufactured in skin and fur, suggesting something intimate or visceral, like bodily orifices.

In Craques do Povo, André Vargas creates a team of 6 paintings of shirts from Brazilian soccer teams such as Fluminense and Ponte Preta attributed to entities of Afro-Brazilian religions. Each shirt represents the deity which colors coincide with the team colors and whose name is on the back of the shirt – the traditional place for the name of the players.
Vargas connects Brazilian soccer culture with religious syncretism evoking the black ancestry of Brazilian culture.

“This series investigates the herbs used by healers, as well as the prayers they say when they bless people. It is at the intersection between object-image-herb and writingprayer-voice that the work sustains the simplicity of popular traditions as fundamental importance to our constitution”.
-Andre Vargas
The Incenso plant [Mother of herbs] is used for blessing against illness.

In Arturos, Eustáquio Neves portrayed a black community reminiscent of Arturos’ Quilombo, in Contagem, Minas Gerais. The accumulation of interventions in the images registered in Arturos reflects what the critic and curator Eder Chiodeto called “Photographic Thickness”. This “thickness” can be seen in the images as overlayings and perimeters around the main images.
A chemist by training, Eustáquio Neves works from matrices that receive many interventions before reaching the final images for printing. These layers signal the ancestral traditions that are behind documentary records.

In Arturos, Eustáquio Neves portrayed a black community reminiscent of Arturos’ Quilombo, in Contagem, Minas Gerais. The accumulation of interventions in the images registered in Arturos reflects what the critic and curator Eder Chiodeto called “Photographic Thickness”. This “thickness” can be seen in the images as overlayings and perimeters around the main images.
A chemist by training, Eustáquio Neves works from matrices that receive many interventions before reaching the final images for printing. These layers signal the ancestral traditions that are behind documentary records.