"If you can look, see. If you can see, notice."
José Saramago
In 2011 I crossed the equator for the first time and headed for the southern hemisphere. I migrated to Peru, where I lived until 2015, between the capital Lima and the highland jungle, in the eastern side of the Andes, but eventually travelling through all Peru and the nearby countries (Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile).
These pictures are a set of visual memories, a documental journal, fragments of a reality, a personal portrait of the territory. They are placed between permanence and change, between staying and leaving. Because I went and stayed, I’ve been going and staying, because (mainly) I went and came. Between here and there, between there and another there.
These photographs are an experience in the apprehension and understanding of a space which is not culturally mine, a displacement of the Self to another place, physical, social and cultural. It is, at the same time, a process of learning to see, learning to understand what territory is that.
The photographs I do are of instant contact. The subjectivity of their construction derives from this immediate encounter. Like if these found me before I search them. Despite there is a documentary aspect in these pictures, the narrative is personal. A portrait that does not intend to be truthful and representative. Being personal, it is bias. It is my portrait of that reality, based on my emotions, vision and experience. A portrait of the reality that comes from an inner state of mind and a personal curiosity for what I see, an alien look over that territory. The object becomes physically and emotionally inseparable from the subject, a portrait of an outside reality through an inner reality. And it is in that dialogue that this work exists.
It is the portrait of various places in a certain space and time, it is the images (sometimes) anonymous and ordinary, most of them unique in its banality or even banal in their triviality. But this is the world in which we live in, between the images that we form, singular and personal, and those that are formed and with which we are confronted, generic, touristic. Between the things we all see there are many others things which we don’t notice. More than the things we always see and recognize, more than the images we built as a society, our world is formed by thousands of little things that we see, but we don’t notice. It is also in the space between those things that this work exists. It is the connection between all those things that give meaning to this work. The things we see, but we don’t look. That we look, but we don’t notice.
Ofzine #2
"Going South"
Edition: AO NORTE - Associação de Produção e Animação Audiovisual
Editorial Coordination: João Gigante
Design: Edmundo Correia
ISBN: 978-989-54416-8-6
"To photograph is to record and bring to a new perspective the image as a code, as revelation of a new script as document. To document is to reveal, translate and compose a structure of derivations that allow us with a certain distance, in what territory and emotions is concerned, to reframe the author in a common space creating new layers in what can be the understanding of a globalized world and filled with imagery revisitations. To see and transcribe what we notice can be a second journey when it happens with the photography as base of our social and artistic conscience."
João Gigante