ÎlE BRÉSIL
Île brésil|in the press
return to altamira
audiovisual installatiONS
my body is political
copan
CREATING DESERTS
nnipas
COMMISSIONS
EXHIBITIONS|INTERVENTIONS
publications
ABOUT
Brazilian curator Sabrina Moura, currently based at Louvre Abu Dhabi, wrote about Île Brésil: “Vincent Catala’s photographs do not coincide with the classical, or even official, representations of Brazil. The luminous stereotypes of joy, rhythm, exoticism and prosperity — or, conversely, of poverty — surrounding these narratives ignore the face of the country that the artist presents in his images. And here lies their strength.”
Île Brésil emerged from a long-term experience. The decisive moment here is a slow and elaborate construction, intimately intertwined with my life in Brazil, where I lived and worked for fifteen years. For nearly ten years, I patiently recorded and explored the psychogeography of the three main environments where I was putting down roots. The first is Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, a periphery far removed from the representations usually associated with Rio. The second is Greater São Paulo, the immense peripheral area surrounding Latin America’s largest city. The third is Brasília and its hinterland, a small capital, peripheral by definition. By photographing the infra-ordinary of a world that had become my own, I explored the anonymous margins of Brazil’s three main cities.
Tirelessly travelled on foot, by bus or motorbike, these territories, neither poor nor rich, immense and sparsely populated, are spaces found throughout Brazil, although they are rarely shown. In these places without boundaries or centres, the sense of isolation is not only geographical but also subjective, mental. The metaphor of insularity seems omnipresent. There is a feeling of waiting, perhaps of fatality. As if time had been suspended just before an eruption. What is it? I have never sought to answer this question, although the photographs themselves raise it.
In a powerful text written for Île Brésil, Brazilian writer João Paulo Cuenca proposes an explanation: “in a country that has not undergone its revolution and refuses to turn its past of slavery and ethnocide definitively into History, progress is an illusion, rights are not guaranteed, and despair never erupts. Its inhabitants seem like prisoners of an infinite present, unaware of the past and without the prospect of a truly new future.” Between a carefully developed framework, rigorous photographic protocols and an instinctive practice of the territory, I have tried to capture this silent tension. The territories travelled through and the inhabitants photographed — complementary pieces of the same puzzle — convey the project’s extended temporality and complexity.
Seventeen years ago, I travelled to Altamira, a town in the state of Pará, on the banks of the Xingu River, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. At the time, it was my first journey to Brazil. Language, people, history — I knew almost nothing about the country. I was far from imagining that I would devote nearly two decades of my life to it, living successively in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, Greater São Paulo, then Brasília and the Federal District. I spent those years working, in particular, on a personal project entitled Île Brésil, which took the form of a monograph published by Éditions Dunes in the autumn of 2025.
But what happened in the spring of 2008, amid the dust and heat of Altamira? A signal? A revelation? I have often asked myself these questions, without finding an answer. And then, as sometimes happens when a long cycle comes to an end, the desire to retrace my steps, to return to the place where part of my story began, gradually took hold. A desire coupled with the need to provide context — perhaps a horizon — for the work I have carried out in Brazil over all these years. If there was a turning point, it came from rereading the final lines of the powerful text that writer João Paulo Cuenca devoted to my project Île Brésil. In it, João poses an open-ended question: “Perhaps the world ends here. Or perhaps the end of the world has already taken place, and we are standing before its still-warm ashes. Or perhaps this is where, from the ruins of the old new world, a truly new world will be born.”
Between July and August 2025, I therefore returned to Altamira. The images from this project, a natural extension of Île Brésil, follow here. To produce them, I notably used expired analogue films that I had taken with me to Brazil in 2008.
Video, sound / 4’ | Link to the film
In 2008, Vincent Catala travelled to Altamira, in the Brazilian Amazon, before settling in Brazil, where he would live for nearly seventeen years. In 2025, as his Île Brésil project draws to a close, he returns to the place where this story began. Seventeen years later, Altamira becomes both the origin and a turning point of the project.
Built around the photographer’s voice-over and a projection of images, this video forms part of the Île Brésil exhibition installation presented at the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi from May to September 2026.
Alongside the photographic component of the Île Brésil project, Vincent Catala sought to recover, through moving image and sound, the sensations that run throughout this body of work: space, silence, symbols. As he explains, “These are clues that, together, form a single narrative.” He therefore returned to locations that were already familiar to him and that belong to the areas he photographed. The result is a series of short sequence shots, all sharing the aim of extending and expanding the visual universe developed by the artist.
Artist Charlotte Sarian composed an original soundtrack for each of these films. Drawing on the real sound recordings captured on site by the photographer, she developed an electroacoustic language that is both instrumental and experimental. The result is a singular sound world, acting as a bridge between what is seen, what is heard, and what is felt.
This audiovisual proposal takes the form of video capsules with integrated sound, incorporated into the exhibition scenography of the Île Brésil series.
Video, sound / 4’26’’ | Link to the film
In this video, a young woman stands still, facing the camera. To her left, a steep, dark-coloured slope. In the background, a mountainous landscape of tropical forest. The scene is set in Cubatão, on the outskirts of São Paulo, within an industrial site owned by Petrobras, one of the most toxic areas in the country. The ground is black, covered with a layer of tar, from which moisture seeps and lingers.
For more than two centuries, Cubatão was one of the strongholds of the Bandeirantes, the slave-hunting groups emblematic of Brazil’s colonisation. The sound accompanying the video was recorded directly on Petrobras’s massive pipelines, located just a few metres from this sequence shot. These metal pipes carry gas down from the mountain to the valley. The noise is dull, insistent, and regular—like a troubled and troubling pulse.
Video, sound / 1’ | Link to the film
The camera focuses on a pine tree, slightly stirred by the wind. One can make out the structure of a residential building, a garden, and, omnipresent, a thick mist with the milky light typical of Rio de Janeiro’s mountainous landscape in winter. The soundtrack captures the sounds of the building: an electrical generator, followed by a crackling radio.
Video, sound / 1’ | Link to the film
Another sequence shot shows a section of the Rodovia dos Imigrantes, one of the main highways leading into São Paulo. Night is falling, a storm is approaching. Trucks move through the clouds, like large animals fleeing from an unknown threat.
Video, sound / 3’40’’ | Link to the film
A fourth sequence shot shows a jagged coastline, seemingly eroded by ocean mist. An anchored vessel slowly emerges from the fog, only to disappear into it once again. The soundtrack captures maritime sounds that unfold into infinity. The scene is set in Salvador de Bahia, one of the first points in Brazil where Portuguese colonisers arrived, followed by the enslaved people they brought with them. These waters have witnessed history and still carry its memory.
Two sequence shots were filmed on the outskirts of Brasília. On the left, a drift scene unfolds—the name given to car competitions in which modified engines perform circular manoeuvres, burning through the rubber of their tyres to the limit before the engine gives out. This is a speciality of the Federal District region—leading the country in ethanol and rubber production—which consistently draws large, predominantly male audiences.
On the right, two young women sit on a sofa, staring fixedly at a screen that remains unseen. Between the two shots, a circular closed space takes shape, echoing the strangely languid arabesques traced by the vehicles, like a metaphor for an absurdity condemned to repeat itself endlessly, driven by some unknown mechanism.
Two sequence shots were filmed in Brasília on 31 October 2022, the day after the presidential election. In both cases, helicopters were circling overhead. The sound of their rotors, at times loud, at times more distant, forms the basis of a curiously similar soundscape that gradually imposes itself with inescapable insistence.
On the left, we see the entrance to the National Congress, the Brazilian parliament. The building is austere and perfectly ordered. It appears to dominate—almost to crush—a solitary man, probably a civil servant, whose gait is hesitant, even erratic. Ten weeks later, the Congress would be invaded and ransacked by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
The scene on the right was filmed a few hours later and at a short distance, on the margins of Brasília’s Pilot Plan. In a chaotic setting typical of Brazil’s urban peripheries, a group supporting the far-right candidate blocks a highway. The phenomenon would repeat itself across Brazil, paralysing parts of the country in the final months of 2022.
These images are drawn from a body of work focusing on São Paulo’s transgender community, particularly active in Latin America’s largest city. Begun in 2019, at the start of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, and continued through the pandemic, the project is ongoing today in a new political context. Vincent Catala explores the resistance and vitality of this community in the face of violence and rejection from parts of Brazilian society.
He follows the daily lives of its members, moving between artistic performances and visibility events, and more intimate moments drawn from everyday life. Over time, this approach has developed into a collaboration with Vicenta Perrotta, founder of the Transmoras workshop, a space providing support and guidance to transgender people living on the streets, located on the outskirts of São Paulo.
The artist and activist is photographed in a range of settings — a bank, land owned by major commercial groups, the street — where her presence disrupts the codes governing these spaces. The work explores the encounter between the transgender body and these regulated environments, questioning the norms that shape them. This same approach is also at the heart of a film Vincent Catala made with trans singer Deusa Nagô, shot at a Petrobras oil facility.
The resulting work moves constantly between the intimate body and the social body, echoing the ambivalence of Brazilian society, marked by both the violence of exclusion and a profound desire for change.
From this perspective, My Body Is Political can be seen in dialogue with the long-term project Île Brésil: a ten-year immersion in the anonymous margins of Brazil’s major cities, where Vincent Catala lived and worked, exploring the deep-rooted forces and inherited structures that continue to shape the country.
EDIFÍCIO COPAN
An immersion in Copan, the largest residential building in Latin America, an icon of São Paulo and of Oscar Niemeyer’s genius, a true barometer of Brazil’s pulse. What began as a commission gradually evolved into a personal project.
“Here is a country where governing means creating deserts”
This cry of despair was voiced by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro after the fire at Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum in September 2018 —the worst museological disaster in the country’s history. For me, this powerful statement marked a moment of awareness and the starting point of Creating Deserts, a project that accompanies and extends Île Brésil and My Body Is Political.
The images presented here explore Brazil’s predatory relationship with its own natural environment. After settling in the country, I gradually came to understand how the surrounding territory is often conceived as something to be exploited rather than preserved — a relationship deeply rooted in Brazil’s history.
The mechanism of conquest began with the Portuguese invasion in the early sixteenth century. The appropriation of land was extended through forced labour and the transatlantic slave trade, and followed by successive cycles of exploitation tied to raw materials: sugarcane and coffee in the past, intensive agriculture and hydrocarbons today. These cycles have profoundly shaped both the country’s landscape and its social structure.
Brazil’s vast scale, isolation and immense sparsely inhabited territories have long facilitated this predatory relationship with nature. Until relatively recently, it was difficult to assign it a specific political colour: it reflected a mindset that permeated different levels of society.
Over the past decade, however, a conservative and far-right bloc — still highly influential despite Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in 2022 — has come to embody and intensify this logic. Through a convergence of ideological and economic interests, advocates of order, evangelical movements and the powerful agro-industrial sector have helped construct a vision of Brazil in which rural conservatism, patriotism and the exploitation of natural resources reinforce one another. Agribusiness, now dominant across much of the Centre-West, also draws on the immense popularity of sertaneja culture to promote these values.
The message is simple: God has endowed Brazil with almost limitless natural resources, and exploiting them on an industrial scale is presented as a patriotic act. Formulated in 2018, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s bleak diagnosis has never seemed more relevant—or more prophetic.
NNIPAS
The NNIPAS project—an acronym for Nous N’Irions Pas Si — is a collective body of work inspired by the Situationism of Guy Debord, developed through several artistic residencies in France, England, and Jordan. The NNIPAS protocol is simple: to engage with a place, urban or otherwise, over the course of a few days. The project’s ambition is to offer an interpretation of that place by constructing a universe shaped by lived situations. It is these situations that determine the arrangement of the narratives, bringing them together into a single story.