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. Years spent 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 and friend 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 Movie
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.
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, one on which I am still working today.
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 movie
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 movie
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 movie
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 movie
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.
“Here is a country where governing means creating deserts”
This cry of despair was voiced by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro when he learned of 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 marks a moment of awareness and the starting point of a project currently nearing completion, which accompanies and extends the series Île Brésil and My Body Is Political. The images presented here address Brazil’s predatory relationship with its own natural environment.
From the time I settled in the country, and as I gradually took root, I quickly sensed that the relationship to the surrounding environment—almost systematically conceived as something to be exploited rather than preserved—reflected a singular mindset, specific to Brazil. It took me several years, however, to begin to decipher this specificity, in a country where, as Brazilians themselves say, “light reveals as much as it conceals,” and whose complexity is deeply compelling.
In Brazil, the mechanism of conquest begins, etymologically, with the invasion of the territory by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. The forced appropriation of land was immediately extended through the implementation of forced labour, based on the transatlantic slave trade—half of all enslaved people deported worldwide were sent to Brazil. Historically—and this has not changed today—the predation of nature has always been encouraged by Brazil’s vast scale, its isolation, and the fact that it is largely made up of immense, sparsely inhabited territories. Until relatively recently, it was difficult to assign a specific political colour to this culture of environmental exploitation, as it stemmed from a mindset that had permeated all levels of society.
Over the past decade, however, a conservative and far-right bloc—still highly influential despite Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in the 2022 presidential election—has come to embody and promote a form of predation unprecedented in its intensity, and which, in environmental terms, represents a threat to Brazil’s future and far beyond.
Through a perverse interplay of ideological alliances and converging economic interests, this movement brings together advocates of order and representatives of the powerful agro-industrial sector. In military schools, whose numbers have surged over the past decade, discipline and love of country are taught as core values. Evangelical pastors relay the same message, giving it a spiritual and millenarian foundation. Agribusiness, which dominates the centre-west of the country and now surpasses the traditional southern elites in wealth and power, draws on the immense popularity of sertanejaculture to impose its rural and conservative values.
Their message is simple: God has endowed Brazil with almost limitless natural resources. Exploiting these riches on an industrial scale is presented as a patriotic act, one that concerns Brazilians alone. Formulated in 2018, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s bleak diagnosis has never seemed more relevant—or more prophetic.
This was followed by successive economic cycles of exploitation—always tied to raw materials: sugarcane and coffee in the past, intensive agriculture and hydrocarbons today—which have shaped the country’s topography and its social structure.
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.