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.