Vincent Catala


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

RETURN TO ALTAMIRA

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.