I am very happy and honored, as a photographer, to be part of this exhibition titled *RÊVER, IMAGINER ET SPÉCULER SUR LES FUTURS*.
Congratulations to the curators—Gabriela Sá and Gláucia Nogueira, who led the *Foto em Pauta 2026* open call and also curated the event in Paris—as well as to the entire committee for both initiatives.
My photograph (a self-portrait in the form of a diptych) is featured on one of the event’s promotional pages (shown below).
I cannot thank you enough.
(*) Classical origin: The phrase first appeared in the poem Georgics (Book III, line 284) by the Roman poet Virgil, in its full form: “Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus” (“But meanwhile, time flees—irreparably, time flees”).
Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC – 19 BC) was one of the greatest poets of Ancient Rome, a leading figure in Latin literature during the reign of the Emperor Augustus.
Some presences last only for a single instant. Bodies pass through the light, cast their shadows, and vanish. On the ground, the outlines of an existence in transit linger for a brief moment. Caught between appearance and absence, human figures become traces of a passing. Photography suspends that which the very nature of time condemns to disappearance. Yet, this permanence is merely an illusion: the captured instant no longer exists. Tempus fugit—time slips away, and with it, everything we believe we can hold onto.
I am honored by the invitation from the team at Foto em Pauta 2026 (the international photography festival in Tiradentes, MG-Brasil) to include one of my photographs—selected for their Projeções (Projections) open call, themed “dreaming, imagining, and speculating futures”—in a showcase at PARIS PHOTO, the major international photography fair in Paris, taking place from November 12–15, 2026. The selected work will be presented both as a print and as a projection.
The photograph shown here is the piece in question; it is part of my second photography book, titled Assombrações (Hauntings) (2023)—an independent production curated by Roberto Cecato (Studio Imaginar, São Paulo, SP).
BETWEEN WORLDS
Windows open passages to what the eye can reach, but also to that which remains hidden. Distinct realities intertwine within an uncertain territory, where each seems to hold traces of the other. Light passes through the glass, revealing forms and casting shadows, yet without dispelling every mystery. Amidst presences that persist and figures that dissolve into motion, the world reveals its fleeting nature. What vanishes leaves traces behind; what remains is no longer exactly what it once was. There are presences that survive in this way—on the fringes of the visible—silently traversing time and memory.
Work entered into the open call for the ‘Campos de Luz’ Photography Festival in Campos do Jordão, SP, Brazil (Nov 06–08, 2026), which features the theme ‘Crystal Windows’.
A feast for the eyes on days when one’s vision—at times—becomes a bit “clouded.”
Tipuana tipu (Benth.) Kuntze—known as tipuana or rosewood—forms magnificent trees in the central square of Poços de Caldas, MG, Brazil.
The city’s identity is formed by an accumulation of lives, gestures, and anonymous trajectories. Photography becomes a reflection on time and the urban experience.
In a city, traces outlast individuals, turning the urban landscape into a silent archive of memories and passages. What matters is not merely what is visible, but the invisible stories that remain deposited upon these places (drawing on Calvino’s fantastic city of Tamara).
(from my project ‘Parallel Worlds: A Poetics Through Photographic Polyptychs’)
A landscape is not something fixed.
It is constantly being constructed, reconstructed, and imbued with new meaning.
Thus, a photograph captures not merely a place, but a fleeting moment of a territory in a state of constant transformation.
As in Eusapia (one of the most fascinating cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities), the figures inhabit an uncertain boundary between presence and absence. Bodies dissolve into light and shadow, becoming traces of a passage that is already beginning to transform into memory.
The city emerges as a place where the living and the absent share the same invisible space, reminding us that every human landscape is composed as much of those who traverse it as of those who remain within it, silently inscribed in time.
Photos: ‘Paliteiro’ [Forest of Snags], Tucuruí Hydroelectric Reservoir, Pará, Brazil. February 1988.
Analog photographs on Fuji Superia 100 film.
There are landscapes that seem to exist between two times: that of presence and that of memory. In this pair of diptychs from the Parallel Worlds project, trees, water, fire, and reflections compose a transitional territory, where the landscape reveals subtle signs of a world in transformation.
The images aim not merely to record places, but to capture states of permanence and fragility. These visual records thus become a trace of a time in which past, present, and future coexist. The landscapes function as an archive of signs—indications of the future—transforming into a kind of silent witness to the changes underway on Earth and signaling that the future is not distant, but can already be perceived in the marks inscribed upon the present.
These images engage with the Anthropocene, as they present a nature that can no longer be understood as separate from human action.
[poetry of architectural disillusionment]
The city of Pirra (one of Calvino’s many incredible invisible cities), while merely imagined (and not yet visited by the traveler), inhabits a limbo; it is an incorporeal reflection.
In the dynamics of the city of Pirra, the glass grid represents the name “Pirra” or the mental blueprint: a clean, geometric, and predictable structure (the “towers and wide windows” Marco Polo imagined). The distorted reflections, meanwhile, represent the chaotic physical reality that dissolves the rigidity of our imagination. The real world “warps” the straight lines we create in our minds.
My Pirra exists only in a spectral state: it is there, yet intangible.
It exists solely as an image reflected on the glass surface, just as expectations exist only on the surface of our minds.
