Rachaduras ("Cracks")

Rachaduras is a work that starts from a long-distance relationship. My relationship and my distance. It begins with a love affair between Europe and Brazil, but goes through the socio-political problems that cross this love: borders, war or revolution.

Through the documents of a long-distance relationship (photos, screenshots, official documents, and diary texts), I try to understand what happens to the body when it leaves. I met Thomas in 2015, during the New Year's Eve, by the arms of another. Since then, we have never been apart. I mean, we didn't break up, although yes, our bodies did separate, travel, and stay, for 5 years, in an intercontinental back and forth. Whether between Porto Alegre and Lyon, continental Brazil and multicultural Europe, our relationship was made of movement. Of closeness but of distance. "Rachaduras" (Cracks) is a work where I try to think about this movement, about the desire to possess something and the inability to obtain it. Our relationship, just like photography, shows that what I want to capture is not necessarily what I achieve. What I want to possess is not what I have.

With its index of loss, photography screamed my inability to be close. The body, once physical, present and tactile, destroyed itself when we said goodbye and when we departed for our respective countries, only to give place to a digital body, an avatar that we should fill and interact with during the periods of distance. This violence presented in the inability to be close is the driving force behind the production of photographs of this series, with the wandering eye searching, in the strangeness of the world, for a meaning.

It's the gaze that seeks love amidst conflict, that embodies the passion of reunion, of rediscovering each other's geography with novelty. By creating digital touch when the physical one is impossible. To navigate between continents, but to also navigate the emotion through the metaphorical waves depicted in these photographs: the ebb and flow of the Atlantic that both connected and parted us, the waves of light, and the echoes of communication via Skype and WhatsApp. In "Rachaduras" I present photos that show the translation of this love through the bodies of saudade (portuguese word without translation, but that could mean "the memory of something with a desire for it"), facing the difficulties of language, law, money, and emotion, of everything that escapes the limits of perfection and that, through its cracks, allows for us to see.