Work in Work

The project highlights construction sites as a way of reflecting on the transformation of cities, proposing a poetic and critical gaze beyond architecture and generating new questions about how we interact with the world.

After four years living in Recife and sixteen in Rio de Janeiro, during the pandemic I returned to my hometown, Bento Gonçalves, in the Serra Gaúcha. Once a small countryside city, it had now been transformed. From the windows of my home, I began to observe the landscape, the shifting seasons, and the new buildings that emerged. I felt naturally compelled to photograph them, driven by an urge to register the rapid changes unfolding before my eyes. In this act of photographing the inevitable, I was measuring this development (nature – destruction – construction), weighing and digesting the new city rising before me, moving toward (and against) my own interpretation of what a city is.

After revisiting all this material—images produced over nearly four years of research and questioning—I was finally able to go through a process of catharsis, listening to those frozen instants in the photographs and giving voice to the work that was being born. The images surpassed the boundaries of the documentary, breaking through layers of questioning and offering new poetic and symbolic dimensions, reclaiming or proposing other ways of thinking about cities beyond the organizational, architectural, and speculative.

These images are universal, as they speak to many younger cities, such as those of the American continent. They transcend the borders of reality, merging unfinished, raw spaces with a poetic gaze of re-signification.

It is an opportunity to see architecture not only as completed buildings, but as a living process, in constant transformation. It is in this overlap—between what is built and what is felt—that this project is born. One work within another. A city within a gaze. With this intention, the project seeks to look at cities from another perspective through art—using the city itself (its constructions, landscapes, workers) as stage, photography as foundation, and digital editing and manipulation as a path to express the entire process.