At one point, the narrator of the photo-novel Jongo & Adriano, created by the artist Yhuri Cruz, asks what freedom consists of. The answer seems obvious in the context of Brazil in the time of slavery. But the parable of the escape is both a revolt against the enslavement of bodies as Much as the imprisonment of affections. Cruz sums it up: freedom is the absence of fear and annoyances.
Freeing yourself from everyday oppression and social ties is what moves most of the artists in this edition. Sydney Amaral confronts White hedonism in collages that mock the symbols of pleasure and power. The surreal climate contrasts with the sobriety of his self-portraits on a black background, in which Amaral faces his personal and artistic dilemmas: work or eat, live or die?
Renata Felinto reviews the history of images of oppression and vigilance in search of emancipation and justice. Her unpublished work is featured in the cover of this edition and in the poster sent to subscribers. Ming Smith captures the vibration and resilience of black life in the United States, while an unknown photographer fits images of people who express the democratic beauty of Rio de Janeiro into the scenic and well-known curves of the city’s seafront. Public love, recalls the writer Eliana Alves Cruz, can be revolutionary.
In Sabelo Mlangeni’s wedding photographs, the sweetened life gains transcendente nuances. With her model boyfriend, Pixy Liao reverses the gender roles disseminated by Western iconography and her Chinese education. More than thirty years earlier, Austrian artist valie export embraced urban solemnity in her pioneering feminist performances.
About to publish her first book, photojournalist Gabriela Biló reveals in a diary the mistakes and successes, dangers and pleasures of her profession in Brasília. For the Guarani people, memory is not a dimension of the past, but the path of both the past and the future in the present. Moving the images, explains curator Sandra Benites, is freeing them for the fight.
Thyago Nogueira, editor
