Pantanal revealed exhibition: a territory's soul.
Some trips leave us with memories of places. Others change the way we see everything that comes after. The Pantanal was that kind of trip for me. I went there expecting to be passing through. I came back with a body of photographs I was happy with, but also with the unmistakable sense that something in me had been rearranged.
I had never experienced life at that scale. Nothing depended on spectacle. It was everywhere: in floodwaters moving across the land, in wildlife that appeared for a moment and disappeared again, in the changing vegetation, in the people, the horses, the celebrations, the quiet, the long stretches of waiting. Life seemed impossible to escape. Nowhere had I felt its presence so strongly. The Pantanal is a place where life refuses to stop beginning again.
The photographs came out of that feeling. The camera gave me a way to stay close to things I could never take in all at once. Each picture is an attempt to make sense of an experience that extends far beyond the edges of the frame, without pretending that an image can contain the place itself.
We usually imagine a trip as something with a clear beginning and end: you leave, you go somewhere, you come back. Mato Grosso disrupted that logic for me. I returned home, but the experience kept unfolding. It changed what I noticed, what I remembered, what I valued, what I felt drawn toward, even the way I look at places that have nothing to do with the Pantanal. Some trips end when the plane lands. This one followed me home.
So I will go back. I will go back with the same excitement and, naturally, with a camera in my hands. Not because I expect to find the Pantanal exactly as I left it. It will have changed. I will have changed too. Every return will begin from somewhere new, facing a place that never reveals itself in quite the same way twice. That much is certain. Photography will be my way of staying attentive to that change.
This exhibition comes from that continuing encounter. These photographs are not an attempt to define the Pantanal once and for all. They are pieces of a relationship that began with a trip and became something much larger. What I found there did not stay inside the photographs.
Some experiences change the place you return to.
The Pantanal changed mine.
(Explore the photograph featured at Shopping Paseo in Salvador through the EXHIBITION menu. From the comfort of your home, discover exclusive works from “Pantanal Revelado: a Alma de um Território” in the COLLECTION.)
