"Deitado eternamente em berço esplêndido"

“Forever reclining in a splendid cradle” could have been written for this photograph. The line comes from the second verse of Brazil’s National Anthem. The music, composed by Francisco Manuel da Silva, dates back to 1831. Joaquim Osório Duque Estrada wrote the lyrics in 1909, and they became official in 1922. The verse imagines Brazil resting in a magnificent cradle, rocked by the sea and illuminated by the sky and sun of the New World.

Here, the expression takes on an unexpected meaning. The “cradle” is no longer part of the geography of the nation; it becomes an imagined state of the body. Rest acquires the weightlessness of suspension, while the skatepark seems, for a moment, to lose its familiar scale. The lens compresses distance and draws separate planes closer together, creating an unexpected sense of proximity. No post-processing creates this illusion. It comes from the optics and from the photographer’s position.

The anthem may have been waiting two centuries for this particular act of irreverence. Duque Estrada’s Brazil rests beneath the sky; here, a skateboarder seems to rest within it. National solemnity meets a practice that turns balance into a language and gravity into a source of imagination.

There is something wonderfully absurd about the coincidence. If two plus two can equal five, perhaps a cradle can also be a skatepark, provided the photograph finds exactly the right distance to make us believe it.