In Conversation with Eustáquio Neves

“Letter to the Sea”

The Brazilian photographer underscores how vital Valongo Wharf, in Rio de Janeiro, is as a place of remembrance for Brazil, and highlights the small number of artists of African descent on a predominantly-white Brazilian art scene.

The theme of the Encomendador de almas (2006) photo essay is Crispim, one of the remaining members of the Baú maroon community in the Araçuaí region of Minas Gerais, where he is entrusted with making the transition between the world of the living and the dead.

Religious syncretism is portrayed by Neves in the Arturos series (1993-1997), on the maroon community located in Contagem, Minas Gerais. This photo essay displayed the photographer's work in galleries both in Brazil and abroad.

In the series Objetivação do corpo (1999), Neves questions the exploitation of the female body by the media.

One of the photographs in the Futebol photo essay, produced between 1998 and 1999, in the Santa Tereza neighborhood and city center of Belo Horizonte. In 2014 the series earned a sequel in the town of Diamantina, where the photographer currently resides.

The Portuguese word 'carregado', or 'loaded', is repeated on several photographs in the photo essay “Valongo: cartas ao mar” (2015-2016) to denounce the reification of the black population in the past and present. Here it appears on a portrait of Neves, at age 17, taken from an ID card.

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by Ana Paula Orlandi

Mon 5 Mar, 2018

It’s no coincidence that Eustáquio Neves lives and works on Rua Arthur Bispo do Rosário, in the town of Diamantina, in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais. Seven years ago, he and his wife, historian Lilian Oliveira Neves, came up with the idea to name the small street after one of Brazil’s greatest visual artists, who spent part of his life confined to a psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro. “After seeing a Bispo do Rosário [1909-1989] exhibition in the early 1990s, I realized there was no need for me to be ashamed about breaking the rules,” says the photographer from Minas Gerais.

From then on, Neves started to manipulate negatives, something of a trademark in his career, which began in 1992 with Caos Urbano (Urban Chaos). In that photo essay, where he portrays a homeless community on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, one can already see another crux in his work: the place of the black man within Brazilian society. “We lived for almost four centuries as slaves in Brazil, but to this day, 129 years after the abolition of slavery, we are still invisible to a large white majority who seem to believe the country was made exclusively for them,” he says.

This concern is also present in his most recent work, Valongo: Letters to the Sea (2015-2016), inspired by the history of Valongo Wharf, in Rio de Janeiro. In July 2017, the site, which received between 500,000 and 900,000 enslaved Africans between the 18th and 19th centuries, was named a Unesco World Heritage site. Since then, it has come to be regarded as a “place of remembrance”, like Auschwitz or Hiroshima. “It’s important to remember so that we won’t forget. The history of Valongo is part of the history of all people of African descent in Brazil,” emphasizes Neves.

C&: How did you come up with the idea for Valongo: Letters to the Sea?

Eustáquio Neves: That photo essay was commissioned in 2015 by anthropologist and photographer Milton Guran, director of FotoRio [Encontro Internacional de Fotografia do Rio de Janeiro], who at the time was on the technical committee for the Valongo Wharf Archaeological Site World Heritage bid. The idea behind the photo essay, which was first exhibited at FotoRio in 2016, alludes to the practice of throwing letters in bottles into the sea: they’re messages so that people will never forget and always reflect on the tragedy of slavery. In addition to memory, the images also speak about death.

The area of Valongo was not just a port of entry, but also a burial ground, where the bodies of Africans who died during the long and hazardous ship crossing between Africa and Brazil were thrown into a mass grave. Now the death of the place’s memory is taking place: with the current renovations, many of them will be buried by projects that are attempting to scrub the area clean.

C&: Valongo Wharf was built in 1811, buried for decades and rediscovered during excavations for renovations of the Rio de Janeiro waterfront, initiated by the city in 2011 in preparation for the 2016 Olympic Games. How do you view this revitalization process?

EN: I think there’s a great contradiction. If, on the one hand, this revitalization is attracting visitors to an area that was once abandoned by public authorities, on the other, it winds up repeating past oppression. That’s because the vast majority of the region’s residents are ordinary, low-income people, and the local cost of living, such as the price of rent, has risen sharply since then. So, this revitalization has turned into an exclusionary process.

The Portuguese word “carregado”, or “loaded”, is repeated on several photographs in the photo essay “Valongo: cartas ao mar” (2015-2016) to denounce the reification of the black population in the past and present. Here it appears on a portrait of Neves, at age 17, taken from an ID card.

Artists were berfore at the mercy of curators and galleries; nowadays they have more autonomy, thanks to social media and also because they've reclaimed more of the streets.

C& América Latina: How was the photo essay produced?

EN: First, I read the application file for the Valongo World Heritage bid, which was several pages long, to learn more about the history of the place. Then I went to Rio de Janeiro. intending to photograph the area and also make a video, but I decided to just talk to the local residents and merchants over the course of a week. When I returned to Diamantina, where I live, after digesting all that information, I decided to work with portraits of friends that I had taken in the past and even a self-portrait, actually an appropriation of a photo of me, taken at the age of seventeen, from an ID card. That’s because, in my view, the history of Valongo is part of the history of all people of African descent in Brazil.

C&AL: In addition to the portraits, the images also feature stamps, references to Africa, such as guinea-fowl feathers, and texts. Why is the word “loaded” repeated throughout the photo essay?

EN: One reason was to show that those people, kidnapped in Africa and brought to Brazil against their will to work as slaves, were treated like cargo, like objects. But I also wanted to talk about contemporary slave ships, like suburban trains crowded with poor people, mostly black, who work in the city center, live on the outskirts of big cities, and spend three or four hours a day or more inside public transport.

C&AL: You work with an analog camera. Is time an important factor in your work?

EN: Totally and in several ways: the time of memory, the time to manipulate the negatives to create the image… In the case of Valongo: Letters to the Sea, this is reflected even in the cotton paper used as a backing on the images. Since the 9/11 attacks have made it difficult to bring chemical materials into several countries, including Brazil, I emulsified a fair amount of paper during a trip to the Netherlands in 2008. This paper obviously suffered the effects of time over the years, it got smudged and stained, which in the end reinforced the documentary idea of the photo essay. In addition, I’m not in a hurry in life, I think there’s a time for everything, something I learned in the films of [Russian filmmaker Andrei] Tarkovsky. I can’t say I’ll never work with a digital camera, but I run counter to the immediacy and exaggeration.

C&AL: Is there space for visual artists of African descent on the art scene in Brazil today?

EN: I’ve never actually seen an opening. What I see now is more young people doing what I and other artists have done in the past, kicking in doors to get their work shown in overwhelmingly white spaces. I’ve also noticed today a greater presence of Afro-Brazilian women, such as [photographer] Ana Lira, on the Brazilian visual arts scene. Not to mention that if before artists were at the mercy of curators and galleries, nowadays they have more autonomy, thanks to social media and also because they’ve reclaimed more of the streets. In any case, we need to underscore [curator and artist] Emanoel Araújo’s work at the helm of the Museu Afro Brasil (São Paulo), which maps the production of Afro-Brazilian artists so well. And also the work of Solange Farkas at the Associação Cultural VideoBrasil, which opens up the VB Galpão (São Paulo), not only to Afro-Brazilian artists, but also to people from Africa, the Middle East and other Latin American countries. But back to your question, we still have a long way to go.

Ana Paula Orlandi is a journalist who writes about culture and behavior. Currently she writes her Master at the Communication and Arts Institute of the University of São Paulo.

Translated from Portuguese by Zoë Petry.