INTRODUCTION

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Framing and geometry are key elements in the composition of my photographic works, particularly architectural shots. Developing this and seeking to highlight how the human factor is integrated in the contemporary urban tissue, I set all subjects against an abstract background, which displays a definitive geometry revealing or exhibiting lines. People are given a distinctive place in each work, as if they are a portrait sitter or a point of visual convergence. Consequently, the normally visually isolated subject in the city’s hustle and bustle gains intensity and dominates the composition, while also maintaining a strong connection with the urban landscape that has seemingly begot it. 

 

A common denominator in all pictures is the subject’s ‘ground state’. I approach this both literally and metaphorically. Homeless people are portrayed in stationary mode, without any essentials and having turned urban furniture and surfaces into their seats and mattresses. Most of them in São Paulo own just a blanket. Having no place to live, no food and no access to any kind of medical care, they are captured symbolically as having been brought to the ground, which appears to have become their new habitat in the new urban circumstance. This comes in stark contrast to our acquired tendency to understand and experience life in megacities vertically, and commands a new, complementary appreciation of it, resembling grassroots organisations.

 

Moreover, purposely isolating the movements of homeless inhabitants reveals a different layer of the potential future of the urban network. Showing people who sit or sleep literally at zero level, either in direct contact with the soil of the parks or the man-made materials of pavements and squares, I seek to demonstrate an emerging figurative ‘hybridization’. Skin, the organic shell of humans, merges with the inorganic shell of the city, represented by building materials and infrastructure. 

 

As such, it appears that this ‘tribe’ gradually reclaims the urban space horizontally, thus revealing the potential of a novel, organic architecture which emerges in a megacity that is exponentially growing.

  

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