neyde lantyer

“Blind Waves” is a new development of the photo-series “Beach” (2000-2006) from my old portfolio. The work was a gathering of a (then) newly discovered interest for the Romantic Painting and the nostalgia of the life-style I left behind when I migrated to Europe.

The beach life had a familiar taste and Porto da Barra Beach was the embodiment of my dearest dreams. When I returned to Brazil after a period abroad, there I found everything I had missed: sunshine, warmth, free bodies, tender waters and the sweet taste of recognition.

A famous Brazilian mith considers the beach as a democratic space where all classes and races equally convive. I developed a poetic series of photographs that unconsiously ressembled that thesis.

Years later, the work was turned upside down.


     
Bodies, gestures, poses, games, maneuvers, deviations and all which was previously perceived without distinction, now had changed in the territory /battlefield before my eyes. Suddenly I understood that however occupying the same space, they did not mix.

What my nostalgia sought was nothing more than an illusion of equality while my point of view was a privilege. A white and class privilege. The democratic beach was an illusion, an appendix of another mith: the violent legend of the Brazilian racial democracy.



Seeing is a process steeped in conjecture, as we see what we believe. And seeing beyond our beliefs comes as a shock, a slap in the face, an embarrassment.

The embarrassment of ignorance.

           
             

               

              And that's how it happened: all of a sudden I
              started to see. 

            And what I saw was separation.

      
       

   

    

In petty-bourgeois leisure spaces, that is, for whites, the place of black bodies is a suspended, invisible place.

Ther place of the survival illegal and uninsured work.

Where shadows move invisibly carrying misshaped luggage.

Cloths, toys, sunglasses, hats, bikinis, souvenirs, hammocks, all kinds of fake products (eventually also food).

Black shadows wandering on the beaches of Brazil as well as in Europe, selling, in general, outsourced products.

     

Recurring images on the beach, but also in the city, in front of museums, tourist spots and other leisure areas.

Scenes repeated in Salvador, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Greece or Sicily.

Sometimes, children.

Bodies walking under the sun of the globalized blindness, dehumanized, working incessantly without rights.

   
In Brazil, the favelados, precarious, descendants of the enslaved that were brought from Africa by force along three centuries.

In Europe, those who recently fled war and famine, those who crossed the ocean in precarious boats and survived the crossing, refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants.

        

I recreated their shadows digitally, in a metaphor for their invisibility in global capitalism.

The intention is to re-read the images, intensifying their exclusion and silencing.

     

The title “Blind waves” was randomly taken from a text by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe.

The photographs were taken in:

Brazil (2000 / 2001 / 2006 / 2010)
France (2016)
Italy (2014)
Spain (2016)

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