With the intention of discovering a yet unknown subject emerging through the exploration of her hometown, Passetto de Souza documents the house she grew up in and the town where she was born in the series presented here. Actively searching for a theme to reveal itself, she soon found death and grief manifesting as undeniable core subjects.
The sound of a car driving through the city, announcing the latest obituary notices and funeral times over a loudspeaker, is a familiar one. The community’s relationship with death is embedded in many of the photographs—images of places and objects imbued with a deep sense of loss. The family album covers permeate the series, serving as an archive of faded memories. With this, Passetto de Souza is drawn closer to a process she had postponed for two decades: grieving her father's death.
This is how the series We Were What You Are was born.
The act of photographing, along with the shelter provided by the lens, has finally allowed the artist to begin a process long repressed—one she had been unable to confront due to the complexity of these emotions. Approaching these feelings through photography has reconnected her with the act of seeking refuge in art—a practice that was integral to her childhood and one of the few memories that remain.
Facing people, stories, and memories that have always been present yet kept at a distance has now become a central methodology in the artist’s photographic practice.
Single channel video, 10 min.
https://youtu.be/comKB9LRHiU?si=1uum_WU9ij40QLAL
The project presents portraits of people from my hometown in the Brazilian countryside. It aims to explore the social roles individuals play and how they contribute to the functioning and shaping of the community. The idea is to challenge the lingering post-colonial perspective—still common in many small Brazilian towns—that equates a person’s importance with their material wealth or social status. Instead, the project invites the town’s citizens to reflect on alternative ways of understanding their own significance within the community.
On this ongoing project, I’ve been in contact with traders from around Elephant & Castle, a London neighbourhood that became a hub for South American and other diasporic communities, and which, in 2021 saw the demolition of its largest commercial centre, the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre and the eviction of its traders. There is an ongoing threat to remaining businesses in the area, which suffer under so-called “regeneration” plans: the community risks losing a space that functions as a vital support network for many people and that establishes a crucial social foundation of belonging.
The project consists of a visual and conceptual research in the area and aims to document poetics, stories, and themes that result from the rise of a community built in parallel to the conventional and exclusionary Western infrastructures in the UK, alluding to Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities, but as an expression of support for the community instead of exclusion of others.
The process of creating and producing each image comes through after establishing relationships with the subjects, and listening to the stories they tell.
Alongside the portraits and pictures of exotic Brazilian fruit and flowers are images of pre-columbian art, the kind of objects found at the British Museum, not far from the area, steamed as valuable assets; and a cut out of a South American brand mascot found in a market at Elephant road.
The elements brought together invokes reflection on the contrast of their economic and cultural value, from the community and the British authority perspectives.
Elizabeth, 2023.
Nylza, 2023.
Morenada dancer, 2022.
Siria, 2023.
London, 2024.
Ongoing series documenting one of the oldest functioning youth clubs in London.
Founded in 1929, Pedro Youth Club was reopened in 2003 by James Cook, a local resident and former British Super-Middleweight Boxing Champion. Pedro club is run by volunteers.
In June 2007 James Cook was awarded an MBE within the Queen’s Honours List for Services to the Youth Justice in Hackney.
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