Whirlwind by Joao Castilho (September 10, 2010) 
(14 votes, average: 4.43 out of 5)
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Artist statement by Joao Castilho
Entropy, displacement, transience, translations, reprogramming, reconstructions, travel and cultural exchange are some of the issues addressed in my work. Issues which are present in contemporary thinking about the arts. I like to push photography beyond its immediate characteristics of index and trace. I like to focus on allegory, which, unlike documentation, can be dubious, ambiguous, fictional. The dogma of light print, of photography only as a mechanism to record, masks its ability to fabricate and create new worlds.
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
Whirlwind (Redemunho) is about the sertão. The sertão is a place in Brazil, a geographic region, but it’s also a place inside us. Geographically, it’s associated with the desert environment, where sowing is complicated, where water is scarce, where access is tortuous, I mean: where life is hard. Within all this isolation, people in the sertão have learned to live along another world, which is not so tangible, not so immediate and not so material, or in other words, a world which is not so real. It’s a metaphysical, or a fantastic world, if we want.
In the sertão, for instance, people believe that the devil lives inside the whirlwind. This series depart form those believes and the oppositions which are very present in there. God and devil, sky and earth, light and shadow are all elements from the sertão life, which I took to guide me in this work.
This series was edited and photographed so that blue sequences are followed by orange and earthy ones. Some of the photos refer to the divine (wings), others to darkness (snakes), bodies that disappear into the light, bodies that disappear into the shadow. The climate, the ambience that the photos reveal, comes from that. We can also see that cosmology in the Latin American literature of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marques and João Guimarães Rosa.
Joao Castilho (1978) lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
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