O Pais do Futuro

The starting point of these projects was a landscape photograph overlooking Rio de Janeiro from an elevated point in the little visited Parque de Catacumba.
The picture then was retouched to eliminate all man-made structures and give the appearance of a pristine landscape.
For part one the Black and White photograph was overlayed with the iconic phrase of Oswaldo de Andrade's "Anthropophagic Manifesto", "Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question." from 1928.
For part two another literary reference was used, Stefan Zweigs, "Brasil: Land of the Future", what started out as a book full of praise for the country has become a phrase of ironic cliche. Since the book's publication in 1941 the nation of great promiss has gone through several cycles of promises of a great future which never came and one could argue that at the moment the country is again at the end of such a cycle. For a visual representation of this cycles of hope and promise an engraving plate was made of the same retouched landscape and after being inked up the plate was printed until the image just about disappeared. Repeating the process three times the 15 prints on handmade nepalese paper illustrate the seemigly ever returning cycle.

“O how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning . . . or wise . . . and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund