Civil Possibilities
(Rio)
Rio de Janeiro, cradled between mountains and the ocean, is a city of exceptional natural beauty. Since it was founded in 1565 the mountains informed the growth of the city and today devide the city into boroughs. The first tunnel, inaugurated in 1887 in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, was the first of a series of tunnel projects which continue until today with the latest, called Rio 450, inaugurated in 2015. Most large boroughs are devided by mountains but also have very specific cultural differences from the neighborhood on the other side of the mountain and though the tunnels function as a connect between the boroughs they are also tunnels to a subtly different culture or way of life. What happens in Europe between differnet valleys happens here within one city.For this project all 23 tunnels were photographed at night. All pictures show the sorroundings of the tunnel, from favelas to natural constructs like woods and rocks. A final image was created from several exposures with the help of an automatic photoshop function. The outcome of the frame of each of these semi-automatically constructed images was unknown before the program constructed the composit giving each tunel its distinctive character.
