My maternal grandfather and my father were good amateur photographers. Photography has always been very close. I started shooting early, around 12 years old, with a Nikon FM that my father had, and we developed the films at home. The visual world presented itself to me that way; it was the tool with which I was most familiar. Then I graduated in photography, and things took their course naturally. Today, more and more things are made to be consumed as quickly as possible and then discarded: this reflects the state of a large part of society. I don’t see instant communication and rapid technologies affecting my way of working. My photography and my search are moving in an opposite direction and pushing me to relate to things.

How do you cope with fast appearances, instantaneous culture, and the technological evolution of the medium? How is this affecting your practice and vision of photography?

BR: At the same time, I see positively the chance to access materials that otherwise would not be so easy to discover; it helps to open up many possibilities for new thoughts and reduces the distances and borders somehow. One of the challenges of today is to be able to explore these means and tools constructively. My search refers to spiritual development; this is the focus of my approach.

Your series 'The Stone Time' was selected for the Urbanautica Institute Awards 2020. Could you briefly present what motivated you to start this project?

BR: When I started to develop the series ‘The Stone Time’, I was reading Wassily Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”. He claimed that the form, in the strict sense of the word, is nothing more than the delimitation of a surface by another surface. That is the definition of its external character. Yet, everything outside also contains an interior element that appears weaker or more strongly, depending on the case. Therefore, each form also has an inner content. This statement was a big boost because it was something I already had inside of me, but I found it organized in Kandinsky’s ideas. In this way, I started to encounter this type of image, which could reveal its counterpart. I continue in this search. Many images of this project were taken in familiar places, where I grew up. I feel that the pictures hold a nostalgic feeling about them too. The camera I used was an old camera from my family that could be one of the objects in this series. Time creates the meaning of the object and manifests its burden, use, deterioration, life, and affection. I am attracted to the weight of the surface of things. ‘The Stone Time’ speaks of my quest to achieve an expressive precision through poetics. I try to remove all the superfluous and rigorously stick to the main idea that I want to achieve, whatever the work proposal.

In summary, it is a search for simplicity. An example of this for me is Robert Bresson’s cinema, where he masterfully achieved this poetic precision in his artistic production. When I think of Brazil, the incredible fusion of cultures and peoples always comes to me, and in this mixture, something new emerges with all its particularities.

For example, I shoot many images of this project in a municipality in São Paulo’s suburb, in a family house where I had a solid emotional bond. I always had the feeling that time passed in a different way there. The things that were there also had this characteristic, as if they carried a large temporal load on their structure. There were objects from my grandmother’s family who came from Russia, things from day to day in a country house objects from different generations of the family, and more.

Anyway, that space became almost like a laboratory for this project. There I found this fusion of cultures and times so common in Brazil. But the project is more extensive; it has images taken in the hinterland of Ceará, Minas Gerais, the city of São Paulo, in the interior of Uruguay, among other places. Although there is not much contextualization of the environment, I feel an atmosphere when I look back at the photographs that make up the project. Such as a personal memory. For example, there’s a portrait in multiple views of a white-bearded gentleman. That’s my grandfather, the one who did photographs when younger. He was a significant per- son for me; he brought me to the idea of spirituality which is my great pursuit. The importance of the im- age is the time it takes as a person. I took those photographs just before his death. I feel he merged into that universe that I was going to encounter.