I worked on this project while traveling in Brazil this January. Finding myself on the opposite side of the world, where literally everything was different, I went through various stages how I perceived my surroundings - from fascination to alienation. While trying to record my feelings with the camera, I realized that the images of “exotic” places and people that were around me were the last thing I wanted to bring back home.
So I started looking at the way people arrange their living space in BrasÃlia, the capital of the country, and a small old town of Luziânia about 60 km from it. Suddenly I realized that the walls, simple walls surrounding houses and yards of any type, represent the essence of Brazil for me. Looking at the wall itself, the pavement or the road below and what I could see above, I could imagine what life was like behind the confines of the wall. This was purely a product of my imagination. But isn’t it what we get when we go abroad thinking that we can gain a greater understanding of peoples’ needs and values in such a short period of time?
Besides, these three horizontal partitions (sky, wall, ground) form unique abstract compositions like those of Mark Rothko, delving deeper into levels of reality perception as a combination of simple forms. I saw these compositions as real masterpieces created by nature (sky and the trees), humans (wall) and time (ground that holds a function of memory, walls’ mould and cracks indicating the flow of time).
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