Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Portrait »

From my father’s nightmares came the men who were never dreams. The cost of unpaid debts on borrowed land was death. All his life, he tried to reclaim the land he lost under Brazil’s Collor government, in the wake of the Collor Plan, March 1990. To contain an 84% inflation, the state froze savings, changed the currency, erased zeros—erasing, too, what little he had. He was left with nothing to cover the harvest’s ruin.

I do not speak the language of numbers, yet I was raised inside their aftermath. I was told this arithmetic altered everything.

Of what never came to be: glaucoma clouding his left eye; chemotherapy for the cancer in his right; years of poison seeping into his hands without protection; the breaking of his cervical spine under the weight of endless sacks; the selling of used cars across the border; the long drift through other people’s lands, across the North, Northeast, Central-West; the failed returns to rented soil; the sudden, desperate surges.

In his hunger for land of his own, I grew up among absences. Something in me was always missing. No land ever held me. No love took form without the shadow of its undoing.

Here, within the rural imaginary of southern Brazil, I try to make images of a body that cries out, that endures—yet still refuses to relinquish the promise that has not yet bled.