João Castilho receives the 2011 Musée du Quay Branly's "Résidences PHOTOQUAI" Award in Paris
The ten photographs recently selected for acquisition into the photographic collection of the Musée du Quai Branly (prints numbered 1-5, in large and small formats: 60 x 90 cm and 110 x 165 cm) were created during Brazilian artist João Castilho's 2011 residence for his project Vade Retro. Jõao Castilho (Belo Horizonte, 1978) is one of Brazilian photography's up and coming figures. He is among the pioneers of the "imaginary documentary". In his most recent series, Castilho uses concepts from land art with the purpose of giving his creative process a new impulse in the field of constructed images.
The photographs in the Vade Retro project were created in different ways. There are real scenes captured during the artist's journeys to the Brazilian interior; others that were built specially for the camera; others borne from the displacement of objects or interventions on the landscape. Most of these images are in black and white, with a growing dominance of black, and such an economy of colors contrasts with Castilho's previous work.
João Castilho describes his project in this way (July, 2012): "Vade Retro is a photographic essay that seeks to establish a field of reflection around the notion of the supernatural, evil, and death. Photography, almost always related to what can be seen, allows us here to make visible the hidden layers of human experience. (…) In a certain way, I am attempting to reflect on our times. Since the end of large-scale utopias, the failures of political models accumulate and generate an incessant reconfiguration of the power structure. For Giorgio Agamben, the contemporary subject is that which focuses its gaze on its own time 'to distinguish there not the lights, but the darkness'. We live in a shadowy time.
"Vade Retro wants, precisely, to perceive that darkness, immersing itself in the obscurity of the present. To break appearances in order to reveal that which is dissimulated and mutilated. Thos work is part of a research project that began with my previous essay, Redemunho (2006). In Redemunho, there is a violent clash of antagonistic forces: light and shadow, clarity and darkness, sun and sky, god and the devil. In Vade Retro there are only shadowy forms, taciturn beings, and flickering torches in the dark. Vade Retro is a place without exit."
The Quai Branly museum holds some 700,000 old and contemporary photographs in a collection that is a point of reference at the international level. The continents represented in the collection are four: Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The collection includes photographs from 1841 to today, by artists of great importance in the history of the medium. Many of the plaques are from the era when the photographic process was being invented.
Geographically, the collection's strong points are: the Americas—to be more precise: Mexico, Peru, and Brazil—; sub-equatorial and Western Africa; Polynesia, Melanesia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The continued acquisitions made by the Musée du Quai Branly since its opening are based on geographic selections, by photographers who developed a unique gaze or a true photographic practice in the Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-First Centuries. These works consolidate the collection as a reference point in the representation of the non-European world.