By Sarah Brown, Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Between December 20th and March 21st at the Centro Cultural dos Correios (The Post Office Culture Center) in Centro Rio de Janeiro, Ricardo’s Nauenberg’s extraordinary photography collection of the construction of the Line 4 of the metro will be showcased.
The photography provides a unique and unbiased glimpse into the sub-terrain work that was the result of the Summer Olympic Games in Rio.
Nauenberg is a cinema and TV director, designer and photographer that captured the construction of the new metro when the construction work began outside his house. During the year long project, he took around 7,500 snaps, selecting just 89 for the exhibitions, Entre Terra (Between Earth).
The exhibition comes from a burning personal curiosity of events that were happening outside and has no link to the City Council nor does it attempt to document the metro development. It was more an opportunity for Nauenberg to return to photography after an extensive curriculum in TV, film and design.
The photos are of the underground construction of Line 4 of the Rio metro that was inaugurated in August for the Olympics and will occupy a space of 600 squared meters during the exhibition. In addition to other related images, the photos from the exhibition will be released in a book next year.
The photographs are not about an engineering work, but about a man’s ability to interfere with the environment. Nauenberg says, “I decided to immerse myself in an essay on the subject and for a year I photographed these interferences, trying to focus on whether they were scars or planned tattoos.”
Entre Terra is an aesthetic record, distant from photojournalism. What matters to Nauenberg is documenting a transitory landscape that no one has captured, a submerged Raw Terrain, as he describes it. He used a 600mm and a 7mm lense, to create various perspectives which was his choice to move away from a journalistic focus.
Curator Marc Pottier says, “what is essential here is what remains invisible: the impression, photograph after photograph, of a remarkable and immense fascination that comes from the repetition and revelation of the power of an artist who can impose reality on this world filled with unknown laws.”
Adding, “and the confirmation that this work is really the result of a spiritual adventure deeply lived on the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. It is the victory of the ephemeral. In Ricardo Nauenberg’s photographs, time seems to have already destroyed the creation of man. ”
This photographic essay on human and geographic variations was carried out in the excavations of Itanhangá in Barra da Tijuca, Antero de Quental and Igarapava in Leblon and Praça Nossa Senhora de Paz in Ipanema.
What: Entre Terra photography exhibition
When: Tuesday, December 20th – Tuesday, March 21st
Where: Centro Cultral dos Correios, R. Visc. de Itaboraí, 20 – Centro – Tel: (21) 2253-1580
Entrance: FREE