Abstract of the accomplished photographic work
Avenida Brasil 24h is a photographic series born from the artist’s experience as a commuter and worker in Rio de Janeiro. Avenida Brasil, the city’s longest expressway, channels hundreds of thousands of people daily from the peripheries to the center, sustaining it with cheap labor. The road becomes an involuntary habitat—crossed every day, it is lived, endured, and remembered. The motels become architectural markers of affect along a highway designed for the circulation of cheap labor. These neon-lit facades punctuate the urban decay and post-industrial ruins of 26 neighborhoods. Blinking hearts of neon—sometimes glowing, sometimes defective—echo the circulatory failure of the city itself. The work captures the tension between body and city, mobility and exhaustion, revealing how infrastructure imprints itself onto the body and psyche. Avenida Brasil 24h offers a visual reflection on displacement, invisibility, and survival in transit.
Description of the project you intend to pursue through the Prize
Through the Prize, I intend to develop a photobook that merges my photographic work on Avenida Brasil 24h with transcriptions of interviews I conducted for a documentary about life along this expressway. The project will interweave images of motels, roadscapes, and infrastructures with the voices of commuters who traveled Avenida Brasil daily—workers whose testimonies reveal how transit routines have shaped their bodies, emotions, and perceptions of time and space. Combining photography, oral history, and urban narrative, the book will portray Avenida Brasil not only as a physical road but as a psychological and social corridor. I will use both archival and new photographs, along with edited excerpts from the interviews, to create a visual-textual essay. The publication will reflect on forced mobility, urban violence, and the embodied experience of commuting in a post-industrial city.