The work The city in my mind or the fear of my sky by Flávio Andrade reveals a persistent search for the guts of life in the urban space. His interest in the city as a secluded place of the real allows him to travel through imaginary geographies, where the places make inhabit characters who occupy tasks marked by the drive of desire. As Flávio says, these characters “imagined in the city or in the countryside, are above all in my head”, now conditioned by the vicissitudes of daily life, sometimes marked by the presence of a fear that overcomes fiction, giving them a more real existence, where desire, religion, pleasure, sex and suffering leave their mark.
The photographer plunges into the dilemma pointed out by Jacques Le Goff (For Love to the Cities: Conversations with Jean Lebrun) between the real city and the imagined city. This dichotomy allows the subject to feel experiences that necessarily cross the various layers of time and space of the the urban context. Factors such as pressure, wear and tear, alienation, contamination, space conditioning, influence the relationship between subjects. For the artist, these connections are more marked by secrets than by sharing.
The city is like a collective body of micro and macro events in parallel. The set of photographs point to this system of simultaneous occurrences. The interaction between the images orients the viewer’s gaze to a conflict between transparency and opacity, suggested in the photographs. In this simultaneous existence we find also the bodies traced in a fragmented way, relating to each other, as in Le Goff’s reference to the idea of the cemeteries (or city of the dead), places which, with the expansion of urban spaces, are no longer outside the city and began to be integrated in their interior, adapted as areas of socialization. This displacement opens a wide field of imaginary geographies in the daily relationship with death. In the project The city in my mind or the fear of my sky, this idea remains as a motto for an approach to the photographs.
Orlando Franco
