m a t e u v e l a s c o
New York, 1980
m a t e u v e l a s c o
New York, 1980
under construction
Porto Alegre, RS - 1972
Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Edu Monteiro is an artist and researcher. He holds a post-doctoral and doctoral degree in Arts from Graduate Program in History of Art at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and a master's degree in Science of Art from Graduate Program in Environmental Sciences at the Federal Fluminense University. He also has a background in Arts and Visual History from the Jeu de Paume Museum, Paris (France). As an artist, his works are part of the collection at Museum of Modern Art - Rio de Janeiro/Coleção Joaquim Paiva, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, among others. He is the author of the books "Paisagem Vertical" (Nau editora, 2022), "Autorretrato Sensorial" (Pingadoprés, 2015), and "Saturno" (Azougue Editorial, 2014). He is the vice-leader of the LAPA - Laboratory of Arts and Alterity Policies research group at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). In 2021, he won the XVI Funarte Marc Ferrez Photography Award, and in 2019, he was a finalist for the National Pierre Verger and Chico Albuquerque Photography Awards.
Among his solo exhibitions, notable ones include "Madureira em Transe" at Sesc Madureira in 2022, "Corpos em Luta" at Galeria Movimento in 2019, and "Costas de Vidro" at Z42 Arte Contemporânea in 2018, all in Rio de Janeiro (RJ). "The Invisible Fight" at the China Art Museum in 2017. "Saturno" in the city of Dali at the DIPE - 6th Dali International Photo Exhibition and in Yixian during the Yixian Photography Festival, both in China in 2015. In the same year, he exhibited "Autorretrato Sensorial" at Paraty em Foco in Rio de Janeiro (RJ). In 2014, his series "Autorretrato Sensorial" was part of the Lianzhou Foto Festival in Lianzhou (China), which was also exhibited at DOC Gallery in São Paulo (SP).
works
PAISAGEM VERTICAL" SERIES
"Paisagem Vertical" is a personal cartography that subverts the common representation of space, it is an encounter of temporalities. In 1997, Edu Monteiro photographed the Aparados da Serra region, on the border between Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. These are records of the beginning of the transformations caused by the arrival of asphalt and vertical landscapes in the South of the country. In a dialogue of previous and new images, taken in 2022, subject and space are confused, tensioning the relationship between nature and culture through photographs crossed by performance and sculptural objects that mark the changes in the place and in Edu Monteiro’s poetics over the years.
"Paisagem Vertical" was awarded first place in the XVI Marc Ferrez Photography Award.
"LADJA" SERIES
With powerful spells, chants, drumming and imperceptibles coups at the look, Ladja is a combat dance with african origins, based on the mystical power of invisibility. Practiced in the small caribbean island of Martinique, it keeps alive the ancestral memories of slavery, anchored in the body of its fighters.
By spending a season on the island to become a Ladja fighter, the photographer Edu Monteiro builds the visuality of this work from this body experience. Neither obvious nor documentary, the photographs of this essay are apparitions, fight to show the invisible and its mysteries. With less than a hundred practitioners and unknown beyond their own borders, this ritual is now revealed to the world through the images of one initiated.
Wolo [Triptych]
Printing on cotton paper Hahnemühle PhotoRag Baryta 315g
Edition: 7 + 2 AP
113 x 300 cm
"CAIXAS DE MEMÓRIAS ANCORADAS NA PELE | ILHA-TERREIRO" SERIES
With the installation “Caixas de memórias ancoradas na pele” (Boxes of memories anchored in the skin), Edu Monteiro was a finalist for the Pierre Verger 2019 award. It consists of pictures of Laamb, also known as Senegalese fight, imprinted on sheepskin. This work possesses a sculptural aspect that refers to the three-dimensionality of African art. The backlighting gives texture to the leather: each skin has a story, a life, which makes each printing unique.
"SATURNO" SERIES
When the world is transformed into images, it is immediately lost. This lends photography a certain degree of melancholy: images are always in the past. As the early traveling photographers launched gloriously into an imaginary conquest of the world, they held before them the illusion of a gain (of the world). Today, these voyages have become perhaps a touching and repeated inventory of what is left us. As travelers, our guide is perhaps the planet Saturn, linked from ancient times to the secretion of black bile that presides over the melancholic temperament.
Saturn is one such voyage of return, of loss, but its course also transforms the world. It took Edu Monteiro back to places admittedly intimate, a trip, in a way, in search for himself. Monteiro returned to the south of the country where he was born and where he spent his childhood, traveling across the mountains of Rio Grande do Sul and along the state’s lengthy coastline. And to the images gathered on his trips, Monteiro added fragments from other stops: Paris, Buenos Aires, Ilha Grande, Porto Alegre, Barbados.
Throughout this manifold trip, the photographer does not reaffirm his place in the world, but instead reaffirms his place as outside his own self - through specific cut-outs of the world. Monteiro employs a complex apparatus of his own conception in some of his photographs, a circular mirror used cover his face which has a viewfinder and his camera’s shutter release attached under it. Thanks to this apparatus the photographer both doubles himself and is split between the one who sees and the one seen by the camera. Partly camouflaged into the environment, he can by turns merge into the setting around him and stand out. He plays with the opposition of landscape and portrait, subject and object, so as to affirm through both landscape and object, a strange force of self-representation.
Even in those of Monteiro’s works that do not involve mirrors or self-portraits, the subject differs from its own image and emerges forcefully, diffused in objects and scenes. At this point photography resumes its full power of allegory, the entirety of the strange power that was perhaps conferred to it in its early period: the power to animate fragments and remains of the world.
Tania Rivera