InConcret Realities
BY FADIA MUFARREJ
PT | EN
How one lives during quarantine in Brazil?
The social isolation in Brazil is not a rule, it is a privilege. Unfortunately because not everyone has the same social conditions, self isolation is not taken as serious. The Brazilian government has not made quarantine an essential, actually the President elected create excuses about breaking health measures, suggested by the World Helth Organization, and mocks social isolation together with the pandemic e ects in the world. Excuses such as “it’s just a little flu” and “so what?” are used by the President when referring to the pandemic.e social-political and health scenario in the country is the most cruel since the period of the military dictatorship in the 70s. From home we have been experiencing the fall of our democratic system simply by keeping up with the news. Scandals such as ministers asking for resignation, judges being disrespected by members of the government, the head of state being involveld in nepotism, press being persecuted, and so on.In such a chaotic situation I find myself in a relatively medium- -sized city located in Amazon, Belém. The city has been negatively a ected in many ways, reported with thousands of deaths due to Covid-19, local authorities involved in corruption scandals and the health and funeral state systems collapsed. From the inside of my “privilege island” I observe all this helplessly, the agony of not knowing what the future holds is a constant, and the wait is timeless, life as we knew it, now became an utopia.e following photographic series portrays a little bit of a middle class family daily life in Brazil, who has the privilege to properly exercise self-isolation due to Covid-19 world pandemic.
Bio
Female artist and producer from Pará, who graduated in medias and communication at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), São Paulo Brazil, in 2015. I started my career with photo and video documentation.
In 2013 I had my first contact with professional photography through an inter- nship at the International Photography Festival Paraty em Foco (RJ-BR) a er this experience, I’ve worked as a television producer in Brazil. My first authorial art project initiated when I was living in London in 2016 where I studied documentary lmmaking at the Met Film School, I nished my course with a short documentary about a Lebanese mother, the Learning to Fly, when I returned to Brazil I took a workshop at the Fotoativa association (PA-BR), with the visual artist as a tutor Ana Lira, who changed my perspective as an artist in many ways, the tools of producing an art object had expanded. We ended this course with a collective exhi- bition of the students creative processes in the association, my result was a project about a ective memory by a photographic series and an installation about the oldest warehouse still in operation in my hometown, Casa Salomão.
In 2017, I joined at a Master in Art and Design for the public space at Porto Fine Art faculty, during the course I developed the project In translation, narratives between the two sides of the Atlantic, which consists in a photographic research about public space by the analysis of homonymous cities between Brazil and Portugal. The similarities and dissonances assimilated in this project were presented through the construction of a photobook which the narrative invites the observer to immerse himself in the imaginary of these six cities, Óbidos, Santarém and Salvaterra, both in Brazil and Portugal, and to get lost among them without knowing in which country they are by the observation of the images, inviting to re ect on these experience by the observation of public space and also on the past and the present.
In addition to the photobook, I’ve participated in a collective exhibition of the finalists on the Master degree in Art and Design for the public space (2017/2019) on the Fine Arts faculty gallery of the U.Porto, where I presented the same project by photographs, screen printing on fabric and a small installation. In 2020 I participated of an individual exhibition for new artists promoted by Canto Co-working (Belém / PA-BR) with the same project. Themes such as memory, colonialism, urban flows and geographic maps are frequently addressed in my projects.