Me, by myself
Well, I can't start my story any other way than at the beginning. I was born in what until 1995 was the last city in the far south of Brazil, the municipality of Santa Vitória do Palmar, located on the border between Brazil and Uruguay. At the age of 7, I began the movement that would become a necessity in my life: to experience new places, cultures and knowledge. It was during this period that my family moved to the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and I began to experience the shock of leaving the countryside to meet the culture of a big city. I believe that from a very early age I carried in my imagination journeys through different “worlds”, which somehow over time led me to live in different regions of Brazil, more specifically in São Paulo (Southeast), Rondônia (North) and Bahia (Northeast). In a country of continental dimensions like Brazil, this was an experience that broadened my Brazilian identity and made me understand that we are built from the encounter with others and their culture.
I've moved on in time by telling you about the places where I've had the opportunity to live in Brazil, but I'll go back to the beginning. I was born into a family with limited financial resources, the son of a single mother with six children and in a very small town, where everyday activities are closely linked to rural culture. It was around the age of 11, already adapted to big city culture, that I consciously made my first contact with art through literature. This gave rise to a taste for reading and immersion in this process, which is essentially one of constructing images. I remember that it was also an important moment because it was a time when I was very close to discovering the world of crime that crosses the future of millions of young people in Brazil in this age group. Although I already had contact with literature until the age of 17, the visual arts were a very distant universe for me. I can't say that I grew up with access to and contact with art, my first experience of a movie theater came late in life, our financial conditions didn't allow me to participate in most of the museum visits and cultural activities promoted by my public school, it was a time when having a good meal at the table was the ultimate luxury. For this period, I am grateful to have nurtured the childhood dream of being a footballer and today, to be able to recognize the role of sport in building a better society.
At the age of 18, after finishing my secondary education and already in a scenario that allowed me to glimpse a university course, I carried within me the anguish of many doubts since I could see myself exercising many professions. It was then that a trip to a second-hand bookshop led me to the book that would change my life: “The Construction of the Character” by Russian theater master Constantin Stanislavski. At the time, I had no knowledge of the author's importance, but reading it made me realize that through the actor's craft I could experience different professions and human facets. This unexpected discovery brought me to directing and led me to study and practice the art of the actor for the next four years.
In 2010, as a result of what the largest city in South America (São Paulo) is adept at promoting: encounters and restlessness, Ritmo Visual Filmes was born, a project conceived together with my great friend from Rio de Janeiro, Pedro Marques. There we were, two young people (me 22 and Pedro 21), dreamers and instigated to tell stories behind the camera. In a self-taught way, we began our journey as photography and audiovisual filmmakers, seeking knowledge, freely exploring languages, improvising equipment and making dreams come true.
If there's one positive thing about the enormous challenge of building an artistic career, it's that you often have to seek financial income from other activities. In my case, it was my work as an event promoter and producer that allowed me, since 2006, to cover my bills and never lose sight of my dream. As this repertoire developed in 2011, I was given the opportunity to join the Arandas Marketing agency team as a producer and creative in parallel with Ritmo Visual Filmes, a journey rich in the acquisition of repertoire and full of new challenges. I worked internally at the agency as Content Director until 2015, and the partnership as an external collaborator lasted until mid-2020. This experience was recognized with more than 40 national and international awards and the opportunity to work with names from Brazilian culture that are very dear to me, such as Ariano Suassuna, Caetano Veloso and Ney Matogrosso.
In 2014 and 2015, when I was already living between Bahia and São Paulo, I made an important move for the present: I left my partnership at Ritmo Visual Filmes and my position as Content Director at Arandas Marketing, to dedicate myself to photography as my main full-time activity. In 2015, I started my photography studio in the city of Salvador and created the Benjoim Filmes label to sign audiovisual projects. Until 2020, the studio's activities focused on portraits for artists and advertising portraits, a form of income that allowed me to continue developing authorial series and exploring my photographic language without pressure for results. There are still unpublished projects from this phase that I continue to work on so that in their simplicity they find their due maturity.
At the heart of my work process is something that has accompanied me from a very early age: observing everyday life, the aforementioned need to meet others, discovering new cultures and moving between places. Over the last few years I've had the opportunity to go on several professional trips and use them to fuel my work. Between 2017 and 2018, I spent 8 months in Canada and was able to experience the plurality of a city like Toronto, which is home to people from diverse backgrounds and with more than 140 languages spoken. Back in Brazil, I decided to start planning a new stage in my professional journey: leaving the commercial work of the studio to focus on my authorial photography. This movement lasted until the year 2020, more precisely the emergence of Covid-19. It was there, in March 2020, that I realized the time had come to close the studio and dedicate myself exclusively to my authorial work.
This movement, accompanied by the growing pandemic created by the poor management of the Brazilian government, sparked my need to experience the exchange with a new culture and space, and my move to Portugal was born. This was undoubtedly one of the most important and significant decisions of my so far young professional journey. Starting this process in the midst of a pandemic was an act of courage.
I believe in the power and intensity of each cycle. In my 36 years of life, I have been driven by a restlessness that leads me to challenges and the intersection with the other. I have to say that, somehow, the fact that I was born in a border town sometimes makes me not believe in them or simply enjoy crossing them.
When I arrived in Braga, in the north of Portugal, in October 2020, I was taken aback by a city that brought back childhood memories, which immediately gave me a sense of belonging. Upon arriving in Portugal, I had in my mind the desire to resume the learning process within academia, although I haven't mentioned it so far, I did my undergraduate degree in Audiovisual Production and a series of specialization courses in Brazil, Argentina and Canada. I decided to do a master's degree in Photography and Documentary Film at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, a process that led me to move from Braga to Porto in July 2021.
Recently, I've been tempted to draw a parallel between a photographer's professional development time and our human development Chronos. This line makes me think that today, my 14 years of photographic career are equivalent to 14 years of age, which is the stage when we have mastered reading, have the ability to construct criticism, have built our own handwriting and, above all, have enormous energy and curiosity to explore the unknown.
I believe that this reflection of time is why, for a long time, I didn't have the impetus to take my work to exhibitions or contests. In 2018, I held the “Blenders” exhibition, but it was precisely in 2019, with the realization of the documentary photography and video project “Bahia Experience”, a project carried out in partnership with friend and photographer Gabriel Coimbra, that my time to exhibit was built up and the following year I held four exhibitions of the first stage of the project.
In Portugal, the reception and opening up of spaces for my work has been very positive, and I have already held more than a dozen exhibitions in the country, including group and solo shows in museums, galleries, festivals and cultural venues. Among them, I'd like to highlight my participation in the XXII Cerveira International Art Biennial and being chosen as one of the discoveries by the Encontros da Imagem festival, which each year nominates 15 new discoveries in world photography. On both occasions, I had the opportunity to present a small preview of the “Sleep Time” project, which I started in 2017 and continue to work on with the care it deserves. I should also mention the solo exhibition “Mãos à Obra, O fazer invisível da cidade” at the Coimbra Municipal Museum and the enormous impact of the solo exhibition “Noites do Norte”, held in Porto, all during 2022.
The year 2022 was intense in the process of creating and also reinventing myself in the midst of tough times and unimaginable challenges. In December 2022, my best friend Tércio Fonseca, a unique accomplice in my personal and professional journey, left this world. The person who accompanied the embryonic emergence of all my desires and professional projects. The blow of this bereavement was heavy. A few months before Tércio's passing, I had inaugurated the CB Art Space project in Porto, a hybrid of studio and cultural center in the heart of the city's historic center, a space aimed at presenting my work and connecting and exhibiting artists from the most diverse backgrounds, with doors open to democratic dialogue with all audiences, as I believe.
During 2023 I dedicated myself to running CB Art Space, not participating in exhibitions outside the space and investing attention in dialog with other artists and audiences, since the central location allowed me to meet people from different continents. In January 2024, I held the solo exhibition HÁ COR! in the city of Porto and dedicated the rest of the year to research, new learning and the production of projects that I continue to work on and intend to bring to the public in the near future. In opposition to today's fast pace, I have increasingly tried to respect my time and give my creative urge a breather. There are stages in the experience that should not be ignored.
I think that all my movements carry within them the same belief, which is to find in art a greater form of life and a creator capable of transformation.
Therefore, in this context of “Me, by myself”, I can foresee as long the life of the desire to express my concerns, reflections and poetic possibilities based on artistic practice.
I know that few people read long texts, so thank you for getting this far. The path is on the horizon, it's utopia. We're going for the dream!
Photography is not an object. It's a sensation.
Christian Baes
January 2025
christianbaes.art 