Associação Cultural Videobrasil

INTERVIEW_EUSTÁQUIO NEVES

Eustáquio Neves’ work is permeated with physical and chemical manipulations of photographs, and his career is punctuated by high-impact images and wide-ranging significations: personal, autobiographical, as well as regarding the conditions of Afro-descendants in Brazil. A new installation by Neves is being exhibited in Salvador, inaugurating in a new phase in his career: he is using projections, and here he talks about video work.

By Helio Hara

Your work has always contained research and experimentation with interferences (both physical and chemical). Does the new installation that you will present at the exhibition, including projections, represent a new phase, a new challenge?

Those who follow my work closely will notice that I still experiment a lot, and that I’m using less interference (physical and chemical). Video is something I have wanted to do for a long time. Indeed, the use of video in the aforementioned exhibition inaugurates a new phase in my career, and it also represents a challenge. There are few curatorships that offer the conditions needed for the artist to produce, and this is one of those rare moments.

English photography critic Mark Sealy claims that your work is clearly and directly related to your being a Black man. Is that important to you, or would you rather be seen and thought of simply as an artist?

It is a good thing to be seen and thought of simply as an artist, but one cannot forget his blackness. For example, physical interferences in the images are needed so that I can express my view regarding image in the Western Hemisphere.

I have read somewhere that your stepfather was from Mozambique. Is that the reason why you have some kind of relationship with the past and with the concept of Diaspora?

This whole thing about a stepfather from Mozambique happened because of a typo. I mentioned in an interview once that my stepfather had joined a brigade in Mozambique, in a secular-religious demonstration of resistance. Actually, my relationship with the past stems from daily experiences, it has to do with inequality, with my mother’s struggle to raise me and my four brothers with dignity. She is a strong and essential presence in my formation.

Where is your work headed? Would you like to experiment with new media, such as video?

Yes, I would. I guess I have always made photography with cinema in mind, and video is a more accessible resource.

Your art incorporates personal elements, such as pictures of your mother; is that a way of thinking about your own history? Is this confrontation with the past painful, or is it pleasurable?

I feel pleasure in making art. It could be painful to do it, but it’s my means of expression, my instrument, a way of exposing things I dislike, and reflecting. My work is almost entirely autobiographical. Nevertheless, in order to discuss the profound scars left by slavery in the today’s world, I used a picture of my mother when she was young, as well as pictures of myself and my family.

Available at:

The Photographs of Eustáquio Neves

In 1995 I was invited to Brazil present a paper on “Photography and Identity” as part of the “II International Photo Meeting ’95 - São Paulo”. During my short visit I managed to carry out some informal portfolio reviews with photographers, mainly from the São Paulo area. I had been informed by colleagues at NAFOTO (Photography Friends Cluster), a non-profit organisation based in São Paulo, that a photographer was on his way to meet me and that he was traveling on an overnight bus making the long trip to São Paulo from Minas Gerais. The photographer’s name was Eustáquio Neves and I had an impending sense of responsibility and nervous anticipation whilst awaiting the encounter. I was deeply worried that Neves could be making a wasted journey. My anxieties however were proved to be unfounded. Neves showed me some of the most innovative photography I had ever seen and I remember the encounter with great affection.

By 1995 Neves had already completed two major bodies of work, ”Urban chaos” and ”Arturos”. In “Urban chaos” he begins to investigate a theme that he will return to again and again - social inequalities. “Urban chaos” is a series of constructed photographs that portray nihilistic abstract cityscapes that evoke the nightmares of a post apocalyptic world. The photographs surround us with a veil of tension. The surface of the work has been interfaced by times, graphics and layered with dystopian meanings. Neves’ vision of the city represents the harshest of all environments for humanity to exist in a place where hope seems to have been abandoned, values inverted and left for dead. The photographs from “Urban chaos” are literally windows into the deprivation and hardships that the increasing millions of city dwellers around the globe have to endure in order to simply survive. It’s as if the series “Urban chaos” is the fruit of a past founded in a profoundly worrying foreboding of the future to remind us that beneath the veneer of social progress and so-called development lies an underbelly of mass disillusionment, shattered existences, polluted environments and chemical rivers.

The series “Arturos” was made in 1993-96. In this series of photographs Eustáquio Neves lays claim to his desire to make contact with and celebrate directly the African in Brazil. The works are complex visual narratives that lay history before us and at the same time celebrate the present. “Arturos” references the injustices of slavery and highlights the strength, discipline and value of the Arturos community spiritual life. These photographs affirm and lay testimony to the power of self-respect. They celebrate the deep-rooted sense of identity within the Arturos community. There is an intense sense of pleasure and identification in the Arturos photographs. Through this series of photographs Neves invites us into a world that is almost beyond race and into a space that affords us the time to enquire about the nature of the spiritualized world and indeed the complexities of Christianity in relation to the African Diaspora.

Arturos is a reminder of the need and social function of ceremony in society and how ceremony is catalytic in the binding together of communities. Arturos is, itself, a shrine to a people that exist as a sacred family, deeply connected not just through biology but also through experience, past and present slide between the imagined and the real. Through the “Arturos” series we see a people who not only understand the nature of struggle but also have, through strength and faith in collective identity, managed to survive. “Arturos” is quite simply a beautiful visual alchemy of religious and cultural meanings. The work is loaded with the contentious contradictions that history, religion and power so often negate.

Eustáquio Neves’ later works based on football and produced around 1998 comments once again on the social conditions in which people function. Football “the beautiful game” is played under a haze of urban mist and oppressive city pressure. Every available patch of land that could be used to play football on is crushingly being imposed on by the threat of urban expansion. The footballers even have to compete for space with recently washed clothes. Trains run within touching distance of the sidelines of the football pitch and apartment blocks push upwards in competition for fresh air. The sense of claustrophobia is agitated by Neves’ refusal to allow us to see clearly. When looking at this series of photographs you cannot help feeling that the grime and grit of the city is literally being kicked up in your face. As the dust metaphorically settles, the eyes are left deliberately irritated by the overall bleakness of the scene. “The beautiful game”, now a global signifier of world harmony, is being rendered ugly.

The players in the mist therefore represent a vague possibility of something better. Neves’ football series pays homage to those that dare to play and try to win against massive and overwhelming social circumstances. The young men in these images have in many instances already lost. Circumstance and social prejudice have insured that the result of their life’s game is a guaranteed struggle.

In Eustáquio Neves’ more recent work there is growing sense of unease. Issues relating to race representation, colonialism and post colonialism are now paramount to his work. When he arrived in London in the winter 1999 he spent many days wandering around Brixton. He said at that time “In Brixton I identify with places, people and everyday activities. As I wonder around with the critical eye of a researcher and the admiration of a foreigner, I feel a sense of belonging”. Brixton is one of the key areas of Black settlement in London.

There is a sense that colonial history for Neves has not been reconciled and he is deeply troubled by the current state of Black people in contemporary Brazilian society. From the very beginning the issue of inequality has been at the core of his practice. He is very aware of the relationship between Black people and commodification. Neves’ very existence in Brazil is testament to the exploitative nature of global trade. It is no wonder then, as Neves’ work matures, that themes of social injustice keep returning, again and again to haunt us through him. Eustáquio Neves is the past manifest in the now. He comes from the place of re-memory, a place that can’t be ignored. Neves, has to, by the very fact of his blackness and his concern for socio-political change, take on those who can’t see past the epidermal schema of things. “The fact of blackness” Professor Stuart Hall reminds us, “is that which will not go away”. Neves is compelled by his very condition to remind us all of the circumstances he operates in. This is a racialized world.

Later works, from 1999 onwards take on a more direct confrontational approach. Neves now maps out key important themes within his work. He begins to examine and deconstruct the objectification and exploitation of the black body. Advertisements are now exposed for their blatant disregard for the black female body. Old documents and newspaper articles announcing the escape of slaves are juxtaposed with job advertisements that are coded to exclude Black applicants.

The iconography of the slave trade begins to emerge in Neves’ photographs with a powerful presence and new confidence. Neves takes the genocidal violence of colonial past and equates to the current political global situation. His work titled “Other slave ships” (1999) reminds us of the awesome capacity and conditions that globalization imposes on the majority of the worlds’ citizens and at the same time firmly reminds us that imperial power has been built to a large degree on the violent exploitation of African peoples. Neves therefore asks us to consider what has indeed changed and he reminds us that the contemporary condition of slavery takes many forms.

Neves has decided not to ignore the very specific conditions of his position in Brazil. He’s not locked in a neo post-conceptual debate. His work is clearly oriented to and engaged with the conditions of blackness and he acknowledges that those myriad conditions can’t be expressed without recognizing the need for ancestral dialogues. Artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Albert Chong and Carrie Mae Weems and many others all share Neves’ concerns. Weems, Chong, Fani-Kayode and Neves all in their own very specific and individual ways allow memory to be active in the construction of the now.

Neves has a desire to recycle the past into a manageable memory for the future. It’s not surprising then that after spending time researching at the Slave Museum in Belo Vale county, in the state of Minas Gerais, that Neves felt compelled to photograph the brutal metal punishment masks. Then some time later taking an image of his mother, he morphs the mask in set stages onto his Mother’s dignified portrait, until she is completely obscured by the mask and effectively silenced, and objectified. It’s in the series “Punishment mask” that Neves finally reveals to us how deeply personal his feelings of oppression are. The work in many ways is his most violent and deliberate, he literally masks his own Mother.

( Pan-African Exhibition of Contemporary Art catalogue )ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "Mostra Pan-Africana de Arte Contemporânea" [Pan-African Exhibition of Contemporary Art]: from March 8 to April 19, 2003, pp. 83-87, São Paulo, SP, 2005.