Doce Sonâmbulo
In the opening pages of Doce Sonâmbulo [Sweet Sleepwalker], against a black background, the only textual information in the book provides the reader with some context:
“I grew up in Bairro Nacional, on the suburbs of Contagem, Minas Gerais. I’m the son of a white father (whom I never met) and a Black mother who worked as a housekeeper. A migrant from poverty, my mother left the countryside towards the long-dreamed job at Belo Horizonte. Maid and a single mother, she ended up with another white man and settled in a dense forest area that would later become Bairro Nacional. Being from the suburbs has deeply shaped my life and my artistic practice. Moving between photography, video, performance, and painting, my work is a bridge to the world of the excluded — the world that has surrounded me since birth.”
The book has more than 400 black-and-white pages, printed with a Xerox-like quality, and was entirely built from the artist’s analogue photographic archive — the result of a long process of organising and digitising, followed by an editing phase coordinated by Lucas Kröeff. The whole ensemble reads like pure cinema, structured in three parts:
The first takes place in Bairro Nacional. It opens with the cemetery of this peripheral neighbourhood, composed largely of popular self-built houses, typical of the expansion of Belo Horizonte’s urban peripheries. From the cemetery we move into other precarious landscapes marked by violence and religiosity — spaces that seem abandoned at first, until people gradually enter the frame. Little by little, we notice the photographer’s intimacy with them: in the natural ease of their poses, in the smiles, in the humour. The spreads may contain a single image or may be subdivided into sequential photo-collages, revealing the texture and borders of the negative, “errors” from the development process, and hand-drawn interventions.
The second part unfolds in downtown Belo Horizonte, where the sun almost disappears and the book dives into the nightlife of motels, karaoke bars, dive joints, and their characters.
In the third part, experimentation with negatives and chemicals inside the photo studio — where he worked and experimented during off-hours — takes centre stage. Direct drawing on the film also becomes a protagonist, leading the image toward its complete physical disintegration.