​Só depois do Carnaval is a long-term photographic project that examines questions of perception, memory, and belonging through landscape, temporality, and embodied movement. Initiated in 2019, the project emerges from this tension between familiarity and estrangement. Periodic returns to Brazil confront the photographer with a shifting landscape in which personal memory and present experience no longer fully coincide. Both the country and the observer have changed over time, and the images arise within this interval between recognition and transformation. Photography becomes a means of negotiating this unstable relationship to place, allowing perception itself to become the central subject of the work.

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The title — Só depois do Carnaval (Only After Carnival) — draws on the cultural resonance of Carnival as a moment of collective spectacle, excess, and temporary suspension of everyday order. In Brazil, "Só depois do Carnaval" is also a common expression, signifying that many people consider the year to truly begin only after Carnival has ended. This idiomatic use reflects a cultural idiosyncrasy where plans, routines, and undertakings are often postponed until the festivities are over, underscoring the elongated duration and rhythm unique to the country. The project plays on this notion, using it as a lens to explore how time, transitions, and the aftermath shape both personal and collective experience. Rather than representing the event directly, the project focuses on its temporal aftermath. The “after” is understood as a critical interval in which surfaces settle and ordinary rhythms re-emerge. Within this temporal space, the landscape reveals traces of use, fragility, and persistence. The project therefore shifts attention from performative identity to the quieter structures that remain once the spectacle has passed.

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The work is grounded in analog photographic processes that foreground slowness, materiality, and uncertainty. Working with film delays the moment of visual confirmation and introduces a temporal gap between the act of photographing and the appearance of the image. This process situates the photograph initially as an intuition—an encounter that exists between observation and memory. In doing so, the project deliberately resists the immediacy and acceleration that characterize contemporary digital image production.

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The resulting images privilege ambiguity over declaration and atmosphere over narrative closure. Architectural fragments, emptied streets, traces of human occupation, and subtle gestures compose a visual field that oscillates between documentary observation and poetic construction. Human figures appear within the frame but rarely occupy its center. Rather than functioning as traditional portraits, these presences operate as fragments within a broader spatial and temporal context. In this sense, the project approaches what might be understood as an “anti-portrait,” extending not only to individuals but also to the representation of the nation itself.

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Rather than proposing a unified or monumental image of Brazil, Só depois do Carnaval constructs a fragmented and decentralized visual archive. The country emerges not as spectacle but as lived terrain—layered, contradictory, and temporary . Through sustained attention to color, gesture, rhythm, and the textures of everyday life, the project seeks to register the subtle pulse of a place while simultaneously reflecting on the photographer’s own position within it.

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In this sense, photography becomes both an investigative tool and a reflective practice. While the work does not resolve the question of belonging, it establishes a space in which that question can continue to be explored.