​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), borrows a common Brazilian expression: the year, people say, truly begins only once Carnival is over. The phrase carries a particular understanding of time, in which things are held in suspension until the right moment arrives. Carnival is itself a moment of collective spectacle, excess, and temporary suspension of everyday order, but the project turns to what follows. The “after” is not an absence so much as a period of latency, in which surfaces settle, ordinary rhythms re-emerge, and what the spectacle had obscured slowly comes into view. In this interval, the landscape reveals traces of use, fragility, and persistence, shifting attention from performative identity to the quieter structures that remain.

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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.