Meditate with Mateus Gomes Almeida (born 1993)

A big void. The two photographs face each other as if to underline the strangeness of the situation: frozen in the past but terribly present by the evocation of absence. On the first, seen from above (left), a strange circle of stones takes shape; but on the second, seen at eye level (right), things become clearer: it is rubble (escombros, in Portuguese).

Those of a house where, ten years ago, ordinary people lived. A home of life, births and struggles. This lady, returned to the scene, poses in front of the ruins. Those of the house where she lived and from which she was kicked out.

Between 2017 and 2024, Brazilian photographer Mateus Gomes carried out the investigation in the region of Açu, a small town of 50,000 inhabitants in northern Brazil. To reflect the effects of economic globalization, he produced a series of photographs of this type to show the reality of farmers dispossessed of their land.

The woman, sitting on a chair emerging from who knows where, looks at us with questions, we who, on the other side of the world, are also part of this liberal economic system which has very little burden with ordinary people to further accelerate the tools of production. The image is captured by the stillness of a disaster. We wait for the cry that will wake us from the torpor that has invaded us.